The US Department of Defense sent out news releases about two of our fallen on Tuesday. One was a casualty among our dwindling combat troops still stationed in Iraq. Another was an MIA who has been positively identified.
The combat medic who we have lost is US Army Specialist Jamal M. Rhett, and the bomber pilot who was found is US Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Ray F. Fletcher. May they both rest in blessed peace.
US Army Specialist Jamal M. Rhett
When Jamal Rhett was 11 years old, he moved with his mother from Philadelphia to Palmyra, New Jersey. He went to public schools, played basketball, and graduated from Burlington County Institute of Technology in 2003. He attended Bloomfield College for one year, but found he needed help paying for tuition. To help his plans to go to medical school, he enlisted in the US Army.
He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Rhett was trained as a combat medic and started his second deployment to Iraq with his unit in early July.
Rhett communicated with his family constantly by phone and using Facebook, He had recently told his family that he had been recommended for promotion to sergeant. However, due to security concerns or personal ones there were some things he didn't discuss with his family, according to NorthJersey.com:
"He wanted to go into the medical field and he found out, looking through everything, that it would be costly to him as far as schooling was concerned. So he decided to join the service," said Winters.
Winters said Rhett was on his second tour in Iraq, and that he preferred not to share his experiences there with his family.
"When he first came home, he told us that there were some things that he couldn’t talk to us about and he’d appreciate if we didn’t ask him questions about it," said Winters. "He did at one point tell us there were some things over there that he’d seen that he never wanted to see in his life."
Army Specialist Jamal Rhett was killed when insurgents attacked his vehicle with grenades. The attack occurred on August 15th near the city Ba Qubah, which is located northeast of Baghdad. He was 24 years old.
Some of Specialist Rhett’s family went to Dover Air Force Base Tuesday to attend the transfer ceremony of his remains. A flag-draped casket was carried solemnly from the plane in a ceremony that has, unfortunately, been repeated hundreds of times at that base. Among the survivors who watched was Jamal's mother, Michelle Watson. She is quoted on Philly Burbs.com which is the Burlington County Times site:
Watson was informed of her son’s death Sunday afternoon. She said the trip to Dover was emotional but that she was glad she went.
"There’s a feeling of honor and glory even," she said.
Bloomfield College is flaying its flag at half-staff in Rhett’s honor. Funeral services are expected to take place at Evergreen Baptist Church in Palmyra and burial in Chelten Hills Cemetery in Philadelphia's West Oak Lane section. The Patriot Guard Riders will be assisting in the ceremony.
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US Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Ray F. Fletcher
This month marks the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II. More than 400,000, of the 16 million Americans who served during that war, died. At the end of the conflict, the US was unable to recover, identify, and bury approximately 79,000 as known persons. More than 72,000 World War II Americans remain unaccounted-for.
US Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Ray F. Fletcher, of Westborough, Mass was missing in action from World War II. His remains have been identified and returned for burial, with full military honors, on August 20th in Burlington, Vermont at the Mountain View Cemetery.
On May 10, 1944, Fletcher and four others aboard a B-25C Mitchell bomber took off from Ajaccio, Corsica, on a routine courier mission to Ghisonaccia, Corsica. They failed to reach the destination and were officially reported missing on May 13th, 1944. Two days later, French police reported finding aircraft wreckage on the island’s Mount Cagna.
The US Army’s Graves Registration Command visited the crash site in 1944 and reported remains were not recoverable. It was not until May 1989 that Corsican authorities notified U.S. Army Memorial Affairs Activity-Europe that they had found wreckage of an American WWII-era aircraft and turned over human remains collected at the mountainous location. They sent a survey team to the site and determined the terrain was too rugged to support a recovery effort. In 2003 and 2004, two French nationals provided U.S. authorities with crew-related equipment recovered from the crash site.
A Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC) team excavated the location in September 2005 and recovered additional human remains as well as more crew-related equipment. Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used mitochondrial DNA in the identification of Fletcher’s remains.
The Patriot Guard Riders will be providing an escort for the funeral procession for US Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Ray F. Fletcher as he takes his final journey home.
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Helping our troops:
If you wish to assist our military and their families, consider Operation Helmet, or Fisher House. Sponsoring a deployed service member at US Troop Care Package can provide letters or care packages that make a real difference in a military person's life. To assist the animal companions of our deployed military, information is available here. Also, you could visit:
When our veterans come back home, they need jobs. Look at the programs of Hire Heroes USA and Welcome Back Veterans to see if you can help out. The new KINship Project has also been of help to our veterans and other Kossacks In Need.
About the IGTNT series:
"I Got the News Today" is a diary series intended to honor, respect, and remind us of the sacrifice of our US troops. Click here to see the series, which was begun by i dunno, and which is maintained by Sandy on Signal, monkeybiz, noweasels, blue jersey mom, Chacounne, twilight falling, joyful, roses, SisTwo, SpamNunn, a girl in MI, JeNoCo, Mediaprof, TrueBlueMajority, JanosNation, Proud Mom and Grandma, Ministry of Truth, CalNM, and Wide Awake in KY. These diaries are heartbreaking to write, but are an important service to those who have died, and show our community’s respect for them.
Fallen service members whose names have been released by the US Department of Defense will usually be diarized two days after the official announcement on the DoD website. This allows the IGTNT team to cover each person more fully, but still in a timely manner
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Please bear in mind that these diaries are read by friends and family of the service members mentioned here. May all of our remembrances be full of compassion rather than politics.