MARBLE HILL -- Even as a young child, Robert Joseph Bollinger wanted to be a Marine.

He couldn't wait to enlist. "This was his lifelong dream from the time he was 6 years old," said his mother, Pat Bollinger of Marble Hill.

The youngest of six children, Robert J. Bollinger joined the Marines straight out of high school in 1983. "He was so proud to be a Marine," his mother remembered.

Small but wiry, he barely made the weight minimum. But he liked everything about the Marine Corps boot camp in California. He proved to be a good marksman and received the "expert rifle" badge.

After four months of training, he was discharged to the active reserve.

Pat Bollinger said her son had volunteered to go on a mission to Nicaragua with other Marines. "They screwed up his orders and they were going to send him to cooking school," she said.

Her son didn't want to be a military cook. "He wanted to fight for this country," she said.

So he accepted the discharge in exchange for an opportunity to be an active member of a Marine Corps Reserve unit, headquartered in St. Louis.

He was 20 years old when he was killed in a traffic accident when the car he was riding in ran off Route D west of Jackson and struck a tree.

The driver of the car, Kevin Paul Scholl, admitted that he and Bollinger had been drinking at an East Cape Girardeau, Ill., club prior to the accident.

Scholl, then 18 and a Jackson High School student, was convicted of careless and imprudent driving. He was sentenced to a year in the Cape Girardeau County Jail.

Pat Bollinger has so far been unable to convince the federal government to provide a military marker for her son's grave.

She said her son could never

(have imagined that the government would have denied him a military marker.

Said Pat Bollinger, "He would be so ashamed.")