Lance Cpl. Gregory E. MacDonald, a 1995 graduate of Belmont University, was killed in Iraq. The Lowell Sun newspaper in Lowell, Mass., has complete – and moving – coverage.
MacDonald earned a degree in philosophy and social policy in 1995 from Belmont and a graduate degree from American University in Washington, D.C., in 2001.
From the Lowell Sun:

BURLINGTON – “That I have died means that I have failed to achieve the one thing in life I truly longed to give the world, PEACE,” reads the last statement of Lance Cpl. Gregory E. MacDonald.
More than 200 friends and family mourned MacDonald at a military burial yesterday in Pine Haven Cemetery in Burlington, after services at St. Margaret’s Church.
A 21-gun salute was fired in honor of the U.S. Marine whose life’s work was to help achieve peace in the Middle East. MacDonald died June 25 in Hilla, Iraq, when his light armored vehicle turned over on his way to rescue ambushed American soldiers. He was 29.

The Washington Post reports MacDonald, who lived in the Washington D.C. area, joined the Marines after earning his master’s degree at American University because he saw military service as a way to gain credibility and experience in his intended career in Middle Eastern affairs:

“He wanted to do foreign policy work,” [friend Jeni] Spevak said, “and he wanted to do it for the Middle East, and he wanted to create peace in the Middle East.”

The Post says MacDonald was “a cerebral man with red hair and blue eyes who loved books and classical guitar and studied philosophy as an undergraduate (and) did not fit the classic profile of an enlisted Marine.”

Former Belmont University basketball star Joe Behling is profiled in the July 3 Tennessean:

During his basketball career at Belmont University, Joe Behling was the main man. He scored 2,823 points from 1987-90 and is still the school’s all-time leading scorer.
These days Behling is a main man of different sorts as one of the few male teachers at Park Avenue Elementary School in West Nashville.
”I teach in an inner-city school and I feel like that’s where I need to be,” Behling said. ”We’ve got some challenges there, but it’s neat to know that the kids need you. There are a lot of kids there that need a positive male role model.

The June 29 Vicksburg Post profiles Belmont women’s basketball associate coach Donna Brown:

All the kids stare at Donna Brown. From the moment the whistle falls from her mouth, their gazes are fixed on her, anxiously awaiting her words.
The fiery Brown barks out instructions, and the kids follow them without question.
To some, the charismatic coach could appear intense and ruthless, but then she follows it up with some horseplay and joking, putting any notion of seriousness aside. This two-faced combination has served Brown well through her years of coaching basketball.
Brown excelled on the court in her days at Vicksburg High and turned her basketball beginning into a career. After spending four years as a starter for Mississippi State, she took up an assistant coaching job at Belmont University in Nashville.
Her success there will lead her to a promotion next week to associate head coach, Belmont head coach Tony Cross said.

Belmont University President Dr. Robert Fisher received the latest installment in gifts from the Maddox Foundation this week, $506,880 in gifts to help fund construction of the Maddox Grand Atrium, and to continue funding Belmont’s Presidential Scholars Program scholarships and the Rasmussen Foreign Studies Program.

Belmont’s own Lindsey Harper is one of 36 finalists in the Miss Tennessee pageant, to be held June 18-21 in Jackson, Tenn.. Harper, 20, of Trenton, Tennessee, won the Miss Madison contest, a preliminary to the Miss Tennessee pageant.