Monday, Aug. 08, 2011

Friends remember three area soldiers killed in Afghan crash

Army Reserve Spc. Spencer Duncan was a 2008 Olathe South graduate who at 21 left his Kansas family, his best buddies and his girlfriend because he wanted to serve his country.

He wrote how much he loved his job as a door gunner on a Chinook helicopter. But he also told his friends that in the quiet amid the stark landscape of Afghanistan he missed the Kansas sunsets, lying in a truck bed listening to the radio and cuddling with his sweetie.

Army Spc. Alexander Bennett, 23, had earned a reputation for his pranks on Marines and soldiers, drawing eye rolls from older officers. After a 2009 deployment in Iraq, he moved from the Tacoma, Wash., area to Overland Park to be a flight mechanic in the Army Reserve’s Chinook unit at New Century AirCenter.

Piloting was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bryan Nichols’ dream, something the 31-year-old Kansas City man wanted from the first day he saw a Chinook hoist itself gracefully into the sky. He studied and became one of his unit’s best, a rising star in its stable of skilled pilots.

The men were among the 30 Americans and seven Afghans who died Saturday morning when their Chinook was shot down in Wardak province west of Kabul on a mission to help Army Rangers in a firefight.

The military released names Sunday, and families in the heartland and across the nation felt the pain of war thousands of miles from the battlefield.

•••

Her smartphone is still counting the days until he was supposed to return: “Two hundred and twenty-five days, 10 hours, eight minutes and four seconds,” she said Sunday.

Andrea Miller, 19, can’t make herself turn it off. That was when she and Duncan were going to reconnect. She struggled to talk about the young man she adored.

Friends gathered at the home of Brittany Walsh, 19, whose father, Michael, has served 33 years in the Army, nearly all with the Company B 7/158th Aviation Regiment.

Stories about Duncan rose faster than the tears sometimes. A teenage rebel, he loved to go “mudding” in a rural area, spinning wheelies, tearing up grass. One night the boys were caught, but Duncan told the farmer they were looking for a hat he’d lost.

“No, that farmer didn’t believe us,” laughed Aubrey Thomasson, 20, who joined the Army Reserve because of his buddy. He will soon become a member of the 7/158th himself.

The friends are holding each other up through their sadness. They’ve visited Duncan’s parents, who didn’t want to talk publicly about their son so soon.

Duncan has two younger brothers — 15-year-old Calder and 18-year-old Tanner, who is in Marine boot camp. “Spencer was going to surprise Tanner by showing up at his graduation,” remembered Brian Bartels, 21.

The friends said that on Facebook Duncan wrote them how much worse the war was becoming.

“The war in Afghanistan has sure become real to us now,” Thomasson said.

The friends cried some more. “We’re so proud of Spencer and all of them over there,” said Mikayla Dreyer, 20. “When Spencer gets to heaven, he’ll say: ‘Let me in. I’ve been to hell already.’ ”

•••

Kirk Kuykendall, 47, eased himself into a chair inside the hangar of the 7/158th on Sunday. His right ankle is broken after a Chinook crash on June 25.

No one died in that one. But its memory is still vivid.

Bennett was the crew chief for that flight. One of the pilots was Nichols.

“Nobody should have walked away from that one, but we all made it out,” he said. “It was an act of God.”

Kuykendall and his wife, Anya, have often taken in younger reservists who arrive at the unit. Bennett was like a brother to their daughter, Emily.

“He is…I mean, was…a fun, goofy guy,” Emily said from a cellphone on speaker mode. Her parents fought back tears. “He’d sit and just talk with me a lot on the back porch…..This is surreal. For the first time in my dad’s deployments, this really feels like war.”

Bennett wanted to transfer to the Chinook unit after meeting Kuykendall in Iraq in 2009.

Kuykendall watched as the young man played jokes like hiding behind a corner and popping an unsuspecting officer with an air gun. “Yeah, he got in a lot of trouble for that one,” says Kuykendall. “You could say he got a lot of butt-chewing and extra detail.”

He once stole a division flag from an active-duty Army unit.

And there was that epic battle, he said, with the Marines over an extra large bench in Iraq. “The Marines stole it from us and Bennett stole it back, putting a lot of chains on it. Even the whole Marine unit couldn’t take it back.”

He laughed at the memory and quickly slipped into sadness.

“Alex really matured, and in Afghanistan, he became a mentor. He wanted to serve another tour there, too.

“He was thriving….”

•••

A lot of the stories about Saturday’s attack have focused on the Navy SEALs who died, but those men weren’t alone on the Chinook.

“We want people to know there were others on that mission, too,” says Sgt. Andrea Norton, a unit administrator for Delta Company. For a few years, Nichols was her counterpart administrator for Bravo Company.

“Bryan hated the desk,” she said with a little laugh. “He gave it his best shot, but we all knew he hated it.”

He had three loves, his friends agreed: flying, driving his motorcycle and talking about his family. His wife, Mary, lives in Kansas City, but military officers said she declined to talk.

Nichols has a 10-year-old son. His friends cry knowing that his family is hurting.

“From the first day I met him, he set a picture of his wife on his desk…he probably had one of her in his helmet, too,” Norton said.

Nichols grew up in western Kansas and worked in another Army reservist unit in Independence, “but his heart was in the flying,” she says.

He transferred and began lobbying for flight school. Officers in the 7/158th knew he would make a good pilot.

They were right.

There’s one memory that Kuykendall can’t shake: the crash they endured in June.

He remembers how the engines were screaming and everybody knew they were going to crash. They were carrying 28 infantry troops — “just boys, they were so young,” says Kuykendall.

The helicopter landed hard 9,500 feet up a remote mountaintop in Afghanistan with tall timber all around and unknown enemy beyond that.

It happened so fast that Kuykendall said he didn’t have time to think he might die.

“But I can still see Bryan, so professional, helping all the injured. He and the other pilot, Buddy Lee, popped the doors off and helped all the injured. Bryan was calm and professional, remembering to zero-ize all the sensitive, secret stuff. Those two guys stayed with us all night, not leaving until everybody else was evacuated. And then they stayed with us all day, without any sleep, until they knew we’d be all right.

“I’ll never forget that.”

Nichols emailed him just last week. In two weeks he was coming back to Kansas City for a leave.

He planned to see his wife and son, visit Kuykendall and then drive to Minnesota to see another unit member recuperating in a hospital.

“Things like that mattered to him. He was pretty special.”

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