Tribute

I went to Ramadi this week to say farewell to a fallen comrade and offer some support and condolences to the boys I had to leave when I came to Baghdad.

This memorial ceremony was harder than the others, as it ought to be for someone I'd worked with for 18 months. It was good, but hard. You never expect the true warriors to fall like that. You never really expect it for anyone. He was killed in a direct conflict with the enemy, and somehow that makes it seem more tolerable. More just perhaps. Not like the majority of the bullshit IED deaths we suffer. Those are random strikes on random vehicles with no fighting chance to make it seem fair.

Not this time. This was a man in a ditch with a gun and a death wish, ready to fight and be killed. He was making his last stand after an atypically pitched battle. His burst of machine gun fire killed two good men before he was quickly engaged. The subsequent detonation of his suicide vest wounded two more of ours.

My fallen brother was a warrior who died a warrior's death. It wasn't glorious or dignified, but it was what we prepare ourselves for and hope to God never happens. The man was relentless in his duties. He took care of his soldiers, troublemakers all. He was an instigator and mischief-maker, to be sure. But he refused to back down when we were losing vehicles all too regularly to IEDs and were rethinking our tactics. He fought through pain from injuries that should have been treated years ago to do his job, often going above and beyond. He was one of those men who always seemed to be the first to respond when trouble arose. He was by all accounts a warrior, and by most definitions, a hero, probably multiple times over. When the mission called for supporting the local police, he gave them everything he could find, to include taking the time to escort them to our scrap heaps and dump sites to scrounge for usable material. The ceremony showed picture after picture of him with his IPs, with caches he and his boys found, with IEDs they had dug up. The success of that Company owed much to him. Though he didn't seem the type, he just couldn't hold back his dedication, couldn't stop working for improvements, day by day. He was, like so many we've lost, a family man; a husband and father of two boys.

Rest in peace, Ray.