BUCKHORN, Ont. -- Along the Highway of Heroes and up through Peterborough, yellow ribbons dot the cars moving toward Buckhorn, where Canada's latest Afghanistan casualty built forts, caught frogs and grew into a man.

The same ribbon sticks to the front door of the white house near the water where Cpl. Nick Bulger spent much of his life. Steps away, his tearful kid sister sits, looking down on a tiny paper Canadian flag stuck at half-mast in a pot of flowers.

"Do you have a brother?" 21-year-old Jessica asks, a day after her oldest brother was killed by a road-side bomb west of Kandahar City.

"I was five days old and he took me to show-and-tell," she continues. "He's been my hero ever since I was a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed, skinny little awkward girl. He's the one that believed in me."

With a nine-year age difference in a mother-only household, Bulger was a mix of father and brother to his little sister.

"He taught me how to be a good person," she whispers.

"And his laugh. I can't even describe it. I'd do anything to hear him laugh again."

Take it or leave it, Bulger always had advice to offer and argued anyone into the ground who said the troops should come home, Jessica says.

"He was just, he was a good-hearted man," she says. "It didn't matter who you were. He'd give you the shirt off his back."

No, he didn't give her advice on boys. "He'd deck anyone who came near me," Jessica laughs.

But he was supposed to give her away at her wedding.

"I can't believe that I'm sitting here talking to you about this," she cries. "He told me he'd be safe and I trusted him. I believed it when he said it."

Kathy Bulger is too upset to speak about her son at the moment. She has spoken about him so much in the past tense that she feels like her life is turning into a movie, Jessica's boyfriend, Josh Leclerc, says.

A crowd of pictures sits on a table leading to the kitchen. Among them, Bulger with his wife, Rebeka, and two daughters, Brookelyn, 4, and Elizabeth, 2.

"She was his angel," Jessica says of Rebeka. "That's what he called her: Angel."

On the fridge is a print-out of an e-mail Bulger sent to a family friend Tuesday.

"So ya we have had a few mishaps here but all in all I'm doing ok. Tell my ma that I'm ok and she raised a tough cookie and it's gonna take more than this to break me lol [laugh out loud]," it reads. "I'll be able to share with you my experiences when I get back there at the end of July."

After joining the Forces at 18, Bulger's job took him to Edmonton where he met his bride. His younger brothers, Christopher and Sheldon, followed him west.

As Bulger is bid farewell in an Afghanistan ramp ceremony and his wife and brothers make the trip back to Buckhorn, Jessica sits, angry.

"That's my big brother, man. I just can't imagine living without him. He was everybody's rock. Where do you go from here?"

But Jessica is not angry at the mission, she affirms.

"Entering a war-torn country and trying to do what's better for their people, that's what he was there for," she says. "He knew it was his duty."

TAMARA.CHERRY@SUNMEDIA.CA