Michael Davis laid to rest

SAN MARCOS — Taryn Davis, 21, never thought that she would have to give her husband's eulogy. But Friday evening, she strode to a podium, opened a spiral notebook and calmly addressed an audience of hundreds at the Hays County Veterans Memorial on the banks of the San Marcos River.

She spoke of Michael Davis, the man she met during her junior year at San Marcos High School, the man she loved "more than the universe times pi."

"You are my future; you are my life; you are my everything," she said she told him on their wedding day a year and a half ago.

"I love you more than life itself. I know that's cheesy, baby, but I mean it," she told him the morning of May 21. Two hours later, Cpl. Michael Davis and two other soldiers were killed when the bomb they were disarming exploded beneath their armored vehicle in Baghdad, Iraq. Two other soldiers were seriously injured.

On Friday, with more than a hundred motorcycle riders carrying American flags guarding the memorial's edge, Davis' family and friends remembered the man his commanding officer called "the comic relief of the platoon."

Davis, the youngest of three children, graduated from San Marcos High School in 2002 and enrolled at Texas State University.

But he left college two years ago to join the Army in search of a challenge, college friend Phil Muzzy said.

Some of his family and friends supported the decision. Others did not.

But that didn't matter to Davis, Muzzy said.

"Michael was Michael, and Michael was going to do what he wanted to do," Muzzy said.

Standing 6 feet, 3 inches tall with dark brown hair and huge green eyes, Davis loved his wife so much that he constructed elaborate treasure hunts leading her to a special gift and dance with her to " '50s music," Muzzy said.

Davis, who served with the 25th Infantry Division from Fort Richardson, Alaska, planned to study engineering at Texas A&M University when he got out of the Army, his family said.

Brig. Gen. Anthony Ierardi told Davis' family that he was a "true American hero" who died fighting hatred and intolerance.

Then officers presented a Bronze Star Medal, a Purple Heart and three folded American flags to Davis' parents and wife as dozens of tiny American flags, staked in the grass, fluttered in the evening breeze.

From the Austin Statesman

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