Three Carson soldiers killed in Afghanistan

Three Fort Carson soldiers were killed Saturday in a bombing in Afghanistan, the Defense Department said Thursday.

The three were assigned to Fort Carson’s 4th Brigade Combat Team when their unit was attacked in Afghanistan’s Zhari district.

Killed were Staff Sgt. John A. Reiners, 24, of Lake Hamilton, Fla.; Sgt. Jeremiah T. Wittman, 26, of Billings, Mont.; and Spc. Bobby J. Pagan, 23, of Austin, Texas. All three were assigned to the brigade’s 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment.

Reiners’ widow, Casey Reiners of Colorado Springs, said she was told the three were manning a security checkpoint when a suicide bomber rode up on a motorcycle and detonated a bomb. Several other soldiers were injured in the blast, she said. Her account couldn’t be verified.

Zhari district is in the Taliban stronghold of Khandahar province in southern Afghanistan, where a U.S. offensive has been going for months.

Reiners joined the Army in 2004 and had served two tours in Iraq before joining the brigade in Afghanistan in November. He had been decorated with the Army Commendation Medal and emerged from the Army’s elite Ranger School in 2007 with a coveted Ranger tab.

“He always said boot camp wasn’t enough of a challenge,” Casey Reiners said.

The pair met in the first grade at their Hamilton City, Fla., elementary school and attended the same high school. They didn’t start dating until early 2006, when Reiners was home for a two-week leave from his first deployment. She fell in love with the man he had become.

“He was a strong man with a soft heart,” she said.

As a leader, he was dedicated to his youngest soldiers and took their welfare seriously. At home, he showered his wife and 2-year-old son, Lex, with attention, she said.

The couple had big plans for Reiners’ homecoming later this year. On their itinerary: A stop at the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Johnstown, Colo., where they celebrated their three-year anniversary in October, and another trip to their favorite vacation spot, St. Augustine, Fla. They also wanted a bigger family.

“We were hoping for a girl. We were going to name her Audrey,” Casey Reiners said.

His funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday at Northridge Baptist Church in Haines City, Fla.

Wittman, a mortarman, was a six-year veteran who had served in Iraq before heading to Afghanistan in May.

At home in Billings, he showed his parents a photograph of himself and four of his closest friends in the Army. With Wittman’s death Saturday, only one of those soldiers remains alive, said his mother, Cynthia Church. He told her never to worry, joking that he was a “super soldier,” she said.

“He told me, ‘If something happens and I get killed, remember that I died doing something I believed in,’” she said.
He loved racing dirt bikes, hunting, action movies and grilling outside. His favorite television show was the Neil Patrick Harris comedy, “How I Met Your Mother.”

“He was a good man and a hard worker. He loved his family and always tried his hardest,” said his widow, Karyn Wittman of Colorado Springs. She and their 3-year-old daughter, Miah, have been staying with her mother in Chesnee, S.C., since Wittman left for his latest deployment.

He had a second daughter, 7-year-old Arieanna Ray, who lived with a relative in Cody, Wyo.
A memorial service is being scheduled in South Carolina.

Pagan, an infantryman, had been in the Army just over a year and was on his first war deployment, Army records show.

He said in a Jan. 16 post on his MySpace page that he was to return to Texas in about 5 weeks.

“I am my own hero, and one day I will be your hero too. You probably look up to me behind closed doors, and soon you’ll be able to brag about being a fan,” Pagan wrote on his page.

Pagan followed in his older brother Robert Pagan’s footsteps in joining the Army, KXAN, the NBC affiliate in Austin, reported. The son of a single mother, Pagan was engaged to a fellow solider who is also deployed to Afghanistan, KXAN reported.

“I’ve realized that my younger brother has really stepped up and become the glue of this family, the heart of this family,” Robert Pagan told the news station.

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Carlyn Ray Mitchell of The Gazette contributed to this story.