One Year Ago...

It was on this day a year ago, that I walked into the TOC and found out that we had lost CW4 Keith Yoakum and CW2 Jason Defrenn. I have posted on this site before about this event, but all of us would benefit if we sat down from time to time and reflected upon the kind of people we have who have given everything for this nation and their brothers in arms.

From www.army.mil is this blurb about the presentation of the Distinguished Service Cross (the second highest award this nation can bestow upon a warrior) to Keith's family.

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Nov. 15, 2007) -- The Army recognized his determination to continue fighting in a flak-riddled Apache helicopter and Sunday posthumously awarded Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 Keith Yoakum the Distinguished Service Cross.

CWO4 Yoakum became just the eighth soldier since Vietnam to earn the award, the military's second-highest behind the Medal of Honor.

CWO4 Yoakum's widow, Kelly, and his two daughters, along with his parents and his two brothers and sister, were among 300 people who attended the awards ceremony on Veterans Day at Gibbel Park in Hemet, Calif. His company commander, Capt. Lee Robinson, flew in from Iraq for the ceremony.

Capt. Robinson, of the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, called CWO4 Yoakum a "force for good" who infused in his comrades and the young Soldiers he supervised "the desire to be the best," reported the Press-Enterprise newspaper in Hemet.

The Distinguished Service Cross was awarded for an engagement near Baghdad Feb.2. Insurgents had dug gun positions into irrigation canals and ditches. From these concealed positions, the insurgents fired automatic weapons and 12 mm or 14 mm anti-aircraft rounds on CWO4 Yoakum's Apache and another helicopter.

Even though his Apache had been hit in the fuselage and was losing the hydraulics that kept it flying, CWO4 Yoakum led the two-helicopter patrol, giving directions over the radio to the other Apache crew as they engaged the enemy.

CWO4 Yoakum put his Apache into a climb and told the other helicopter pilot that he was going to try firing rockets at the insurgent gun positions. But then his radio went silent. The other aviators later spotted his burning helicopter on the ground.

Here's a little piece about Jason and his family found HERE

Family of soldier killed in Iraq finds solace in newborn

By Meg Kinnard
The Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. — For weeks, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jason DeFrenn’s family awaited his homecoming, a trip planned as much more than a simple respite from his second tour in Iraq: The nine-year Army veteran was returning to South Carolina to help his wife give birth.

Instead, his loved ones are making plans for the 34-year-old Army pilot’s funeral. DeFrenn’s Apache helicopter was shot down Feb. 2 — two weeks before he was supposed to be back in his native state.

Wracked by grief, his wife went into labor early, giving birth to a boy just days after her husband’s death.

It’s newborn Christopher who’s now providing the family a measure of solace. “A healing child,” is how Jason DeFrenn’s father explains it as he alternately gazes at a photo of the son he lost, and at a card stamped with the footprints of his new grandson.

“It’s a wonderful thing that’s happened here in the last couple of days, in a way,” said Garth DeFrenn. “But it’s going to be a tough month.”...

...Jenny DeFrenn struggled at first with choosing a name for her infant, born four days after the crash. She decided on Christopher Andrew, the name that she and her husband had picked months ago, rather than naming him after his father.

“She always did what Jason wanted,” Garth DeFrenn said last week. “She always followed him and supported him.”

That support took the couple, who met while Jason DeFrenn was managing a Pizza Hut, from South Carolina to Texas, where he was based at Fort Hood after joining the Army nine years ago. He served one tour in Afghanistan before going to Iraq twice.

His father said the military gave DeFrenn the excitement he had sought as a boy while hunting and fishing near their hometown of 5,000 about 60 miles south of Columbia.

“When he was young, he had a spirit of wanting to be a hero,” Garth DeFrenn said. “He was one of those kids who wanted adventure.”

The DeFrenns are now making plans for Jason’s funeral in the small town of Barnwell. He’ll be buried in his family’s plot, as his father believes he would have wanted. The governor plans to grant a request to lower the state’s flags.

On an overcast afternoon last week, during a trip to visit his daughter-in-law and new grandson in a Columbia hospital, Garth DeFrenn walked through a city park that is home to dozens of memorials to war veterans. He paused on a footbridge to look out over the granite monuments and bronze sculptures, and broke into tears.

“I don’t think I’ll ever come back to this place,” he said. “No, I won’t ever come back.”

Yesterday, we the members of the 1st Battalion 227th Aviation Regiment gathered at the Fort Hood Officers Club and hung a painting of Keith and Jason's aircraft that day along with a narrative of the events. We then hoisted a few to their memory.

Here's to those and those like us...damn few left.