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Return to Communications & News > National Guard Magazine
MEMORIAL DAYS
Nearly 600 Guardsmen have died in the war on terror. They may be gone, but they are not forgotten
By Ron Jensen
May 2009
They go to war and come home in coffins, buried beneath markers in cemeteries from Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida. Sometimes they are laid to rest in a foreign land, covered by the very soil they died to free.
The line has been long, stretching for centuries from our nation’s colonial past to this year. This week. Even, perhaps, to today. They die fighting our nation’s wars.
And on at least one day each year, the nation stops to remember them and take note of their sacrifice.
They were fathers and mothers. Sons and daughters. Husbands and wives.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the National Guard has lost nearly 600 men and women in the war on terror.
On these pages, Guardsmen recall four soldiers who were warriors, colleagues and friends.
For some people, every day is Memorial Day.
THE LEADER
'You just wanted to follow him.'
Capt. Bruno de Solenni
Died: Sept. 20, 2008, in Kandahar, Afghanistan
Age: 32
Home: Crescent City, Calif.
Unit: Joint Forces Headquarters, Element Training Team, Oregon Army National Guard
Capt. Bruno de Solenni had the rank. It was right there on his shoulders for all to see. Two shiny bars.
But they were superfluous accoutrements on this man’s uniform.
“He didn’t have to have rank to get people to follow him,” says Capt. Paul Dyer. “You just wanted to follow him.”
Sgt. 1st Class Mark Browning says it this way: “The guy was a rank all of his own.”
Dynamic and personable. A born leader. Genuine and generous.
“He was a presence,” says Dyer, who served 10 years with de Solenni.
De Solenni made an immediate impression on anyone who came in contact with him. Browning first met him when they served together on the Oregon National Guard’s 17-member Element Training Team (ETT) in Afghanistan last year.
“We just hit it off,” Browning says. “I was the NCO and he was the officer and together we were going to go out and teach a company of Afghans.”
The ETT’s task was to embed with and train Afghan security forces. It’s a tough, tough job and pretty thankless. De Solenni
attacked it like no job in the Army was more important.
“His Afghans loved him,” says Dyer. “He was the first guy to sit down and have chai with them—tea. He would ask them about their families. He was never quick to judge and that’s hard over there. The Afghans would follow him anywhere.”
Browning says de Solenni treated his Afghan soldiers no differently then he treated the Americans he commanded.
“He immediately embraced them as equals,” he says. “They could have been American soldiers to Bruno. He expected performance out of them. He rewarded good performance and he criticized poor performance.”
De Solenni asked his aunt, who was sending “care” packages to her nephew’s troops, to include his Afghan soldiers to make them feel more a part of the team.
Less than two weeks before a bomb buried in the roadway killed de Solenni and two Afghan interpreters, de Solenni’s hometown newspaper, The Daily Triplicate, printed one of his e-mails.
“When an Afghan comes up to youthanking you for everything that you have done to help them and for making their [home] a better place now that the Taliban are gone,” he wrote, “this is probably the biggest reason why I proudly enjoy being over here.”
In the civilian world, de Solenni fished for crab and felled trees, not uncommon tasks in America’s Great Northwest, but
indicative, also, of a man described as a warrior by his peers.
“You wanted him on your team,” says Browning.
Dyer recalls de Solenni being the first one in the fight and the first person treating casualties when the fighting was done.
The loss of such a man was tough for the ETT. There was disbelief that de Solenni—“Capt. Bruno”—was dead.
“To be honest, I’m still dealing with it,” says Dyer. “It was hard. Our team was in shock. It was a big loss out here in Oregon.”
Browning had told his wife all about de Solenni, so much so that she admired him, too. He dreaded calling to tell her of the
death of someone she’d never known.
“I really wanted my wife to meet him,” he says. “You don’t come across guys like that very often.”
Dyer likens de Solenni now to James Dean, the popular movie actor killed in 1955 at age 24 who remains forever young.
“I find it odd,” he says. “I can’t imagine.”
THE OPTIMIST
'Her glass was always half full.'
Spc. Jessica Cawvey
Died: Oct. 6, 2004, near Fallujah, Iraq
Age: 21
Home: Mahomet, Ill.
Unit: 1544th Transportation Company, Illinois Army National Guard
A few weeks after Spc. Jessica Cawvey was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, her two best friends—Sgt. Jennifer Buffington and Spc. Andrea Bryan—were having a smoke outside a tent and complaining about things soldiers complain about, especially in a war zone far from home.
Suddenly—Thwat! A bird flying past made a well-timed, well-aimed deposit on Buffington’s hat, but it splattered on Bryan, also.
