Vincent Pomante laid to rest

Even with his casket at the front of the church yesterday, it was hard to believe that Spc. Vincent James Pomante III’s life had ended.

"V.J." had loved that life so much. He lived it so well in his 22 years. Everyone thought that. There was the time he filled his backpack with crickets, locked a bunch of people (including himself) into a room, and then dumped them all out.

With V.J., things could go from "dull to bizarre in a matter of seconds." There was the time that he caught a frog and kept slapping a guy he had just met with it.

Once, in Wyoming, he decided he should have his hair publicly cut into a mullet and drew a crowd of 100 people.

There are several stories involving V.J. and a mullet.

The mullet was what the pastor mentioned during the funeral yesterday at Central College Church in Westerville. It’s also on a blog that his friends have written. The cricket story is there, too, along with ones about V.J. mooning someone and setting off fireworks.

He always was hungry for food — at 6 feet 5 inches tall, refrigerators were never safe around him — and for new experiences. That was part of what led him into the Army after he graduated from Westerville South in 2003.

V.J. was a tank gunner. He was in a Humvee on Dec. 6 in Ramadi, Iraq, when a roadside bomb exploded. It killed him and Capt. Travis L. Patriquin, 32, of St. Charles, Mo.

V.J. had been in Iraq since January, and his three-year stint with the Army would have been over next month.

He had wrestled and rowed in high school. One time, at lunch, he managed to thread a spaghetti noodle through his nose and out his mouth. He fought with his younger sister, Amy, but talked about how much he admired the woman she was becoming.

"Many times when a person passes away, their past gets rewritten to highlight only the positive," someone wrote on the blog. "With VJ, no revisions are necessary. He lived up to every kind word anyone can say about him."

Somebody else wrote: "Liz and I were talking, and we decided ‘rest in peace’ does you no justice – Raise hell in heaven, VJ! "

Even with all that life, there was still the casket in the front of the church.

After Pastor Richard D. Ellsworth talked of V.J.’s commitment to his country, after his parents were presented with the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and after the congregation sang On Eagle’s Wings and Onward Christian Soldiers, the crowd drove to the cemetery.

Ellsworth read the 23 rd Psalm. He said "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

An honor guard fired a rifle volley. A bugler played taps. V.J.’s military pallbearers folded the flag on top of his casket, and a major general gave it to his mother, Karen Pomante. She held it on her lap. He gave another folded flag to his father, Vincent Pomante Jr.

Then it was over.

V.J.’s friends and family went back to the church to eat lunch and tell more stories.

From the Dispatch

Related Link:
Vincent Pomante dies of injuries from I.E.D.