MONROE - "Kyle was a very interesting child to have in our lives," Rita Novak said.

Novak is the mother of Green County's 1989 New Year baby and named him Kyle John Bruehlman.

His brother Kevin, age 5 at the time, wanted to name him "Gizmo."

His sister, Nadean, was 7 and became his protector, often times from Kevin.

Bruehlman was born at 9:17 a.m. on a foggy morning at St. Claire's Hospital in Monroe, and weighed 8 pounds and 13 ounces.

"He tried to be born in December," Novak said. "But the doctors said he would have been too small."

Today U.S. Marine Intelligence Analyst Lance Corporal Kyle J. Bruehlman is serving in Iraq and is married to his high school sweetheart, Kasey Canon.

The life of Kyle, who spent his youth between Monroe and Argyle, was one dramatic moment after another.

"He was always busy. I think we paid for the Monroe Clinic," Novak said.

"One day his dad (Gerald Bruehlman) called and said Kyle was being transported to the Monroe Clinic by ambulance. He had fallen down a hay shoot," Novak said.

"He said they would call me after he got out of x-ray, and I said, 'I don't think so!'" Novak said.

Kyle had been reaching for a kitten when he fell through the shoot and had an open wound in the back of his head.

When his mother saw him, Kyle still had blood mixed with straw stuck to him.

"It was coming out of his nose and his eyes and his ears, and in his hair," she said. She held her breath and shook her head remembering the sight.

Perhaps his worst accident was at about age 9. Bruehlman attempted to ride down a steep street in Argyle on his scooter. He lost control and wiped out.

"He was practically skinned raw, everywhere," Novak said.

Kyle had to be taken to the emergency room to have the gravel cleaned out of his wounds.

The next year he got hit in the face with a baseball, and again was taken to the hospital.

"He had blood coming out of his nose and all over," Novak recalled.

As a sophomore in high school, Kyle broke his hand and wrist in football. For homecoming, he was sporting a new, bright green cast.

"He kept his arm behind me so you couldn't see the cast in the pictures," Canon said.

But Kyle's busy life was not all blood and gore.

"He was an investigator all his life, even at age 2," Novak said.

That was when Novak turned to find her little boy standing on the corner of a small end table, reaching up to his arm pits into the aquarium trying to catch the fish.

"The fish were going all over the place," Novak said.

"I grabbed my camera a took a picture," she said. "Nobody would have believed me if I had told them."

Not long after that, Kyle took an interest in a mud puddle across the street.

The idea to jump in came to him, and Kyle wrote in his senior biography that he thought about it "for about two seconds" before he did.

The idea that her son had crossed the street without permission was bad enough, but to see him covered in mud from head to foot was exasperating for Novak.

She marched him home and sprayed him off with cold water from the garden hose before making him take a bath, and then wouldn't let him outside for "a long time," Kyle wrote.

"I guess you might call that my first grounding," he wrote.

Kyle spent his childhood in Monroe schools, but when he became a teenager, he chose to live with his father in Argyle. That's when he met Kasey Canon.

"He didn't care about grades, but he did well," Kasey said. "He never had to open a book to get a good grade."

Canon said she had to study math "all the time."

"He'd get an A and I got a C," she said, throwing up her hands.

Kyle acquired a love of fishing and hunting, which became bonding activities for him and Kevin. Kevin sometimes still calls him "Gizmo."

"He got hooked on turkey hunting from his Uncle Jim," Novak said.

Eventually, Kyle and Kevin had Kasey along on their hunts, too.

"They dragged her along. And here she came, dressed in Kyle's oversized, old camouflage overhauls," Novak laughed. "But she was keeping up."

Canon admitted she had some training from her father, who took her ice fishing while she was growing up.

Beneath his active life, Kyle's giving and loving nature has shone through it all.

"He's a hugger," Novak said. "He'll even hug a stranger."

He blended well with his step-sister Shannon Novak, now 19, and with his little half-siblings Brock Bruehlman, sixth grade, and Erin Bruehlman, third grade.

Kevin dropped off venison jerky and letters at Kasey's to send to him recently.

Nadean took all his senior pictures, after getting him some new clothes, because she didn't like what he was wearing. And while he dreaded the thought of sitting for a thousand pictures, he wrote in his senior biography that he actually enjoyed the time.

He teases Kasey's sisters.

"And there was not a teacher that didn't like him," Canon said.

"He's one to give up something because someone wants something else," Novak said.

"He's not selfish," Canon added.

Now, he's stationed in a desert.

"He hates hot, dry climates," Kasey said. "Even though he had training for Iraq in the desert in California and Nevada."

Readers can write to Bruehlman at:

LCpl Bruehlman, Kyle

2nd Bn 9th MAR

H+S Company Base Unit 74115

FPO AE

09509-4115