CARLTON — The sole victim of the Carlton Complex wildfires to lose his life earned an honored resting place alongside America’s buried military veterans.
Robert E. Koczewski was laid to rest April 23 at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The former Washington State Patrol trooper and longtime U.S. Marine died from a heart attack July 19, 2014, while fending off the flames at a bridge leading to his property and that of his neighbors near Carlton.
Those efforts, plus a belt of green he and his wife Pat Koczewski maintained around the home they shared, helped keep the house intact as the fire swept by. Robert was 67. Pat, who was working with her husband to beat back the fire when he died, attended the Arlington ceremony in which Robert’s ashes were interred.
“He had full honors,” Pat, 67, said Friday. “He had the president’s personal band and 21-gun salute and the silent drill team and the horses and the whole nine yards.”
Robert Koczewski had earned it. A 26-year Marine who served three tours of service in Vietnam and achieved the rank of sergeant major, he retired from the corps and joined the Washington State Patrol’s 22-week training academy. When he graduated into a patrol car, he was one of the oldest rookie troopers the force had ever hired, at 47.
During his Marine service, Robert suffered combat wounds in Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts. He aided in the recovery of bodies from the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, where 299 people were killed – 220 of them fellow Marines. He oversaw embassy security in Colombia, and played a role in the U.S. invasion of Grenada. (A favorite pastime at the Koczewskis’ house was watching “Heartbreak Ridge,” the Clint Eastwood drama adapted from those events, and nitpicking the details. “They didn’t get that quite right,” Robert would tell his wife.)
Robert and Pat met during his last Marine Corps duty, at Security Force Battalion Bangor near Silverdale, when she worked at the base exchange. His State Patrol job brought them to central Washington, and she took a position with Sun Mountain Lodge in Mazama.
Robert patrolled the state’s highways from 1991 to 2003. Along the way, Pat said, he turned down several chances for advancement. As a former Marine drill instructor, he was sometimes asked to become a State Patrol academy teacher.
“He’d been in charge in the Marine Corps, and he wanted to be out with the troops,” Pat recalled. “That’s what he said.”
In a 1993 Seattle Times profile, Robert told reporter Shandra Martinez that motorists he stopped sometimes asked if he was preparing for retirement. His answer: “No, I’m just getting started.”
“I always thought that the Marines were the best of the best, that’s the same way I feel about the State Patrol,” he told Martinez. “You meet people at their maddest, baddest and saddest.”
After 2003, Robert retired to his wooded home with Pat along Gold Creek.
The 256,000-acre Carlton Complex Fire was the largest in Washington’s recorded history. That July the Koczewskis spent three anxious days maintaining the protective belt around their home an an unoccupied neighboring house. They had to repeatedly move a heavy 300-foot fire hose from one end of the property to the other, and work a generator-powered pump to draw water from the creek. Their electricity was out, and it was hard to find time to rest and eat.
Robert had begun to suffer circulatory problems years earlier, largely related to his Vietnam wounds. The aftereffects of a penetrating gunshot wound to his leg made it difficult to walk. His carotid artery was obstructed, and the aorta of his heart had developed an aneurysm.
Pat had just encouraged Robert to take a meal break when he decided to drive down on an ATV to check the wooden bridge – the only access across the creek to their land. Pat joined him, and there they discovered a tree on fire right next to the bridge. As Robert carried two jugs of water to wet down the blaze, he collapsed.
Although the fires burned hundreds of homes, Koczewski’s was the only human life lost. Friends, neighbors and fellow Marines joined a community celebration of his life at the Winthrop Barn that August, and when President Barack Obama visited Washington to tour the fire damage with Gov. Jay Inslee, he phoned Pat to offer condolences.
Pat still lives in the house she and Robert saved from the fire, but she’s planning to sell it. The property became harder to manage as the couple aged, and she hopes to move closer to their eight grandchildren -perhaps back to the area around Silverdale, where she and Robert met.
Robert had long said he hoped to have his ashes scattered near Bridgeport, California, where he served and studied at the Marines’ Mountain Warfare Training Center. But Pat said later, remembering his years in combat, his thoughts turned to Arlington.
“He wanted to be with the guys that he held in his arms when they were dying,” she said.
