Lance Cpl. Michael A. Downey, a Marine from Arizona, had already suffered for nine days from wounds received in Fallujah when he died Friday at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Downey belonged to the Combat Engineer Battalion from Okinawa that was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment from Marine Corps Base, Hawai'i. He was 21.

Eiler said Downey — her oldest child — had amazing inner strength. It probably kicked into high gear when he was wounded by a sniper Nov. 10, she said.

"I truly believe his injuries would have killed him had he not decided he wanted to make it back to say goodbye to us," Eiler said today from her home in Phoenix. "He knew how hard it would be for us if we couldn't say goodbye. I am so grateful."

Downey was a combat engineer. Part of his job was to blow up confiscated enemy weapons. But the explosives attached to a pile of AK-47 assault rifles did not detonate, so Downey went out to check on them, his mother said. A sniper's bullet found him, went in one side of his body and out the other. It destroyed one kidney, took out part of his bowels and severely damaged his spinal cord.

The Marines told Eiler that her son's condition was serious but expected he would survive. The prognosis was grim, though.

"Unless there was a lot of healing on the miraculous level, he would have been paralyzed from the waist down," she said. "He knew when he got hit and he fell down immediately. He couldn't feel his legs. He kept asking his guys: Are my legs there, are my legs there?"

Eiler learned about her son's injuries on Nov. 12 and flew to Bethesda the next day. Downey's father, William J. Downey, also flew to Bethesda, Eiler said. The couple divorced years earlier and has two other sons.

Lance Cpl. Downey graduated from Thunderbird High School in Phoenix in 2002 and quickly joined the Marines.

"He wanted to help other people," Eiler said of her son. "I think that is why he wanted to enter the military. He wanted to make the world a better place."

He was smart with "a really wonderful sense of humor," his mother said.

On Thursday morning, he seemed fine, smiling and talking. Then he started to bleed internally. Surgery was planned for Friday morning, but he never got to the operating room.

"I guess they just couldn't stop the bleeding," Eiler said. "So they brought him up to the room and we were able to spend some time with him before he passed away."

His parents were at his bedside. A grandmother, too. The commandant of the Marine Corps visited and gave Downey a Purple Heart.

His family told him they were proud of him, that they loved him.