In e-mails to his relatives, Travis Ford, a helicopter pilot, wrote that he was seeing things in Iraq that he didn’t want to see, but he felt worse for the ground troops who couldn’t return to base.

“I know there were some trying times out there for him,” but he didn’t let that get him down, said his brother, Alex Ford. “He epitomized the Marine Corps leadership. He was probably more concerned about his troops than his own welfare.”

Ford had followed his brother, now a Marine reservist and FBI agent, into the military. On April 4, he was returning from a mission near Baghdad when his gunship crashed, said his father-in-law, Bob Tipton.

“He died giving his life for the country,” Alex Ford said. “That is a tremendous sacrifice, but he did so willingly.”

Ford, 30, grew up in Ogallala, Neb., and lived in Oceanside, Calif., with his wife, Deon, and their 1-year-old daughter, Ashley.

He was a cheerleader at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and, relatives said, he proposed to his wife over a megaphone in Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium as other cheerleaders held up placards reading, “Will You Marry Me, Deon?”