The two Illinois National Guard soldiers looked at each other—a bit shocked—and then burst out laughing, both thinking the
same thing: “That has got to be Jessica telling us, ‘Lighten up, girls.’”
That would have been typical Cawvey, a 21-year old single mother and accounting student at Illinois State University serving with the 1544th Transportation Company of Paris, Ill., a person who wouldn’t tolerate whiners or slip into the “woe is me” mode.
“Her glass was always half full,” says Buffington. “She didn’t sit there and complain. She was the opposite. No matter how much it sucked, she made us laugh about it.”
One time in Iraq, Cawvey and Bryan raided the first sergeant’s stash of bubblegum, which he chewed constantly. The two friends unwrapped and chewed every piece. All of it. Just for fun.
When he discovered what they’d done, the first sergeant simply laughed. After all, he already tolerated Cawvey addressing him as “One SG.”
“She wasn’t a military etiquette kind of person,” Buffington says.
When the two women were on separate shifts, Buffington and Cawvey scheduled time to get together, usually around 4:30 a.m. Buffington simply needed to see her friend, absorb some of the upbeat vibes and smile a little bit.
“I called it ‘my Cawvey time,’” she says.
Once, the two women were huddled together in a bunker during a mortar attack, laughing at the strangeness of it all and praying because of the danger. The noise of a helicopter passing low overhead startled them. Cawvey pushed Buffington down and threw herself on top of her.
“I almost cried,” Buffington says of her friend’s selfless and instinctive gesture.
Cawvey died on Oct. 6, 2004, when a roadside bomb blew up near her convoy. She wasn’t supposed to make that trip, but Bryan was on her first mission outside the wire and Cawvey went along to provide moral support for her friend.
Buffington helped them load up. They laughed and took photos of each other. The convoy had not been gone long when the sound of a roadside bomb rolled across Logistics Base Seitz near Baghdad International Airport, prompting worry and confusion. Particular blood types were requested. Soldiers were told to remain in place. The chaplain arrived.
“His presence made us nervous,” Buffington recalls.
It was a few hours before it was all sorted out. The soldiers were told to gather and the first sergeant—the one Cawvey
in action.
“He choked it out,” Buffington remembers. “He couldn’t even say it.”
That was a miserable time. Buffington can recall details of the moment – the temperature, the sound of people crying.
Cawvey was not the first member of the unit to die in Iraq, but her death rattles Buffington to this day. She tells the story about the bird 30 minutes into a telephone conversation and it is the first time she laughs while talking about her “battle buddy.”
“I knew her three years,” Buffington says. “It seems longer than that. We had a lifetime of memories. It seems so much
longer than that. I guess it wasn’t.”
THE PRANKSTER
‘He’d give you the shirt off his back.’
Spc. Thomas Dostie
Died: Dec. 21, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq
Age: 20
Home: Somerville, Maine
Unit: 133rd Engineeer Battalion, Maine Army National Guard
Spc. Thomas Dostie liked to mess with people. Go back to the chow line for something and, when you returned to the table, your drink would be missing. He’d hide your stuff when you weren’t looking. Cigarettes. Magazines. It didn’t matter.
In Mosul, Iraq, Sgt. Sean Lawrence roomed with Dostie, who would sometimes remove the blades from Lawrence’s electric razor.
“Then he’d forget where he put them,” Lawrence remembers.
Because of this predilection for practical jokes, some people weren’t fond of Dostie, but they were mostly the do-gooders,
says Lawrence, the straight arrows and the guys who were way, way too serious about stuff.
“He’d be the poltergeist in their life,” says Lawrence. “He was like, ‘Let’s have a good time.’”
What those other people didn’t know was another side of Dostie, something Lawrence and others saw and liked.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back if he thought it would help,” says Lawrence, who, like Dostie, was a mechanic with the Maine National Guard’s 133rd Engineer Battalion when the unit deployed to Iraq in 2004.
Oh, sure, even Lawrence could get a bit perturbed at Dostie’s incessant joking around.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he says. “I loved the guy, but I hated living with him.”
The constant hiding of stuff and other jokes would wear on him. There were days, he says, when he’d tell his roommate,
“Let’s not play hide-all-my-shit.” But then Dostie would do something nice and all would be forgiven.
“He was just very likeable when you got to know him,” says Lawrence.
Dostie “came from a very close knit family,” says Lawrence. He loved his parents, Mike and Peggy Dostie of Somerville, Maine. His father, he said, was Dostie’s hero and he helped in his father’s business of small-engine repair.
Dostie didn’t like being in Iraq and wasn’t shy about letting people know it. He also had no desire to leave the base.
“He was pretty sure he didn’t want to go out on a mission. He didn’t want to get killed,” Lawrence says. “So it’s ironic … .”
