Daniel J. Londono's grave in Cedar Grove Cemetery.

By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

It was on the day he graduated high school, his mother remembers, that Danny Londono came to her with the papers. He'd lost that skinny, bespectacled look he'd worn back in junior high, that awkward fuzz of adolescence encouraged by bad heavy metal. A youthful transgression.

His sister says he was never a skate punk, though. No, Danny had too many places to go and too much hoo-ah in his future ever to wander far from the straight and narrow. Hijinks to him meant saddling up on his mountain bike and pedaling down to Stoughton with some friends, often arriving after dark.

He was, for the most part, quiet. He'd mug for the camera and clown with his family. But in school he exuded the shyness of one who seems done with the place, whose purpose lies elsewhere, ahead, with no stomach for the shenanigans of high school.

"Danny hated gossip," his mother says. "You know, I got a big family and sometimes I would sit with my brother and sister and start to say something and he would stop me and say, 'Ma, please'."

He wasn't dean's list ramrod - that was too temporal for Danny Londono - and he never smiled with his teeth in any pictures, his mother points out, except for the ones she snapped when he'd just woken up. Accent still thick from the native Poland she left a quarter-century ago, she says, "He loved to sleep and I loved to make pictures when he was sleeping."

Awful smart, though. Awful smart. Reading National Geographic, digging into family history, transfixed by the History or Discovery Channel when he was home, and trilingual. English, Polish, and the Spanish he learned with his father, Bernardo, a native and current resident of Colombia.

"His teachers say to me," his mother remembers, " 'Danny is so smart, but he does not study'." She and Diana, Danny's 18-year-old sister, start giggling. "He never opened a book," Diana says. His mother says, "I don't know how he was passing."

But pass he did, and on the day he graduated from high school, Danny brought his enlistment papers to the three-decker on East Cottage Street that his grandmother had bought before his mother moved from Poland. He'd been nagging his mother for months to sign for him.

"I was thinking he was going to forget it, you know," she says now, sitting on the couch in her living room. She wears a purple sweater and black pants, with her hair pulled back. From her neck dangles a single dogtag.

He brought her something else, after he'd signed up, a bumper sticker. It read, "I am the proud mother of a young soldier."

Three-Decker Roots

Iwona Londono came to East Cottage Street in 1979 as Iwona Maciejewska, an 18-year-old high school graduate whose mother had just bought a three-decker. She spoke no English.

"I went straight to work because my mother was by herself," she says, sitting in the living room of the home she's known since arriving. "She had just bought the house and she couldn't afford for me to go to school or anything."

So she took a job in electronics and one day after work was sitting on the front steps, looking across the street, out onto Edward Everett Square, into the backyard of the Blake House, the city's oldest timber-framed structure. Up walked Bernardo Londono, a Colombian immigrant who had arrived a year before her, and worked for a meat-packing company. He was stopping by to visit his cousin.

Their son, Daniel, was born in 1981.

Iwona doesn't have much to say about her ex-husband, but Daniel kept in touch with him and so has Diana. He calls from Colombia, where he went back to live, and he visited in March.

Daniel was "a very happy baby," but always quiet, "all his life," his mother says. She bought him army boots when he was four or five, which he'd match up with camouflage T-shirts and mock battle fatigues. The lifestyle appealed to him from the jump, and nothing shook him from the path to soldierhood.

He went to St. Margaret School, and then Don Bosco Preparatory School until it closed in 1998. From there, he went as a junior to Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree. He ran track, and waited to go into the Army.

"He says to me all the time, 'Ma, can you come with me to sign the papers?'," Iwona remembers. She never relented, and then he had his diploma and enlisted himself.

"And that's how my Danny joined the Army."

A First-Class Soldier

On August 23, 2000, two months after graduation, Londono was in basic training in Fort Bragg heat, enjoying the offerings of North Carolina in summer. After two-and-a-half months of that, he headed to advanced individual training, doled out to aspiring infantrymen. In March 2001, he was assigned to his unit, the 1st Battalion, 504th Infantry Regiment, in the 82nd Airborne Division. (Today, the unit is stationed again at Fort Bragg, after completing its Iraq tour.)

Pictures of Londono from that time show a broad-shouldered soldier with the close-cropped hair and the cemented jaw that's molded in basic training. His torso isn't adorned yet with the medals he would earn in Asia and Europe, but he has about him an air of certainty. This is what he was supposed to do.

And, if superior officers and military records are to be believed, he did it well. Londono advanced with a notable quickness through the ranks. Commanders praised his aptitude. One of them told her, Iwona remembers, that "he knew that is the best soldier that they have." He was promoted through the enlisted ranks, earning his sergeant stripes.

