Condolences for the loss of your buddies, brother.
3 October
- Thread starter Gypsy
- Start date
Condolences for the loss of your buddies, brother.
R.I.P. and condolences to all that have lost friends and brothers.
F.M.
F.M.
RIP to those fallen 3 October Warriors.......
Prayers out to every warrior who's sacrificed for this great Nation......
Prayers out to every warrior who's sacrificed for this great Nation......
Rest in Peace
RLTW
RLTW
Rest In Peace.
Prayers and thank you to all.
Prayers and thank you to all.
Ran the Mogadishu mile today. They went the distance, so can we....
RIP
RIP
15 years later...
One woman's story, 15 years later....
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=306401
Rierson forges ahead since husband killed in Somalia
By Henry Cuningham
Military editor
Fifteen years ago this week, Trish Rierson was trying to help the wives of Delta Force members who had just learned that their husbands had been killed or were missing in a street battle in Somalia.
She was a “fortunate wife.” Her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Matt Rierson, was alive after three days of fighting. He was the leader of a six-man Delta team, and she had moved into “team leader’s wife mode” — visiting widows, coordinating food, seeing who needed what. All the while, she was juggling her responsibilities as a working mother of two small boys.
Amid her hurry, she had a moment of quiet.
“I was sitting waiting for my pizza when that calm came over me, and I got that feeling that I didn’t need to rush anymore, that everything could wait,” she said.
She later realized that was probably the moment her husband was killed by a Somali mortar round in what seemed to be the relative safety of the base camp.
“I’m still a mom, and I’m still a speech pathologist, but now I’m a widow,” she realized.
The future had seemed so promising for the young family. Both were established in their professions. Their son Kaleb was 28 months old, and Jacob was 4.
“And I have to figure out how I’m going to walk this road the same way Matt and I were going to walk this road, but without him,” she said.
Anniversary
Friday was the 15th anniversary of the start of the battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, a conflict made famous by the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” Six Fort Bragg soldiers died in some of the fiercest fighting between the Vietnam War and fighting in Afghanistan. Two of them posthumously received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.
Afterward, politicians grilled generals over what went wrong and bickered for years over blame. On a national level, the battle influenced U.S. foreign policy for the rest of the 1990s, making America more reluctant to get involved in messy situations in foreign countries, even for the highest humanitarian motives.
On a personal level, Trish and her boys have forged ahead, but the loss of a husband and father still stings 15 years later.
“It takes a while,” Trish said. “You are still you, but you are never who you were prior to October 6 of 1993.”
She is 47 years old and still working. The boys, who have only vague or no memories of their father, are serious, sturdy and athletic. Like their father, both are about 6 feet tall. Their mother says she sees some of their father’s sarcasm come out in them. Jacob, a rugby player, is 19 and a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“I feel like, on some level, even though my dad has been dead for 15 years, that he has done a huge role in helping to raise me just out of me not wanting to disrespect his legacy,” Jacob said.
Kaleb, a championship wrestler, is 17 and a junior at Union Pines High School in Cameron.
The Rierson boys say they carry with them a sense of family honor.
“I’d go somewhere and something wasn’t feeling right, what would my dad do?” Kaleb said. “I would get out of the situation.”
Over the years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trish has reached out to the growing number of other women who suddenly find themselves in the same situation.
“It’s a sisterhood that nobody wants to be a member of, but just with Afghanistan and Iraq, you find yourself in that situation,” she said. “It’s just a blessing to be able to talk to people who have walked in your shoes.”
On Friday, she and Kaleb participated in the Special Operations Warrior Foundation Charity Golf Tournament at Anderson Creek Golf Club in southern Harnett County. The nonprofit organization provides scholarships to children of special operations soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who died in combat or training. The foundation has 120 students enrolled in colleges and universities nationwide.
“These donations and contributions from businesses, from the smallest individual to a large corporation, are going to a Jacob and Kaleb Rierson, to kids whose dads were willing to put their life on the line for all of their freedoms and privileges that we have here,” she said.
Beginnings
Trish and Matt started dating in the 10th grade in their hometown of Nevada, Iowa. He was a linebacker and co-captain of the varsity football team. She was a varsity cheerleader.
Their paths diverged, but they stayed in touch and got married in 1984. Trish finished college and graduate school. Matt enlisted in the Army and joined the Rangers, the Army’s premier light infantry unit. Just as the challenges of the Rangers were wearing off and Matt was thinking about getting out of the Army and returning to college, Delta Force recruiters waved new possibilities in front of him.
Only a small percentage of soldiers make it through Delta Force’s demanding and secret selection process. Matt was one of them. They packed up and moved from Fort Lewis, Wash., to Fort Bragg.
“He was one of those very independent people,” Trish said. “Once he set a goal, he achieved it. He worked hard to do it. If somebody was better than he was, he took that as a challenge to work harder and be better. He was just a unique individual.”
