GALENA — With the waxing crescent moon as a backdrop, the American flag flies at half-staff at Galena firehouse on Wednesday, Sept. 11 — the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
The Town of Galena held its annual memorial service on Wednesday night in one of the firehouse bays. Among the honorees were three Kent County High School graduates who served during the war on terrorism.
• Sgt. Jarrett Bennett Thompson ’93, a specialist with the Army Reserve’s 946th Transportation Company, succumbed on Sept. 7, 2003 to injuries he suffered eight days earlier in Iraq when the tractor-trailer he was driving in a supply convoy was struck head-on by an Iraqi truck outside of Tikrit.
Jarrett was 27, leaving behind a wife and their two young sons.
• Bryan Nicholas Spry ’03, a paratrooper with the elite 82nd Airborne Division, was killed in an accident near Baghdad on Feb. 14, 2004 — eight months after graduating from KCHS.
He had been in Baghdad for only 33 days when he died, drowning after the Humvee he was driving rolled into a water-filled ravine when a bridge partially collapsed.
Nick was 19.
• Almost a year into his tour with the Army, Travis Manning ’99 was gravely injured during a roadside bombing in Baghdad, where he was serving with the 16th Military Police Brigade (Airborne) out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Travis was injured two days back in country after a two-week furlough.
During a nighttime patrol on Aug. 31, 2004, then 23-year-old Sgt. George Travis Manning and two other soldiers were trying to move a disabled supply truck to the side of the road when an Iraqi insurgent fired mortar from an abandoned building, striking the truck’s engine block and fuel tank.
A fiery explosion literally burned the pants off of Travis, leaving him with second- and third-degree burns over 40% of his body — his face, both arms from the wrists to the elbows, and both legs from the thigh to the boot tops.
Travis threw himself to the blacktop and rolled on the ground to put out the fire, while his companions likewise patted out the fire.
The soldiers then secured the area and, despite their injuries, drove more than 30 minutes to a troop clinic in Baghdad. From there Travis was airlifted to a hospital in Germany and then ultimately flown home to the United States.
While at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Travis underwent several skin grafting surgeries and was put through grueling physical therapy sessions 90 minutes a day, seven days a week for several months.
Medically retired from the military in 2006 due to a service-connected disability, Travis is now a sergeant with the Kent County Sheriff’s Office.
Travis, accompanied by his mother Lisa Solloway and his daughter Aja Manning, attended Wednesday’s ceremony.
Jarrett’s mother Judy Thompson and Nick’s parents Irving and Nedra Spry also were in attendance.
“I think it is important that we never stop paying tribute to the ones that gave their lives and may have been seriously injured because of what happened on 9/11, 2001,” keynote speaker Warren Walters, who was a firefighter at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on that fateful day, told the gathering in Galena.
By doing so, he said, “we can make sure that the younger generations will at least have some type of understanding of what actually happened on that day. And why Mom or Dad, or our aunts, uncles, brothers or sisters are no longer with us.”