![\"Nicholas](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Nicholas-J.-Cancilla-500x281.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\nHack Stone sends us a link to Philly.com<\/a> which reports that Nicholas J. Cancilla is home from Betio Island. Hondo told us when his earthly remains were identified in September<\/a>. <\/p>\n “He needs to be honored,” said Darlene Johnson of Virginia, Cancilla’s niece and one of his only living relatives. “I’m glad he’s coming home.”<\/p>\n It was in late 1942, several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that Cancilla joined the Marine Corps. A photograph in the Mirror shows the young man – just 17 when he signed up – smiling in a crisp dress uniform.<\/p>\n Raised by immigrant parents, Cancilla grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Pleasant Valley, near the Altoona city limits.<\/p>\n […]<\/p>\n Cancilla was only a teenager, but he’d already earned a reputation as a hard-fighting, beer-drinking tough guy – not a bad prospect as a Marine, said Dave Servello of Altoona, who became close friends with Cancilla’s brother in the last decade of his life.<\/p>\n “He didn’t take anybody’s crap,” Servello recalled Frank saying. “Certain guys come out of training – even though they’re not officers, they come out leaders. He was the guy.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Like most of the other Marines that we read about from Betio, Cancilla was killed in the first hours of the battle, but he will finally come home this morning;<\/p>\n A funeral Mass, open to the public, is set for 10:30 a.m. Monday at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Debbie Santella of Santella Funeral Home said. After that, Cancilla is set to be laid to rest at Calvary Cemetery – either at the mausoleum or outdoors, she said, depending on conditions.<\/p>\n The military burial marks a small piece of closure for a family with a history of military service and loss. In 1969, a quarter-century after Cancilla’s death, his nephew – named Nicholas Cancilla in his honor – was killed on a river patrol boat in South Vietnam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"