Their sons were born at Fort Bragg’s Womack Army Medical Center.
“He was a great dad,” she said. “Special ops soldiers that I know that are family men seem to be two people. He was a loving, nurturing father — carried the diaper bag, changed the diapers, did everything a wonderful dad would do. When he had to go to work, he put on his warrior game face and he went to work.”
They didn’t talk much about what he did in one of the U.S. military’s most secretive units. Wives have to be careful what they say, even among each other.
“It worked for him, and it worked for me,” she said. “There is a comfort level in not knowing how risky things really are. You can go about your day-to-day business and not worry about them. ... I was confident that when he went to work, things would go well and he would come home and the family would be fine.”
In April 1993, the Riersons lost a friend, Sgt. 1st Class Robin V. Rapp, a Special Forces soldier. He died from injuries he received in a sport parachuting accident near Raeford.
Trish asked herself, “OK, God, what are we supposed to get from this experience?”
As it turned out, the death prompted the Riersons to talk through all the what-ifs should one of them die.
“Really, the gift was how would you look at your life if your mate was gone and what would you do?” she said.
They talked about everything from where they wanted to be buried to how they wanted to raise their sons.
Humor was the way they dealt with a serious subject. She told him, “Go ahead and remarry, and I will haunt you from heaven if she is crappy to my kids.”
In the fall of 1993, Delta Force deployed to Somalia to help get control over the warlords who were hampering humanitarian relief efforts. Special operations forces became embroiled in urban warfare in the dusty, chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
On Oct. 3, 1993, during a raid on a warlord’s compound, two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. As soldiers fought to rescue the crews, a running street battle erupted across Mogadishu. Eighteen soldiers died.
Matt Rierson “led the successful assault on the target building that was the whole reason for our Oct. 3 operation,” retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin wrote in his book “Never Surrender.” He came out unhurt. Then, he died as he was standing and talking near a hangar at the base camp. The same blast injured Boykin, the Delta commander; Gary Harrell, a future Delta commander; and Rob Marsh, the unit doctor and son of the secretary of the Army.
Widow’s future
According to his wishes, Matt was buried on Fort Bragg.
Trish, meanwhile, couldn’t escape the questions: “How am I going to make ends meet? How do I teach two boys to throw a football? How do I teach them how to shoot a gun?”
Those were the things that Matt was good at.
Trish received calls from investors who knew she had a large sum of insurance money and wanted to take her to lunch.
She told them, “No, I don’t know you from Adam. I don’t know your credentials. How dare you call me just because you read his name in the paper?”
The military moves on. Somebody was put in Matt’s position. His wife became the team leader’s wife.
“You just don’t really fit in anymore,” Trish said. “You are still loved and surrounded, but you don’t have the same focus anymore. You start to look at your life almost like a broken mirror, and you are trying to put the pieces back together.”
However, the community around Fort Bragg was home. At the time of the funeral, her refrigerator overflowed with food from friends. Co-workers offered to let her relatives stay in their homes. Neighbors mowed her lawn without being asked.
Trish bucked her own family’s desire for her to move back to their hometown of 6,500 in the Midwest.
“I have a strong religious faith, so I know that Matt’s in a better place and that someday I will see him in heaven,” she said. “I have that to fall back on, my faith, when things get difficult.”
Over the years, Matt’s teammates stopped by to take the boys to the park. They used the services available at Fort Bragg and Womack.
“We really did have extended family support,” she said. “If it wasn’t our military family, it was my school family. ‘Mothers’ who nag them if they do something wrong. ‘Uncles’ who cheer them on.”
The result — that her family has not just survived, but thrived — has filled Trish’s heart.
“Fifteen years later, I’m proud of my children and their accomplishments,” she said. “They are wonderful young men. I think their dad would be proud of me. I’m just shocked that it’s gone by so fast.”
One woman's story, 15 years later....
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=306401
Rierson forges ahead since husband killed in Somalia
By Henry Cuningham
Military editor
Fifteen years ago this week, Trish Rierson was trying to help the wives of Delta Force members who had just learned that their husbands had been killed or were missing in a street battle in Somalia.
She was a “fortunate wife.” Her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Matt Rierson, was alive after three days of fighting. He was the leader of a six-man Delta team, and she had moved into “team leader’s wife mode” — visiting widows, coordinating food, seeing who needed what. All the while, she was juggling her responsibilities as a working mother of two small boys.
Amid her hurry, she had a moment of quiet.
“I was sitting waiting for my pizza when that calm came over me, and I got that feeling that I didn’t need to rush anymore, that everything could wait,” she said.
She later realized that was probably the moment her husband was killed by a Somali mortar round in what seemed to be the relative safety of the base camp.