The 82nd Airborne sent Londono and his unit to Kosovo in September 2001, a peacekeeping mission in southeastern Europe when being an American anywhere didn't feel safe. Londono served there until April 2002, then cycled back to Fort Bragg. In December of that year, Londono and his mates shipped out to Afghanistan, sweeping up the Taliban's mess and keeping an eye out for Osama bin Laden.

In between deployments, he would come home to East Cottage Street.

"He loved this house and he didn't want to leave," his mother says. She talked to him about maybe moving someday, but he would respond, "If you move, you move, and I will stay here."

On these visits, too, he became closer with Diana, the kid sister who had been only 14 when he shipped out to Fort Bragg. It was, she says, as if he'd matured.

"Well," she amends, "he was always pretty mature, but he understood me more." Their relatives, pleased and proud that a member of the clan was in the service, presented him with gifts and checks, which he would promptly turn over to Diana. From Afghanistan, he sent her a burka, which she reckons makes her the only girl in Fontbonne's junior class with one of those.

"I guess he valued things more because of what he went through," his sister says.

A Bostonian Abroad

There was another woman in his life, apart from his sister and mother and flock of aunts and cousins. There was Heather Butler, a bright Southern belle who laughs at the nine-year age difference between the two of them. Butler lives in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, an hour and 15 minutes from Fort Bragg by car, a trip Daniel made often in his black 1995 Ford Taurus.

In August 2003 - and she knows the date if you ask her - Butler was in Ri-Ra, an Irish bar in downtown Raleigh, bored while one of her friends chatted up two guys, neither of which interested her. Over by the stage, though, "was the most gorgeous thing I had ever laid my eyes on."

"He just sort of looked out of place," Butler says. "He wasn't checking out the women, he wasn't paying attention to the band, he was just sitting there drinking a beer with his buddies."

This was par for Daniel's course. His mother and sister are aflutter over Butler, but said he always fared well with the gentler sex.

"He was very quiet, he never approached any girls, but the girls was like glue to him," his mother beams.

And so Butler, vying for his attention while disdaining his companions, got through to him. Later, dancing, she told him, "You're going to have to talk more if you want to go out with me."

So he did. He called her the next day and started seeing her on weekends. He'd drive down to Fuquay-Varina, a small town - "growing by leaps and bounds," Butler says - near Raleigh, and would not leave until the past possible second Sunday night.

He told her about his hometown, adopting an air of parochial superiority befitting a lifelong Bostonian. "He constantly compared everything to Boston, and to Daniel nothing could ever compare," she says. "If we ate at a restaurant, Boston had a better one. If we went to a movie theater, Boston had a better one."

But the home he missed the most was his family's, where Iwona brags gently about her Polish cooking and Diana grows up and thinks about college. When it came to her education, Danny dreamed of bankrolling it with his salary from the Army.

"You have to understand that everything Daniel did was for her," his girlfriend says of his sister. "He adored her."

Butler spoke with him on March 13. Their phone calls were always tender, and this one was anticipatory. Daniel never talked in specific timeframes, but he told her he would be home in a few weeks, and not to bother to send a care package she had ready, because he'd be home before it arrived. They talked about Mexico, where they planned to take a trip when he got back.

"We always laughed on the phone, and we always said, 'I love you'," Butler says.

A few hours later, Sergeant Daniel Londono was patrolling the outskirts of Baghdad in a Humvee with three other soldiers when insurgents struck the vehicle with an improvised explosive device.

A long way from Mexico, a long way from Fuquay-Varina, and a long way from East Cottage Street.

Two Soldiers Make a Dreaded Visit

From Kosovo and Afghanistan, the letters had come more regularly than they did once Danny got to Iraq. Maybe it was the fact that, after three-and-a-half years in the Army, this business of dropping in on global hotspots was old hat. Maybe phone calls and the somewhat spotty e-mail service sufficed.

Or maybe there just wasn't as much good news to report.

When he called, the phone would sometimes ring at four in the morning - noon in Baghdad. "I still wake up at four o'clock in the morning, you know, waiting for his telephone calls," his mother says.

With time waning on his tour over there, Danny was still the gung-ho soldier, but not as enamored of this conflict as he had been of past missions.

"He didn't regret it, but he didn't like to be there," his sister says. "He was saying, 'It's stupid to be there'."

He had plans to stay in the Army, but wanted to be on the other side of Asia, and was talking about studying Korean. In phone calls with his mother, he would talk about the parties they would throw for the family when he returned.

