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Athol, ID
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Birthday:
August 26
What unit(s) did you serve in with the 2d Cavalry?
Hco 159th AVN Regt, RSS, 2ACR then became AVIM Troop, then again alternated as G troop when Aviation was stripped when 2CR became a Stryker unit.
Where were you stationed?
Ft. Polk and Ft. Lewis
What MOS or job description did you have?
67/15 S Kiowa Helicopter Repairer
What was your rank/title?
I was an E2-E5 while I was there
What years were you assigned to the 2nd Cavalry?
2000-2005
Tell us a little about your cav days.
It was my first duty assignment so I didn’t know jack. Learned so much about Cav history in that unit and made many lifelong friends. Deployed to OIF 1 and 2 with AVIM Troop. Quite an experience.
Tell us a little about you now.
Retired from the Army after 21 years, ended up going to Warrant Officer school and ended up flying Blackhawks then went fixed wing.
Name a few buddies you served with that you would like to find.
I’m connected with all my old buddies on other social media, but was interested in joining up here to see how other folks have carried on in life and their experiences.
Comments
Learned a little about Cav history, did ya? I just love to hear that. I was the 2d Cavalry Association historian for several years. I've got a little nugget for ya. A very small group of friends that started right here on Dragoon Base did a lot of research over a number of years and brought home a WW II 2d Cavalry trooper who was severely wounded and captured in Czechoslovakia just 4-days prior to the end of the war in Europe. Fred Ashley was driven away by his captors on the hood of a captured US jeep and never seen again. His platoons' casualties that day were the last suffered by the 2d Cavalry during WW II. We found him and he was brought home to Emmett, Idaho, after 73 years, where we attended his funeral. The entire town turned out for the funeral procession. It is quite the complicated story of repeated burials and reburials with two sets of remains eventually getting switched. A simplified version, Fred ended up being returned to another family and was buried as the other man, while the airman he was switched with was buried as unknown in Europe. We gathered enough evidence to convince the government to have the Europe gravesite exhumed and the remains flown back to the US for testing. It turned out to be the airman. The US gravesite was exhumed and the remains sent for testing, while the airman was finally laid to rest in his rightful grave. The other set of remains turned out to be Fred.
What is so ironic, is that the Airforce base where both sets were sent for testing wasn't far from where both sets had been buried at different times in Indiana, so they were close to each other while one or the other was in the common grave. Furthermore, Flight Officer Richard Lane was KIA over Austria on his second mission of the war, 2 days after Christmas, 1944. Fred died in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, over 4 months later. Their remains arrive in Nuremberg the same day and are buried side-by-side in a temporary military cemetery. Twice they are exhumed in attempts to identify them. Later they are moved to a cemetery in France where they are buried next to each other again and again exhumed at times for identification attempts. It is during one of these exhumations that the remains are somehow switched. Fred ends up going back to the US as Richard. When the remains in Europe are exhumed to move to another cemetery, they don't match the records and are buried as unknown, and Fred Ashley is classified unrecoverable.