By Tom Roeder
The Gazette
Copyright 2007 ProQuest Information and Learning
All Rights Reserved
ProQuest SuperText
Copyright 2007 Freedom Newspapers, Inc.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — In the chapel at Fort Carson, people cried as they consoled the widow. Outside, 6-year old Ethan Brown blew a dandelion plume, smiling as his brother Tyler frolicked in the grass, happy that he no longer had to sit still.
“He used to smile and say his daddy was in Iraq,” the boys’ mother, Rachel Brown, said later of Tyler, 2. “Now he smiles and says Daddy’s in heaven.”
The boys and the sunny morning seemed out of place amid the grief at the memorial for Sgt. William E. Brown, an air ambulance crew chief who died in a mortar attack June 23.
“He always had a smile,” Rachel Brown said of her husband.
Brown came to Fort Carson’s 571st Air Ambulance Medical Company in 2006 and went overseas with the unit last summer, remaining when it was renamed Company C of the 2nd Battalion 227th Aviation Regiment.
Raised in an Army family not far from Fort Rucker, Ala., Brown had always wanted to be a soldier.
A friend, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Byrne, said Brown was everything you wanted in a soldier: An eager, rock-solid leader and an affable guy who was well-liked.
“I know you hear that a lot,” Byrne said. “But he was one of the good ones.”
Brown joined the Army in 2002 and trained as a mechanic for UH- 60 Black Hawk helicopters. A year later, he was in Iraq serving with a unit out of Italy.
Quickly, commanders made him a crew chief who not only repaired helicopters, but flew aboard the aircraft to ensure they were working properly.
Byrne said in the Fort Carson assignment Brown was elevated even more, becoming a crew chief on a “dustoff” bird, an air ambulance where crew chiefs are expected to know first aid as well as mechanical skills.
Called “witch doctors,” the air ambulance crews are the closest thing there is to angels on the battlefield, Byrne said.
“They carry wounded soldiers every day,” he said. “But it’s different when it’s one of your own.”
Brown’s death in Iraq didn’t come during battle or the tumult of a rescue mission. He was doing the mundane work of a crew chief, ensuring that the rotor blades of a Black Hawk were properly balanced.
An Iraqi mortar round lobbed at his base at Taji, north of Baghdad, detonated nearby. The insurgents likely weren’t even aiming at him -- they probably just wanted to hit something American with their inaccurate weaponry.
“It was the luck of the draw,” Byrne said.
Ethan Brown now scans the sky after dark.
“We told Ethan that daddy is a star now,” Rachel Brown said. “And all the stars at night are daddy saying he loves you.”