1-26 Infantry Memorial
The following note and image are from Jaison Koonankeil, Gamma Omega (UCONN), 2001 who is currently serving in Iraq with the 1st Battalion - 26 Infantry. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.
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This has been a very difficult and dangerous tour for our unit. We have lost 16 soldiers and our only at the half way point of our tour. This number obviosly doesn’t reflect the number of wounded we have sustained.
I put created a poster to honor them and ask that you pass it on to your family, friends and coworkers, and ask them to keep us in their prayers. Most of these guys were 19, 20, 21 before they made the ultimate sacrifice. SSG Sizemore was a veteran of OIF II and survived Fallujah but died honorably in Baghadad in 2006. SPC Ross McGinnis was a kid who loved being a gunner in the lead Humvee and had his picture posted on the front Page of Stars and Stripes…3 days later when an insurgent threw a grenade from atop a 3 story building on the narrow streets of Baghdad (which are more alleyways then what we call streets), it landed inside the humvee. A 1 in a million lucky throw. Ross could have jumped out of the Humvee, since being a gunner it would have been easy for him to save himself in time. But he realized that there were 4 other people that would have lost their lives, so he jumped on the grenade saving his friends, brothers really. He made this decision in all a matter of 4 seconds. He has been put in for the Medal of Honor. That is just 2 of the 16 stories. There are countless more stories of our guys trying to recover from wounds sustained out here.