“I’m still a mom, and I’m still a speech pathologist, but now I’m a widow,” she realized.
The future had seemed so promising for the young family. Both were established in their professions. Their son Kaleb was 28 months old, and Jacob was 4.
“And I have to figure out how I’m going to walk this road the same way Matt and I were going to walk this road, but without him,” she said.
Anniversary
Friday was the 15th anniversary of the start of the battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, a conflict made famous by the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” Six Fort Bragg soldiers died in some of the fiercest fighting between the Vietnam War and fighting in Afghanistan. Two of them posthumously received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.
Afterward, politicians grilled generals over what went wrong and bickered for years over blame. On a national level, the battle influenced U.S. foreign policy for the rest of the 1990s, making America more reluctant to get involved in messy situations in foreign countries, even for the highest humanitarian motives.
On a personal level, Trish and her boys have forged ahead, but the loss of a husband and father still stings 15 years later.
“It takes a while,” Trish said. “You are still you, but you are never who you were prior to October 6 of 1993.”
She is 47 years old and still working. The boys, who have only vague or no memories of their father, are serious, sturdy and athletic. Like their father, both are about 6 feet tall. Their mother says she sees some of their father’s sarcasm come out in them. Jacob, a rugby player, is 19 and a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“I feel like, on some level, even though my dad has been dead for 15 years, that he has done a huge role in helping to raise me just out of me not wanting to disrespect his legacy,” Jacob said.
Kaleb, a championship wrestler, is 17 and a junior at Union Pines High School in Cameron.
The Rierson boys say they carry with them a sense of family honor.
“I’d go somewhere and something wasn’t feeling right, what would my dad do?” Kaleb said. “I would get out of the situation.”
Over the years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trish has reached out to the growing number of other women who suddenly find themselves in the same situation.
“It’s a sisterhood that nobody wants to be a member of, but just with Afghanistan and Iraq, you find yourself in that situation,” she said. “It’s just a blessing to be able to talk to people who have walked in your shoes.”
On Friday, she and Kaleb participated in the Special Operations Warrior Foundation Charity Golf Tournament at Anderson Creek Golf Club in southern Harnett County. The nonprofit organization provides scholarships to children of special operations soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who died in combat or training. The foundation has 120 students enrolled in colleges and universities nationwide.
“These donations and contributions from businesses, from the smallest individual to a large corporation, are going to a Jacob and Kaleb Rierson, to kids whose dads were willing to put their life on the line for all of their freedoms and privileges that we have here,” she said.
Beginnings
Trish and Matt started dating in the 10th grade in their hometown of Nevada, Iowa. He was a linebacker and co-captain of the varsity football team. She was a varsity cheerleader.
Their paths diverged, but they stayed in touch and got married in 1984. Trish finished college and graduate school. Matt enlisted in the Army and joined the Rangers, the Army’s premier light infantry unit. Just as the challenges of the Rangers were wearing off and Matt was thinking about getting out of the Army and returning to college, Delta Force recruiters waved new possibilities in front of him.
Only a small percentage of soldiers make it through Delta Force’s demanding and secret selection process. Matt was one of them. They packed up and moved from Fort Lewis, Wash., to Fort Bragg.
“He was one of those very independent people,” Trish said. “Once he set a goal, he achieved it. He worked hard to do it. If somebody was better than he was, he took that as a challenge to work harder and be better. He was just a unique individual.”
Their sons were born at Fort Bragg’s Womack Army Medical Center.
“He was a great dad,” she said. “Special ops soldiers that I know that are family men seem to be two people. He was a loving, nurturing father — carried the diaper bag, changed the diapers, did everything a wonderful dad would do. When he had to go to work, he put on his warrior game face and he went to work.”
They didn’t talk much about what he did in one of the U.S. military’s most secretive units. Wives have to be careful what they say, even among each other.
“It worked for him, and it worked for me,” she said. “There is a comfort level in not knowing how risky things really are. You can go about your day-to-day business and not worry about them. ... I was confident that when he went to work, things would go well and he would come home and the family would be fine.”
In April 1993, the Riersons lost a friend, Sgt. 1st Class Robin V. Rapp, a Special Forces soldier. He died from injuries he received in a sport parachuting accident near Raeford.
Trish asked herself, “OK, God, what are we supposed to get from this experience?”
As it turned out, the death prompted the Riersons to talk through all the what-ifs should one of them die.
“Really, the gift was how would you look at your life if your mate was gone and what would you do?” she said.
They talked about everything from where they wanted to be buried to how they wanted to raise their sons.
Humor was the way they dealt with a serious subject. She told him, “Go ahead and remarry, and I will haunt you from heaven if she is crappy to my kids.”