The phone call she got on March 14, though, was from her sister, Mirka, who lives downstairs. Iwona was at work at Clifford's Flowers in Quincy, and her sister was in tears.

Danny had told her, Iwona remembers, "If they call you, they're going to give you good news, but if they come to you, it's bad news." Her sister was calling to tell her that two soldiers had come to visit the house. Iwona fainted.

Butler was home by herself in Fuquay-Varina, when someone knocked on her door around 7:30 p.m.

"I looked out the peephole and I just knew," she said of finding two police officers on her front porch. She called her brother Craig, who had served in the Marine Corps and come to know Daniel well during his sister's relationship with him.

Butler is coming to Boston in a few weeks to visit Iwona and Diana, "to create some better memories of Boston," she says. In a telephone interview, she sums up her feelings for Daniel by reaching for a quote from the movie Steel Magnolias.

"I would rather have five minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special," she says, "and Daniel was my five minutes of wonderful."

Still-Life Memories

Leafing through a crate of family photographs, Iwona and Diana Londono smile. There's Danny clowning in the kitchen, Danny with his cousins, Danny and Diana, Danny and his mother, the three of them on the beach in Wollaston. Above the television is the same picture that graces the billboard on Gallivan Boulevard. Tucked on a shelf next to the couch is a smaller picture, of him further along in his military career. Gone is the empty expanse of green fabric between his shoulders, filled now with the adornments of honor accrued by a paratrooper who has seen action overseas. He is neither smiling nor frowning, but looks content. He's doing what he's always supposed to do.

Which didn't mean he talked about it. Obeying the code of not talking up his actions in the field, the soldier was content to let his family know that he was happy, and thinking of them. "He didn't like to talk about it," Diana says. Instead, "He wanted to know everything that was going on around the house."

And others wanted to know what was going on with him. Iwona's co-workers, at Clifford's, where her bosses give her time off when she needs it now, and where she used to work at Stop & Shop, they asked after Danny, and now they ask after her.

"Many times I was crying and I say to him, 'You hurt me so much,' and he say, 'Ma, I do it for you. I do it to protect you'."

She went to him one last time, earlier this year. He wasn't her little boy anymore; he already had his Army boots. Hewing to the ethic of stoicism in the face of duty, he hadn't blabbed or bragged to his family that he was heading back to the Middle East, to Iraq this time.

She caught him before he left in January, told him she loved him.

And now, like more than 800 other families, his misses him.

Iwona says she gets back to Poland every five years ago and had plans for another trip. "I was thinking to go this year with both of my kids, but it turned out that we had to change our plans," she says.

Instead, in March, she had to plan a funeral. Daniel was a St. Margaret's kid, she says, but when he was born her English was still scant, so she brought him to Our Lady of Czestchonowa. His First Communion was in St. Margaret's, but when it came time to bury him, his mother opted for the South Boston church where Masses are still said in her native Polish.

"He was baptized at Czestchonowa, so I thought I would let him have Last Rites there."

On a crisp day in March, in a church thronged with mourners, the pastor, the Rev. Miroslaw Podymniak, called it "the most difficult funeral service" over which he'd ever presided. As for Daniel, he said, "God knows him by name."

'Alive in My Heart'

"Old soldiers never die."

That's Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur speaking, all self-styled Caesar and sunglasses and corncob pipe and enough hardware on his chest to best a Panzer shell. Along with ticker tape parades, though, Mac knew a few things about soldiers.

One of them, a flinty-eyed chief warrant officer from Maine, was out checking for land mines in the field one night, a dangerous mission for which he'd volunteered, when up comes MacArthur, Pacific theater commander. The young man knew the Hemisphere's highest-ranking military officer didn't need to be out there among the trip lines and bouncing betties.

"You're doing a hell of a job," said MacArthur.

He came out of that war, the chief warrant officer did, and the next one, with a bayonet scar on his arm and a Death March-weakened heart that quit on him at 54, but before he went he told his wife about the night he went out to face death and met the general.

And his wife told their son, who told his own son and father's namesake, and, proving the general right, that grandson sits in Sergeant Daniel Londono's living room with the sergeant's mother and sister and thinks of his grandfather fighting to keep free the country Daniel Londono gave his life for.

Mac left out the young ones, though, and that's what Iwona London's son was, "my Danny," a quiet kid from East Cottage Street who all he ever wanted was to join the Army.

What about the young ones, General?

She visits the answer every night on her way home from work.

"I have him so close to my heart that I don't want to think that he's not here, that's he's dead," says the young soldier's mother. "He'll be alive for the rest of my life, in my heart. I don't know."