Category: We Remember

KETV reports that 27-year-old Army Sergeant Kyle LaFlore was murdered while he was home on leave in Omaha, Nebraska from South Korea. His father says that he had also been deployed twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan.

Medics found the 27-year-old Army sergeant outside of Reign Lounge with a gunshot wound just before 2 Saturday morning and took him to an area hospital with CPR in progress.

Police said LeFlore was pronounced dead at Nebraska Medicine from his injuries.

LeFlore’s father, Kay LeFlore, told KETV NewsWatch 7 that he believes his son was walking to or from his car in the parking lot when somebody tried to rob him of his jewelry.

By all accounts, he was a good father and a good soldier;

Kay [Kyle’s father] says Kyle was eager to finally spend some time with his 5-year-old son, Kyle Junior, or KJ.

“He lived for his son, and when he got the chance to be here in time for Christmas to open packages and celebrate Christmas with his son, that was my best time I’ve ever had with him,” Kay said.

LeFlore was also an accomplished wrestler, competing and winning in the Eighth Army Combatives tournament over the summer in Seoul.

According to family, LeFlore was a dedicated father and husband, and was taking classes in hopes of one day working for the CIA or FBI.

“If you knew him, you loved him,” sister Kandy LeFlore said.

Bobo sends the sad news that astronaut John Young has passed at the age of 87. From Space.com;

John Young, NASA’s longest-serving astronaut, who walked on the moon and flew on the first Gemini and space shuttle missions, has died.

The first person to fly six times into space — seven, if you count his launch off of the moon in 1972 — and the only astronaut to command four different types of spacecraft, Young died on Friday (Jan. 5) following complications from pneumonia.. He was 87.

Young was a Navy officer, commissioned through Navy ROTC at Georgia Tech, and he began his career during the Korean War as a fire control officer on USS Laws. After the war, he became a helicopter pilot and then he became a fighter pilot flying Grumman F-9 Cougars from USS Coral Sea and Vought F-8 Crusaders from USS Forrestal before entering the United States Naval Test Pilot School which led him to the space program. He retired from the Navy in 1976 as a Captain.

70-year old San Bernardino County sheriff’s Deputy Lawrence Falce was off duty when he was driving on New Year Eve. He braked to avoid hitting two dogs that bolted out in the street. Alonzo Leron Smith, lifelong gang member, rear-ended Falce’s car. When the two drivers exited their respective cars, without warning, Smith popped Falce who lost consciousness and never recovered. He was removed from life support two days later.

Smith tried to leave the scene, but another driver rammed his vehicle. According to the Associated Press, Smith has spent most of his adult life behind bars.

Falce was the oldest member of the 3,700-member department, which does not have a mandatory retirement age but requires deputies to pass training exercises several times a year to ensure they still can do the job, spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said.

“He spent all of those years basically patrolling the community he lived in,” she said.

Falce is survived by his long-time girlfriend as well as a sister, the sheriff said.

Fox News says that Falce was also an Army veteran.

The Fayetteville Observer reports that retired Command Sergeant Major Joseph Michael Murray has passed at the age of 73.

The 73-year-old veteran was a 26-year-old sergeant first class when he volunteered for the famed Son Tay Raid into what was then North Vietnam on Nov. 21, 1970.

Command Sgt. Maj. Murray was one of 56 service members who participated in the raid, meant to rescue 70 American prisoners of war being held at a prison camp near Hanoi.

While the raiders seized the compound after a fierce firefight, the prisoners were nowhere to be found, having been moved months before the mission due to heavy flooding in the area.

While not a success in and of itself, the raid was a tactical victory and set the groundwork for increased cooperation between special operations forces and the creation of Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the nation’s most elite units from Fort Bragg.

Command Sgt. Maj. Murray earned a Silver Star for his role in the raid, during which he was shot in the leg.

Much more about CSM Murray at the link above.

Thanks to Cranky1 for the tip.

ABC7 reports that Sergeant First Class Mihail Golin was killed during operations in Afghanistan.

Golin was an 18B Special Forces Weapons Sergeant assigned to 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He was born in Riga, Latvia, on August 20, 1983, and moved to the United States in October 2004 and enlisted in the U.S. Army on January 5, 2005.

After completing basic training and advanced individual training, Golin was assigned as an 11B Infantryman with the 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. Following his assignment in Alaska, Golin volunteered for Special Forces training and graduated from the Army’s Special Forces Qualification Course in November 2014. He was then assigned to 10th SFG (A) as a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant.

SFC Golin was on his fourth deployment, his third to Afghanistan, when he was killed. Four other soldiers with him were injured and two of those have already returned to duty.

We get the sad news today that Captain Jerry Yellin who flew the last fighter mission against Japan just hours before the Emperor announced their surrender has passed at the age of 93 on December 21st. From Wiki;

Captain Yellin’s final combat mission was executed five days after the U.S. Army Air Force Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar had dropped a second American nuclear weapon on Japan, namely on the city of Nagasaki.

Captain Yellin flew along with another pilot, First Lieutenant Phil Schlamberg, who was piloting a second P-51 as Captain Yellin’s wingman. The two men were executing their mission against the airfield at or about the time that Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, wherein Japan would accept allied terms for unconditional surrender. Yellin and Schlamberg did not hear the military’s attempted radio broadcast alerting them that the war had ended.

Immediately after carrying out their mission against the airfield, Yellin and Schlamberg banked steeply into a cloud cover. Yellin emerged from the cloud cover, but Schlamberg had disappeared, apparently shot down, and became the final known combat death of World War II. Schlamberg’s body was never recovered. Short on fuel, Yellin began his four-hour flight back to his home base on Iwo Jima, where he learned that the war had ended.

Captain Yellin earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal while he flew 19 escort missions for bombers over Japan. His wife of 65 years, Helene, passed in 2015. They leave behind four children and six grandchildren.

A book about his last mission, The Last Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Final Combat Mission of World War II was written by Don Brown and published earlier this year.

Stars & Stripes reports the sad news that Ramon Regalado, a Philippine Scout and survivor of the Bataan Death March has passed at the tender of 100 years.

Regalado was born in 1917 in the Philippines. He was a machine gun operator with the Philippine Scouts under U.S. Army Forces when troops were forced to surrender in 1942 to the Japanese after a grueling three-month battle.

The prisoners were forced to march some 65 miles (105 kilometer) to a camp. Many died during the Bataan Death March, killed by Japanese soldiers or simply unable to make the trek. The majority of the troops were Filipino.

Regalado survived and slipped away with two others — all of them sick with malaria. They encountered a farmer who cared for them, but only Regalado lived.

Afterward, he joined a guerrilla resistance movement against the Japanese and later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as a civilian for the U.S. military.

According to East Bay Times, Regalado joined the US military after the war and continued serving in the Navy and at the VA, including service in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The elder Regalado — an eclectic man, a voracious reader who followed politics closely — took part in the first Bataan Legacy Historical Society event held at Cal State East Bay in Hayward in April 2012, and became a prominent spokesman for Filipino WWII veterans.

Cecilia Gaerlan, executive director of the Berkeley-based Bataan Legacy Historical Society, said Regalado was a humble man, and an eloquent one. “He embodied the values of the greatest generation — duty to country, honor and love for freedom,” she said.