In the fall of 1993, Delta Force deployed to Somalia to help get control over the warlords who were hampering humanitarian relief efforts. Special operations forces became embroiled in urban warfare in the dusty, chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
On Oct. 3, 1993, during a raid on a warlord’s compound, two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. As soldiers fought to rescue the crews, a running street battle erupted across Mogadishu. Eighteen soldiers died.
Matt Rierson “led the successful assault on the target building that was the whole reason for our Oct. 3 operation,” retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin wrote in his book “Never Surrender.” He came out unhurt. Then, he died as he was standing and talking near a hangar at the base camp. The same blast injured Boykin, the Delta commander; Gary Harrell, a future Delta commander; and Rob Marsh, the unit doctor and son of the secretary of the Army.
Widow’s future
According to his wishes, Matt was buried on Fort Bragg.
Trish, meanwhile, couldn’t escape the questions: “How am I going to make ends meet? How do I teach two boys to throw a football? How do I teach them how to shoot a gun?”
Those were the things that Matt was good at.
Trish received calls from investors who knew she had a large sum of insurance money and wanted to take her to lunch.
She told them, “No, I don’t know you from Adam. I don’t know your credentials. How dare you call me just because you read his name in the paper?”
The military moves on. Somebody was put in Matt’s position. His wife became the team leader’s wife.
“You just don’t really fit in anymore,” Trish said. “You are still loved and surrounded, but you don’t have the same focus anymore. You start to look at your life almost like a broken mirror, and you are trying to put the pieces back together.”
However, the community around Fort Bragg was home. At the time of the funeral, her refrigerator overflowed with food from friends. Co-workers offered to let her relatives stay in their homes. Neighbors mowed her lawn without being asked.
Trish bucked her own family’s desire for her to move back to their hometown of 6,500 in the Midwest.
“I have a strong religious faith, so I know that Matt’s in a better place and that someday I will see him in heaven,” she said. “I have that to fall back on, my faith, when things get difficult.”
Over the years, Matt’s teammates stopped by to take the boys to the park. They used the services available at Fort Bragg and Womack.
“We really did have extended family support,” she said. “If it wasn’t our military family, it was my school family. ‘Mothers’ who nag them if they do something wrong. ‘Uncles’ who cheer them on.”
The result — that her family has not just survived, but thrived — has filled Trish’s heart.
“Fifteen years later, I’m proud of my children and their accomplishments,” she said. “They are wonderful young men. I think their dad would be proud of me. I’m just shocked that it’s gone by so fast.”
Matt Rierson's son - Kaleb. Died in a car accident two days ago.
Fucking Christ. Condolences.
F.M.
Horrible. RIP.
Red Flag 1
Verified Military
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2010
- Messages
- 7,588
Such sad, sad news. Prayers out; Rest In God's Own Peace.
found this, thought it was appropriate here in this thread.
Kinda of dusty in here, don't you think?
F.M.
F.M.
Matt Rierson's son - Kaleb. Died in a car accident two days ago.
That is freaking horrible.
I literally got tears in my eyes. RIP, and yet more thoughts and prayers to the family.
May they never be forgotten.
When the roll was called that morning,
We listened for their names;
We paused in solemn silence,
For each it was the same.
None answered to the roll call,
Each one had passed away;
We felt the pain and the anguish,
On that sad and mournful day.
Each of us who knew them,
Knew it was not their last fight;
For God will take them home,
With him, they'll make their last flight.
Only those who fought with them,
On their final day;
Know what heroes they really were,
Yes heroes, we all will say.
For each of them was more concerned,
With the welfare of others;
This selfless love they possessed,
Makes us a band of brothers.
There was no hesitation,
With bullets round them flying;
They came to help their buddies,
For they knew others were dying.
Yes these men were heroes,
What each Warrior wants to be;
But these were special ones,
For they were Night Stalkers, you see.
So when their story is told,
Everyone will then admit;
It's more than just a motto;
"Night Stalkers Don't Quit!"
Gen. Jerry Boykin
In honor of fallen Night Stalkers
We listened for their names;
We paused in solemn silence,
For each it was the same.
None answered to the roll call,
Each one had passed away;
We felt the pain and the anguish,
On that sad and mournful day.
Each of us who knew them,
Knew it was not their last fight;
For God will take them home,
With him, they'll make their last flight.
Only those who fought with them,
On their final day;
Know what heroes they really were,
Yes heroes, we all will say.
For each of them was more concerned,
With the welfare of others;
This selfless love they possessed,
Makes us a band of brothers.
There was no hesitation,
With bullets round them flying;
They came to help their buddies,
For they knew others were dying.
Yes these men were heroes,
What each Warrior wants to be;
But these were special ones,
For they were Night Stalkers, you see.
So when their story is told,
Everyone will then admit;
It's more than just a motto;
"Night Stalkers Don't Quit!"
Gen. Jerry Boykin
In honor of fallen Night Stalkers
21 years... still miss you Gary.
