A Small Town Loses One of the Family : Combat death: Thomas A. Jenkins left his old mining community for schooling and training in Marines. He was one of 11 killed in a ground battle.

In the Sierra Nevada foothills northeast of Fresno, residents of Coulterville talk of a young man who braved a wildfire in 1989 to help firefighters find and rescue people living off the main roads.

Tommy, they said, was able to help direct the search-and-rescue teams because he had learned to hunt and fish in the steep canyons surrounding the tightly knit former gold-mining town of 393 people.

On Wednesday, thousands of miles from the pine trees and streams of his hometown, 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Thomas A. Jenkins was among 11 Marines killed in the first major ground battle of the two-week-old Persian Gulf War.

In his memory, flags throughout Mariposa County, including those at Yosemite National Park, were lowered to half-staff.

A seventh-generation resident of Coulterville, the young Marine was the son of Thomas and Joyce Jenkins, whose ancestors were among the thousands of settlers who flocked to the Mother Lode region in the 1850s in search of gold.

“He grew up in these mountains and he’s from a family with deep roots in the Coulterville area,” said Kent Stoel, vice principal of Mariposa High School. “I know he was looking forward, after graduation, to going into the military for the training and schooling it had to offer. . . . Combat was a very remote thought.”

Jenkins’ parents declined to talk about their son, who was believed to have been assigned to an armored personnel carrier that came under fire from Iraqi soldiers. They were notified of his death at about 7 p.m. Wednesday, friends said.

Family friend Jan Tomlinson spoke in their behalf: “His family was 100% behind their son and their hearts go out to all our troops.”

She described Jenkins as a tall, athletic young man who played basketball in high school and “loved hunting, fishing and mining on the family ranch.”

He was a member of the Coulterville volunteer fire department and worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the summer of 1989, Tomlinson said. He was also a member of the Mariposa County Search and Rescue Team.

Jenkins joined the Marine Corps on Jan. 22, 1990. Stationed at Camp Pendleton, he was sent to Saudi Arabia on Aug. 13 and promoted to lance corporal in early September.

“It is very sad, quite a shock,” said Mariposa County Supervisor Sally Punte, whose district includes Coulterville. “We are all feeling very close to the family. We all feel very badly for them.”

Suzette Prue, managing editor of the Mariposa Gazette, said the mountain community is stunned because so many people know the Jenkins family, and its ties to the Gulf War are deep.

“The entire county has a population of 14,000 people, and yet we have close to four dozen men and women serving in the Gulf,” she said. “It’s a very patriotic community.”

Vietnam veteran Jim Olson, 43, who lives in the nearby community of Greeley Hill, has begun carving the names of the local residents involved in Operation Desert Storm on redwood plaques to be hung in Coulterville City Park.

So far, he has inscribed the plaques with 12 names. On Thursday morning he carved a small cross beside Jenkins’ name.

“I hope it is the only cross I have to carve,” Olson said.