Three Kansans among 30 U.S. troops killed

Army Reserve Spec. Spencer Duncan was a 2008 Olathe South graduate who at 21 left his Kansas family, his best buddies and his girlfriend because he wanted to serve his country.

He wrote how much he loved his job as a door gunner on a Chinook helicopter. But he also told his friends that in the quiet among the stark landscape of Afghanistan he missed the Kansas sunsets, lying in a truck bed listening to the radio and cuddling with his sweetie.

Army Spec. Alexander Bennett, 23, had earned a reputation for his pranks on Marines and soldiers, drawing eye rolls from older officers. After a 2009 deployment in Iraq, he moved from the Tacoma, Wash., area to Overland Park to be a flight mechanic in the Army Reserve's Chinook unit at the New Century AirCenter.

Piloting was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bryan Nichols' dream, something the 31-year-old Kansas City man wanted from the first day he saw a Chinook hoist itself gracefully into the sky. He studied and became one of his unit's best, a rising star in its stable of skilled pilots.

The men were among the 30 Americans and seven Afghans who died Saturday morning when their Chinook was shot down west of Kabul.

The military released names Sunday, and families in the heartland and across the nation felt the pain of war thousands of miles from the battlefield.

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Her smartphone is still counting the days until he was supposed to return: "Two hundred and twenty-five days, 10 hours, 8 minutes and four seconds," she said Sunday.

Andrea Miller, 19, can't make herself turn it off. That was when she and Duncan were going to reconnect. She struggled to talk about the young man she adored.

Friends gathered at the home of Brittany Walsh, 19, whose father, Michael, has served 33 years in the Army, nearly all with the Company B 7/158th Aviation Regiment.

Stories about Duncan rose faster than the tears sometimes. A teenage rebel, he loved to go "mudding" in a rural area, spinning wheelies, tearing up grass.

The friends, now mostly students at Kansas State in Manhattan, are holding each other up through their sadness. They've visited Duncan's parents, who didn't want to talk publicly about their son so soon.

Duncan has two younger brothers — 15-year-old Calder and 18-year-old Tanner, who is in Marine boot camp.

The friends said that on Facebook Duncan wrote them how much worse the war was becoming.

"The war in Afghanistan," said Aubrey Thomasson, 20, "has sure become real to us now."

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Kirk Kuykendall, 47, eased himself into a chair inside the hangar of the 7/158th in Olathe Sunday. His right ankle is broken after a Chinook crash on June 25.

No one died in that one. But its memory is still vivid.

Bennett was the crew chief for that flight. One of the pilots was Nichols.

"Nobody should have walked away from that one, but we all made it out," he said. "It was an act of God."

Kuykendall and his wife, Anya, have often taken in some of the younger reservists who arrive at the unit. Bennett was at their home for the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas last year. He was like a brother to their daughter, Emily.

"He is — I mean, was — a fun, goofy guy," Emily said in a phone interview as her parents fought back tears. "He'd sit and just talk with me a lot on the back porch. ... This is surreal. For the first time in my dad's deployments, this really feels like war."

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A lot of the stories about Saturday's attack have focused on the Navy SEALs who died, but those men weren't alone on the Chinook.

"We want people to know there were others on that mission, too," says Sgt. Andrea Norton, a unit administrator for Delta Company. For a few years, Nichols was her counterpart administrator for Bravo Company.

"Bryan hated the desk," she said with a little laugh. "He gave it his best shot, but we all knew he hated it."

He had three loves, his friends agreed: flying, riding his motorcycle and talking about his family. His wife, Mary, lives in Kansas City, but military officers said she declined to talk.

Nichols has a 10-year-old son. His friends cry knowing that his family is hurting.

"From the first day I met him, he set a picture of his wife on his desk... he probably had one of her in his helmet, too," Norton said.

Nichols grew up in western Kansas and worked in another Army reservist unit in Independence, "but his heart was in the flying," she says.

He transferred and began lobbing for flight school. Officers in the 7/158th knew he would make a good pilot.

They were right.

There's one memory that Kuykendall can't shake: the crash they endured in June.

He remembers how the engines were screaming and everybody knew they were going to crash. They were carrying 28 infantry troops —"just boys, they were so young," says Kuykendall. The helicopter landed hard 9,500 feet up a remote mountaintop in Afghanistan with tall timber all around and unknown enemy beyond that.

It happened so fast that Kuykendall said he didn't have time to think he might die.

"But I can still see Bryan, so professional, helping all the injured. He and the other pilot, Buddy Lee, popped the doors off and helped all the injured. Bryan was calm and professional, remembering to zero-ize all the sensitive, secret stuff. Those two guys stayed with us all night, not leaving until everybody else was evacuated. And then they stayed with us all day, without any sleep, until they knew we'd be all right.

"I'll never forget that."

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This story was originally published August 8, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Three Kansans among 30 U.S. troops killed."