Every Day Heroes

Via email:

Greyhawk,

Not a bad piece published by the Toronto Star about the Canadian soldier killed along side one of our Guardsman. From what I know from our people, “Stoney” was working on the young Canadian Soldier when he was killed. I first met SFC Stone when I went thru the Army Mountain Warfare School just after resigning my RA commission and joined the Guard. He was one of the finest NCOs I have met and one of the great characters you come across in life. Stoney heard a different drummer and marched to that beat. He lived a very rich life in his 52 years. He looked and acted much younger.

God bless him. The same for that young Canadian troop. The link to the Toronto Star is below.

Sgt. 1st Class John Thomas Stone was happiest when he was moving, a kid who'd listen in awe and big-eyed wonderment to the tales told by his big brother Dana, a legendary photojournalist who carved a life of perilous journey.

Stone, who went by his middle name, was a junior in high school when Dana, on assignment for CBS News, disappeared in Cambodia along with Sean Flynn, the son of actor Errol Flynn.

On April 6, 1970, Dana and Flynn, who was working for Time magazine, rode into the Cambodian countryside on motorbikes and were captured by communist guerrillas. The two were never heard from again.

Dana became the first of the Stone boys to die in a war zone.

A year later, motivated in part by a desire to learn what had happened to his brother, Tom Stone joined the U.S. Army.

Pte. Rob Costall, meanwhile, was a scrappy hockey player, but still wrote poetry in Grade 9. He surprised many when he decided to enlist.

The Canadian military gave him a sense of direction, relatives say, providing him with a lifestyle he quickly embraced.

The 21-year-old Canadian with the year-old child and high-school sweetheart at home had been in Afghanistan for 52 days.

Stone, the 52-year-old American medic who found love much later in life — and who looked after children far from home, though he himself had none — had spent his life in and out of the military, and began his third tour of duty in Afghanistan last July with the Vermont National Guard.

But they did have something in common. Both believed they could make a difference in Afghanistan.

And they died, an American and a Canadian together, in a firefight last week in Helmand province, 110 kilometres from Kandahar city.

It's believed to be the first time such allies have died fighting side by side in more than half a century.

More here.

I never had the pleasure of meeting him but SFC Stone was of a rare breed. I've known (and admired) a few of his type over the years. I suspect he is among those who commit themselves to great causes not for greatness, and regardless of the larger issues, but because of some simple inner drive that says this is my calling, and that is my place.

A great loss; Tom Stone and Rob Costall embodied what Teddy Roosevelt described as "the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

They fell, but didn't fail.