Luke Holler laid to rest

He got the nickname "Luke Skywalker" in fourth grade, a moniker all but forgotten by his senior year at Bracken Christian School when he and his buddies would steal into a Wal-Mart well after midnight.

There they'd pick up a few "Star Wars" light sabers and do battle in the aisles until a store worker would run them off.

That was what Luke Benjamin Holler and his friends did on weekends before he joined the Marines and went off to war in Iraq, where he died Nov. 2, the victim of a roadside bomb three months into his duty tour.

"What losers, huh? We were always doing random stuff like that," one buddy, Texas State University sophomore Aaron Watters, 21, of San Marcos, recalled. "It showed how good friends we were because it didn't matter what we were doing as long as we were together."

A lance corporal, Holler, 21, of Bulverde, was given a final salute Saturday with a memorial ceremony at a North Side church. In the afternoon, as the air turned cooler, he was interred in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Friends said he perished in a skirmish with insurgents in Anbar province after the detonation of an improvised explosive device. His death ended dreams of marrying his high school sweetheart, Jessica Coker, and came only two days after their sixth anniversary as a couple.

Tall, with sandy blond, baby-soft hair and blue eyes, and slender except for big, square shoulders, he was always big on surprises. Days before he fell in battle, Holler sent Coker's sister a pair of e-mails and a request to have her send flowers and a card.

"The first thing he said was that he had just gotten off the phone with Jessica and he was on Cloud 9, and he loved her and was so happy that he got to talk with her," said Jennifer Coker, 26, of Dallas.

He then asked her to send Jessica Coker an arrangement of Gerber daisies and roses. Jennifer Coker matched the daises with deep-yellow roses and put a simple message in the card: "Happy anniversary, my love." It was followed by "I love you" and a single infinity sign.

It was a bittersweet Veterans Day farewell for the Cokers, Holler's family and a small band of "originals" — a tightknit circle of friends who had been together since ninth grade. They say he was fun-loving, easygoing with a strong faith in God, a guy who quickly made friends and had a famed sense of loyalty.

Even after high school graduation, Holler and the originals wiled away the hours on holidays and the summer sword-fighting with light sabers at Wal-Mart, engaging in paintball "gunfights," going to movies and playing nightly video games at home. They gave each other ranks. His was "LT," for lieutenant, because he liked the rank.

"We would have three guys go in one door and three guys go in the other door, meet in the middle and we'd stare each other down for a couple of seconds. And then duke it out in the middle of Wal-Mart with plastic light sabers until the old ladies told us to leave," Watters said.

"We were all a pretty good bunch of kids. None of us smoked, none of us drank, none of us did drugs," said his best friend, Danny Scholwinski, 21, of Fair Oaks Ranch. "We were good peers with each other. We kept each other in line and at the same time we had fun, playing our video games and stuff."

All agree Holler had a long interest in the military. They played war games as fourth-graders, with the enemy switching from World War II adversaries to the Russians. But Holler, whose interest in the Marines didn't crystallize until meeting his junior high school shop teacher — a one-time Marine — was always an all-American GI.

He was assigned to Marine Forces Reserve's 4th Reconnaissance Battalion, 4th Marine Division in San Antonio at the time of his death.

"Ever since we were in sixth grade, we always dreamed of driving a Humvee or at least riding in one, flying in a helicopter and having an AR-15 carbine at the time with a scope on it," said Scholwinski, a San Antonio College psychology major. "That was our dream gun and our dreams, and he met all of them before he was killed."

From the Express News

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