Army 1st Lt. Katie del Castillo runs for her life in a race she may never win, but one she thinks she can survive over time.

At the age of 25, the Hawaii soldier is a war widow. Her newlywed husband, 1st Lt. Dimitri del Castillo, was killed in a firefight last June in eastern Afghanistan.

She was at a different base on the same deployment when she got the news.

These days, Katie del Castillo runs — usually in and around Ala Moana Beach Park — to remember the happiness she and Dimitri had together, to experience some of the pain he must have experienced, to push herself to succeed, and to pour out through exhaustion all of the jumble of good times, sadness, resentment and anger that collide every day in her head.

As an extension of that physical therapy, she’s taken on marathons, running in a "Team Del" shirt that’s a reference to her husband’s nickname, and she repeats his name when a run gets tough.

She has also recorded her experience in an essay, "Running Through Life: A Story of Love, War, Death and Resilience."

Both she and Dimitri, who was 24, deployed a year ago to Afghanistan with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team out of Schofield Barracks.

The unit’s 3,500 soldiers will be returning to Hawaii in coming weeks to anxiously awaiting families, brass bands, and speeches about a job well done — a scene played out dozens of times here during more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Katie del Castillo is the flipside to all that joy, among those families that get the heartbreaking news that their loved one has been killed or seriously injured.

According to the 3rd Brigade, 18 Schofield soldiers have been killed on this Afghanistan deployment — which is still wrapping up — and at least 257 have been wounded in action.

Second Lt. Clovis T. Ray, 34, from San Antonio, the 18th fatality, was killed Thursday by an improvised explosive device.

Over the course of the war, 1,790 Americans have died and 15,460 have been wounded.

Until June 25, when Dimitri, who grew up in Houston, was killed in Kunar province, the del Castillos led an idyllic Army life.

They made their families proud by graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where they met.

Her father was a West Pointer, and so was Dimitri’s uncle.

Dimitri was 5-foot-11, "built like a Greek god," a goofball with a big heart and a loud, silly laugh who thought his own corny jokes were hilarious, his wife said.

"He was the love of my life," she said.

They were assigned to Hawaii, loved living here, and got married before the deployment to Afghanistan — their first as officers.

"We lived a fairy tale, we really did," Katie said. "We went to West Point together, we dated for the last three years there, so that’s just like its own little world, and then we traveled to Spain, we traveled to Paris."

Dimitri already was making plans to become a Special Forces soldier, and the couple was making plans to have their first child when they returned to Hawaii.

Instead, Katie del Castillo will receive a state Medal of Honor on March 28 at the Capitol on behalf of her husband as part of the Legislature’s annual recognition of service members with Hawaii ties killed in the nation’s wars.

The Conyers, Ga., native is still trying to process it all.

She knew as a West Point graduate that death in a war zone was always a possibility, "but you never think it’s going to be you," she said.

Running has been one way to cope, and writing about Dimitri and his loss has been another.

Mostly, she wants people not to forget her husband, or his sacrifice — wishes that come as the American public increasingly distances itself from the Afghanistan war.

"Katie’s story puts a real human face on a war that has left the consciousness of the American people," said state Rep. K. Mark Takai, coordinator of the Hawaii Medal of Honor program.

ASKED HOW she’s doing these days, Katie says, "I don’t know. I get asked that question a lot and normally I just say, ‘I’m hanging in there.’ The unit is redeploying (back to Hawaii), which is hard. It’s hard seeing my friends, our friends, coming back that we deployed with and not see Dimitri come back."

On the deployment, Katie was a personnel officer with the 325th Brigade Support Battalion. She stayed at Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad most of the time, and worried like crazy about Dimitri, an infantry platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, at FOB Joyce.

He had been in multiple firefights in Kunar province, she said. On one occasion, a suicide car bomber detonated a vehicle while he was inside an adjacent building talking to Afghan leaders.

He died on June 25 during a massive counter-insurgency operation in the Watahpur district of Kunar in a small-arms firefight. Another Schofield soldier, Sgt. Nigel Kelly, 26, also was killed, and many others were wounded.

That evening, Katie was called into the battalion commander’s office and received the grim news. She was flown back to Georgia and spent two weeks in a fog, she said.

"I buried my husband in the pouring rain that afternoon (July 8 at West Point), next to one of our best friends, 1st Lt. Daren Hidalgo, who had been killed in Afghanistan in February," she wrote in her account.

She was reassigned to Fort Shafter from Schofield because she couldn’t bear to be near so many reminders of her husband’s unit at Schofield.

Katie ran with Dimitri’s father the day of his funeral, and she ran the marathon in Honolulu — her first — with her brother, Nate Pulliam, on Dec. 11, in honor of Dimitri.

"Honestly, I’d never had any desire to run a marathon before, until this (Dimitri’s death). I think it’s because I like pushing myself to that point. I’ll never feel the pain that Dimitri felt, and I’ll never be able to take that away from him," she said, her eyes shedding tears at the thought. "But this (running), this is what I can do. I can push myself as far as I can."

These days, Katie can be spotted in her purple and gray Nikes running at Ala Moana, near where she lives, up around Diamond Head, along the Ala Wai Canal and in Waikiki.

"I have so many emotions that fill me during the day — sadness, anger, resentment, so many things, even happiness, looking back at the memories I do have with him," she said. "So this is just a way to sort of clear the bad things and embrace the good."

Asked how long she plans to pursue her long-distance running therapy, Katie said, "For how long? I have three marathons I’m signed up for now, and then I’ll sign up for more."