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Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Local hearts ache for 4 killed in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Karen Dingler sat on the edge of her son’s bed and hugged his dress green uniform to her chest. She buried her nose in it, breathing in hard.
“I’m so glad it smells like him,” she said Tuesday.
She had kept the uniform tucked away in his closet at their Paulding County home since he left for Iraq. She pulled it out this week and gently placed it on his bed. She figured the military would need it to bury her son, Spc. Joshua Dingler.
Thomas Strickland (left) of Douglas County and Joshua Dingler of Hiram and were among the victims.A military chaplain and a captain had visited her home Monday. They told her Joshua and two other soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment died in an accident early that day. A military press release said their vehicle overturned into a canal during a night mission.
Joshua Dingler, 19, of Hiram was fresh out of East Paulding High School. He died on the second anniversary of his enlistment. Two of his friends died beside him: Sgt. Thomas J. Strickland, 27, of Fairplay in Douglas County and Spc. Paul Saylor, 21, of Bremen, near the Alabama state line.
A fourth Georgia soldier was reported killed in a separate incident. Spc. Michael Stokely, 23, of Loganville was killed Monday night when he stepped on an explosive device, WAGA-TV reported. Stokely is the son of Coweta County Solicitor Robert Stokely and had been in Iraq for two months, according to WSB-TV. He was a 2001 graduate of Loganville High School, the station said. No other information was available Tuesday night.
All four were part of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team, which has lost 16 soldiers since arriving in Iraq in early June.
Strickland was a project manager at Son Electrical Contractors in Winston. He had been in the Guard for six years. He graduated from Alexander High School, where he was president of the drafting club, and later earned a bachelor’s degree in English from University of West Georgia.
Greg Stanford, a minister at Dorsett Shoals Baptist Church, remembered Strickland as a well-rounded, likable man who loved to meet people and enjoyed mission work � including trips to Bosnia and the Philippines.
“He just loved to work with people who were just a little less fortunate than most of us are,” Stanford said. “I could have very easily seen Thomas in the ministry somewhere.”
Strickland’s parents, Patti and Ronnie, didn’t want to give interviews Tuesday. They released a statement saying their son saw his deployment to Iraq as an opportunity to fight terrorism. They asked people to pray for the troops in Iraq and their families.
The Saylors also didn’t want to speak publicly Tuesday. They released a statement through a family friend, Louanne Hutcheson, thanking people for “the hundreds of expressions of sympathy” they had received.
Sgt. Joseph Brown, a member of Saylor’s platoon, said he was like their official photographer. “He must have a thousand pictures of us on his laptop,” said Brown, who is at home in Paulding County recovering from an injury he received in Iraq. “He would create these little slide shows and put music to them.”
Saylor also had a little velveteen bag with a collection of items that he kept secret, Brown said. “Before we’d go out [on a mission] he made us all rub that little bag, for luck.”
Karen Dingler, who was just starting as the unit’s family support group leader, was on the phone seeking advice on how to help families who lose loved ones in Iraq when the chaplain and casualty notification officer showed up.
“It turned out to be mine,” she said. “I just opened the door and swallowed hard.”
Dingler knew why the soldiers were there. She remembers repeating to herself, “I can do this,” as she let them into her home. They asked her where her husband, Tommy, was. He was at the gas station, so they waited to tell her why they were there, making small talk until he returned.
“I could feel the pain in those poor guys’ faces,” she said. “I was trying to be nice. I knew what they wanted.”
The military told her she could keep her son’s uniform. They would bury him in a new one.
Karen and her husband talked proudly about their son Tuesday as they sat in his tidy bedroom.
Several eagle figurines sat atop his chest of drawers. A poster of Osama bin Laden with a red target on his chest hung on his wall.
Joshua’s 16-year-old brother, Samuel, lay on his bed, sobbing.
On the door to Joshua’s closet is a picture of him and his high school sweetheart, Katelyn Wood, taken when they attended a military ball. She wore a black gown; he was in his ROTC dress uniform. It was their first date.
