For many people across the SouthCoast, Memorial Day hits extremely close to home because of the men and women we have lost in the name of freedom, including an honorable young man from Fairhaven who we lost much too soon. Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew R. Rodriguez served in the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, 1st Marine Division, and the I Marine Expeditionary Force, and was stationed out of Camp Pendleton, California. He died conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan in December of 2013. He was just 19 years old. Nearly eight years later, Rodriguez's memory still lives on, and as part of a mass Memorial Day tribute to fallen heroes at Fort Adams, Rodriguez was honored among approximately seven thousand other honorable men and women.