Martha Kirkpatrick is planning to visit her son’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery today, giving new meaning to the heartfelt holiday she always observed, but not like this.

“I’ve never had a Memorial Day before,” she said.

Her son, Sgt. Scott Kirkpatrick, of Reston, was killed by a booby trap bomb as he was pursuing a sniper on Aug. 11, 2007, during his second tour in Iraq. He was 26.

As the nation honors its fallen soldiers, more families from across the region and the country celebrate the men and women they knew and loved.

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Kirkpatrick grew up a rebel, became a champion slam poet and died a soldier, so shaken by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that he joined the military in a decision that, as a younger man, he would have thought impossible.

“Scott was a very passionate liberal poet and resisted authority his entire life and was certainly the last person that anybody on Earth, including Scott, expected to join the Army,” Martha Kirkpatrick said. “9/11 affected him very deeply and he wanted to do something.”

It was a complete “about-face,” recalled Roy Deppa, Fitzpatrick’s uncle. But once Kirkpatrick got involved in something, from theater to poetry to war, he brought an uncommon intensity. “He just got completely gung ho into it,” Deppa said.

From the beginning, Kirkpatrick said he would have rather been in Afghanistan, his mother said, “but they don’t ask you where you want to go.”

After Kirkpatrick finished his first tour in Sadr City, he braced for a more dangerous assignment.

“He knew where he was headed and he knew it was going to be a very, as he would say, ‘it was going to be bloody this time,’ ” his mother said.

He died three months into his second tour, during a patrol in Arab Jabour, south of Baghdad.

A sniper fatally shot one of the men in Kirkpatrick’s unit before vanishing into a house in the community long held by insurgents. Kirkpatrick and three other sergeants, including his best friend in the Army, pursued the sniper into a house that had been booby-trapped with a bomb. One of the soldiers hit the pressure trigger, and the blast killed all four.

Kirkpatrick received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. As the family celebrates those honors, they also point to the medal few other soldiers have, one that celebrates the unique nature of the man: D.C. slam poet champion of 2000.

dgenz@dcexaminer.com