Before leaving for Iraq, he had asked her father for his blessing to marry her. He planned to go to Kennesaw State University, study history and then teach it in high school.
Katelyn held a “just in case” letter he had written her on notebook paper. She couldn’t force herself to open it. But she peeked at the closing sentence: “Yours to the very end.”
— Photo editor Celine Bufkin and news researcher Sharon Gaus contributed to this report. Jeremy Redmon reported from Hiram, Anna Varela from Atlanta.
Three soldiers from 48th die in accident
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Three soldiers from the 48th Brigade Combat Team died in Iraq Monday when the vehicle in which they were riding drove into a canal, military officials said Tuesday.
The three, all from a Douglasville-based detachment of the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment, were part of a convoy conducting a night mission at the time of the accident, which occurred at 3:45 a.m. Monday.
Sgt. Thomas Strickland
The soldiers were identified as Sgt. Thomas Strickland, 27, of Fairplay, and Spc. Joshua Dingler, 19, of Hiram and Spc. Paul Saylor of Bremen.
Their deaths bring to 15 the number of 48th Brigade soldiers who have died since the unit arrived in Iraq in early June, 11 in combat incidents and four in vehicle accidents. Another 48th soldier died in a vehicle accident in Kuwait in May.
Strickland is the first Douglas County resident to die in combat since Vietnam, said county spokesman Wes Tallon.
“We had a huge send-off for our Army National Guard unit in January,” Tallon said. “The whole community is very tight-knit and you know this is something we hoped would never happen.”
Sgt. Joe Brown of Dallas, who is at home recuperating from wounds suffered in Iraq, said Dingler was a driver in his platoon.
“He was like a son to me. In fact, he called me ‘dad,’” Brown said.
Of the three soldiers, Brown said: “They were great soldiers and some of the best men that I’ve had the privilege of knowing. I am a better person because of having known them.”
Dingler’s mother was about to take over as president of the unit’s family readiness group, said Aurora English, the group’s former president.
“His family is like gold to us,” English said of Dingler. “He wanted to be a soldier since he was young. He was in ROTC. That’s all he ever wanted to do.”
English’s husband, Sgt. Ken English, is with the unit in Iraq. She talked to him by telephone this morning.
“He wanted to make sure we didn’t forget they were heroes,” she said.
Families wrote the names of their soldiers on yellow ribbons and hung them in the National Guard armory in Douglasville. The soldiers are supposed to take the ribbons down when they return from Iraq.
Aurora English and another spouse talked Tuesday about placing a black stripe on the ribbons for the three deceased soldiers.
“We’re all kind of in shock,” she said.
Aurora English and a several 108th rear detachment soldiers hovered around a computer screen in the armory Tuesday morning, peering at digital photos of their friends in Iraq.
First Lt. Jeff Morgan stayed home from Iraq because of a family emergency. As he glanced at the photos, he talked about wanting to join his buddies, particularly now that they have lost three of their own.
“I want to be back with my men. I trained with these guys for years,” said Morgan, the rear detachment commander for the 108th’s headquarters company. “I have a big hole in my heart because I can’t be with them.”
Staff writers Saeed Ahmed and Anna Varela and photo editor Celine Bufkin contributed to this article.
Douglas soldier killed in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A Douglas County soldier has been reported killed in Iraq.
Corporal Thomas Strickland, 27, of Fairplay, was a member of the Army’s 48th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), according to Wes Tallon, county communications director.
Strickland’s family was notified Monday, Tallon said.
Tallon said it was the first combat death in Douglas County since Vietnam.
“We had a huge send-off for our Army National Guard unit in January. They went to training, and they were actually in Iraq starting in June. The whole community is very tight-knit and you know this is something we hoped would never happen,” Tallon said.
The Douglasville unit, with members from across Georgia, is Detachment I, HHC 1/108th Armor. It has 81 members. The unit is made up of scouts and mortar teams that support tanks and other armor.
