3 Arkansans killed in copter crash in Iraq
Posted on Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Three members of Arkansas National Guard’s 77 th Aviation Brigade died Saturday in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Iraq that killed 12 U. S. soldiers.
The three Arkansans were members of the helicopter crew, according to a Defense Department official.
The Associated Press on Monday reported the identities of two of the soldiers as crew chief Gary Brown of Little Rock and Capt. Michael Taylor of North Little Rock, commander of Company C, 131 st Aviation Regiment. The third soldier’s name is still unknown. As of late Monday, the Pentagon had not released the names of the soldiers who died in the crash northeast of Baghdad.
All Arkansas families have been notified of the deaths.
The 77 th is part of the 36 th Combat Aviation Brigade, a conglomeration of National Guard units from 44 states. The 77 th has two companies attached to the 36 th, accounting for more than 120 of its 2, 400 members. They are stationed at Camp Anaconda, Iraq, and in Kuwait.
The 77 th has been in Iraq since early September. Saturday’s casualties were the brigade’s first deaths.
Capt. Chris Heathscott, spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, issued a news release Monday asking the media to refrain from contacting the soldiers’ families.
“More information will be provided upon receipt of the pending press release from the Department of Defense,” Heathscott wrote. “Date and time of that release is not known at this point.”
Saturday was the third deadliest day since the war began in March 2003. The heaviest tolls came from the helicopter crash and an attack on a provincial government building in the Shiite holy city of Karbala that left five U. S. troops dead.
An Interior Ministry official and the police in Diyala province said Saturday that the helicopter was shot down about 4 p. m. by insurgents who had fired missiles or grenades from at least two locations. It crashed near Tarrafa village, they said, over a rural area near the Diyala River.
Col. David Sutherland, commander of U. S. forces in the strife-ridden Iraqi province of Diyala, said the crash is still under investigation.
An al-Qaida-linked coalition of Sunni Muslim insurgents — the Islamic State in Iraq — claimed Monday that its fighters had shot down the helicopter.
Navy Capt. Frank Pascual, a military spokesman in the United Arab Emirates, told al-Arabiya television that the helicopter was believed to have suffered technical troubles before going down.
In Washington, an unidentified senior U. S. military official said Monday that investigators had found debris near the crash scene that could belong to a shoulder-fired weapon which may have been used to shoot down the helicopter.
Officials Monday were still combing the debris to make a final determination about the cause of the crash.
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