Dostie died when a suicide bomber wearing the uniform of the Iraqi security forces infiltrated the chow hall at Forward
Operating Base Marez and killed 22 people, including Sgt. Lynn R. Poulin Sr., also of the 133rd Engineer Battalion, who had
accompanied Dostie to lunch.
“I almost went with him, but I wanted to play video games,” says Lawrence. “Dostie asked me to go up, but I didn’t.”
Lawrence heard the explosion and soon answered the call for combat lifesavers.
“I grabbed my bag and went up there,” he says. “It was a mess. There were people everywhere.”
The smell of burned hair filled the chow hall. He remembers it yet. He never saw his roommate lying among the dead and wounded. He got the news when someone pulled him aside and told him.
“Numb. Shocked feeling,” he says. “There’s no way the guy I was talking to that morning and watched go to chow with Poulin was gone.”
More than four years later, Dostie still invades Lawrence’s thoughts from time to time.
“Every time I have a quiet moment, he’ll pop into my head,” he says.
Lawrence has made the trip to Somerville from his home in North Waterboro to visit Dostie’s parents. He remembers, too, the plans the two soldiers had made for Dostie’s 21st birthday, which would have come on Feb. 25, 2005, soon after the soldiers returned to Maine and barely two months after Dostie died.
“We were going to go out,” Lawrence says, “and do it up right.”
THE VOLUNTEER
‘He was bound and determined to try to make a difference.’
Capt. Lowell Thomas Miller II
Died: Aug. 31, 2005, in Iskandariyah, Iraq
Age: 35
Home: Flint, Mich.
Unit: 1st Battalion, 155th Infantry, Mississippi Army National Guard
Capt. Lowell Thomas Miller II was on vacation in Maine once when three Styrofoam coolers arrived by overnight carrier at the armory of his Army National Guard unit in Flint, Mich. Inside were seven live Maine lobsters and the fixings for a full-course meal.
Even on leave, Miller was thinking of his fellow soldiers.
Maj. Raymond Stemitz says the story illustrates the character of his friend, who was killed by sniper fire Aug. 31, 2005, in
Iskandariyah, Iraq.
“Tom was a good company commander. He cared for his soldiers,” says Stemitz. “The soldiers latched onto him. They liked him. He would put his butt on the line for the guys.”
Once on a training range, Stemitz recalls, Miller and his soldiers encountered a wire-mine obstacle.
“The first thing the doctrine tells us is to bypass,” says Stemitz.
But the trainers had made this one impossible to go around.
Or so they thought. Miller was an electrical engineer in the civilian world and solving problems was part of his job.
“Tom had his whole company go up over a ridge that was little more than a goat trail,” Stemitz says.
The training observer watched them disappear up the slope before burying his head in his hands.
“Tom had found a loophole,” Stemitz says.
Stemitz and Miller met in 1997 when they were both platoon leaders with the Michigan Army Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Infantry. They became executive officers and, later, company commanders at the same time.
And they were together for most of 2004 on a peacekeeping deployment to the Sinai.
But when the sad news of Miller’s death reached Stemitz via email, the two were half a world apart. Stemitz was in Michigan. Miller, a 1993 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, died while serving with the Mississippi Army Guard’s 1st Battalion, 155th Infantry, a unit for which he had volunteered so he could get close to the action.
“He didn’t feel that he got enough out of [the Sinai deployment],” Stemitz says. “Our biggest threat was boredom. He didn’t
feel he’d done enough.”
Miller wanted something more out of an overseas mission. When the Mississippi unit prepared for its deployment in 2005, Miller volunteered.
“He was bound and determined to try to make a difference,” says Stemitz.
Miller was training Iraqi soldiers and was on a nighttime mission with them when he was shot.
“He was the first one of my friends that had been killed in the war,” says Stemitz, who has since lost other friends from the battalion. “It kind of takes your breath away. This is a guy who has gone through things you’ve gone through and now he’s dead.”
Buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Miller’s service at the graveyard overlooking the nation’s capital city was covered by The Washington Post. At the time, most of the nation’s attention was focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast two days before Miller’s death.
Stemitz says the storm sort of overshadowed his friend’s death, but not around the Flint armory.
“That was a rough couple weeks for a lot of people here,” he says. “He was a good friend. He would go out of his way to help you.”
Last year, Stemitz had his turn in Iraq. Something just didn’t seem right, however.
“I did miss Tom. His experience. His humor,” he says. “The kind of guy he was.”
Several of those guys who had grown up in the battalion with Stemitz were there— the other platoon leaders who had become XOs who had become company commanders. They were together again.
Except …
Stemitz says, “Tom was one of the guys that was noticeably absent.”
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