By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

Missy Lilley knew her brother Thomas, a Marine in Iraq, was in trouble when her father called and began describing an accident.

Then, her cell phone quit.

She collapsed for a moment, thinking of the 19-year-old she still considered her baby brother. Then, she ran to another phone. She dialed and immediately heard her father’s pleas.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” he said. “He’s all right.”

Missy’s brother, Pfc. Thomas Lilley, had been in Iraq for only a month when the accident happened on Oct. 12.

Thomas Lilley grew up in Turner, graduated from Leavitt Area High School in 2004 and entered the Marines only a month later. He turned 18 while in boot camp in Parris Island, S.C.

Deployed to the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Lilley was driving his vehicle past a row of cars when one seemed to stick its front end into his lane. As he swerved to miss it, it pulled out, crashed into Lilley’s vehicle and exploded.

“He saw the guy,” said Missy Lilley, who has since talked with her brother.

It was a suicide bomber.

The fire and flying metal struck the Marine vehicle. Thomas Lilley took the worst of it: burns to his face, a lacerated eye and shrapnel to the back of his head.

News of the accident reached Maine a day later. A Marine Corps major called Lilley’s mother, Linda, then his father, Jerry. Both tried calling Missy.

She was just listening to a vague-but-frightening message from her mother when her father called with the news.

“That was the worst,” Missy said. For a few excruciating moments, she thought her brother had died.

By last Friday, Oct. 14, Thomas was undergoing treatment in a hospital in Germany. On Sunday, he and Missy talked for an hour.

“He sounded really good,” she said. Both physically and emotionally, he seemed to be coping.

A doctor has compared his burns to a “really, really bad sunburn.” The severity of the eye wound is still unknown, though.

As soon as today, the wounded Marine was expected to be flown to Brooke Army Medical Hospital, outside San Antonio, Texas. The family plans to join him there.

He could be hospitalized for two weeks or two months, said Missy. She has heard both predictions.

Then, he would come home on leave.

“He wants to go back to Iraq,” Missy said.

She cried when her brother left for the Marines and cried again when he left for Iraq, a member of the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Assault Amphibian Battery, Alpha Company. He turned 19 in Iraq on Sept. 23.

The brother and sister remain close.

“I still picture him as if he’s 6 years old,” said Missy, 25. “I always will.”

When Thomas called her Sunday, he wanted to know she would take the news all right.

“He knows me,” she said. “He knows how I get.”

She’ll try not to cry when she finally sees him. She doesn’t want him to cry, too.

“I’m going to give him the biggest hug in the world,” she said.

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