They also serve who pass in peace

This is a thread that I started back in July, when an entry on our Today In Wyoming's History Blog entitled:  Today In Wyoming's History: July 10: 1933 blog, for that date, noted an item on the  Society of the Military Horse • View topic - Long Cavalry Maneuvers.  

This particular entry concerned Col Roche S. Mentzer, Commanding Officer of the 115th Cavalry, who  became ill at Fox Park, in the Snowy Range, and died.  That year, annual training had consisted of a protracted mounted march which took the mustered unit from Cheyenne to northern Colorado, and then back into the Snowy Range. Mentzer was a well known Cheyenne lawyer in civilian life and a long serving legislator.  Descriptions of his death are unclear as to what occurred, given that they were written with the limited medical knowledge of the time, but a person can piece together that he probably had a heart attack in the field. I don't know his age, but based on his long service in the Legislature he was probably in his 50s at the time.  Photographs of him show a vigorous looking man, so it was undoubtedly a surprise to all, but the strain associated with a mounted march of that distance would have been considerable.

To my surprise, after I made that entry, I received a telephone call from a newspaper reporter that the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, the newspaper for Cheyenne.  The reporter was looking into this story and the was hoping to find the rock cairn that was built in honor of Col. Mentzer by his troops, later that year.  The cairn was in Fox Park, Albany County.  I suspect it's still there, but of course I don't know for sure.  I hope it is.  I haven't seen the article if its run yet, so I don't know if the reporter was able to track it down.

At any rate, like a lot of posts here, this one has been in a draft form for a long time, but I recalled it when today's Casper Journal ran an article on B-24 that went down at the Casper air field during World War Two.  A pretty horrific event, most of the crew was killed.  The article noted that 90 planes crashed flying out of Casper during World War Two, and states that only two of the locations are presently known.  I know where a third generally is, and quite a few people otherwise know of that one as well, so I suspect the knowledge on a few of these is a little better known that might be suspected.  In the case of the one I'm aware of, all of the crewmen were killed.

I note these here as its really easy to forget about servicemen who are killed in training exercises.  It's common, at least during certain times of the year, to remember the men who died in warfare, but its easy to forget about the men and women who joined the service and die in training. The routine treatment, in fact, is to only recall combat deaths.  But their death is just as much a part of the defense of our country as the deaths of those who are killed by the enemy in warfare.

I think of this during those times of the year as I can't help but recall one of the young men who went to basic training with me.  He was killed the following year at the Nebraska Army National Guard's AT when a Gamma Goat he was riding in rolled.  The Gamma Goat was a horrible vehicle that the Army had purchased which, like so many things, seemed ahead of its time when it was purchased.  It never worked out in the Army, and like a lot of that stuff in the days prior to the mid 1980s, it was passed out of Army service and into use by reserve units.  It was a vehicle that had been purchased for its agility but it was also very unstable, and accidents with it were common.  

My friend who was killed in the accident was a nice young man who had aspired to an Army career.  Unlike a lot of us, who hit basic training and wondered what we had gotten ourselves into, he hoped to go into the service full time.  He was one of the collection of us who all went to Catholic Mass on Sundays at Ft. Sill.  

While I was at Ft. Sill, I can really them taking a dead private out of a latrine across from our training battery.  I didn't know him, but I'd heard he fell ill and simply died. A lieutenant also died in the field while I was there, overcome by heat prostration.  Officers seemed much older to us at the time, but in reality he would have been just a few years older than we were.

All of these men, and the thousands more like them who die in training served just as much as those who died in combat.  Combat is remembered, of course, because it's such an extraordinary event.  But the price of having armed forces, which we must have, is in part to accept the accidental loss of men training for combat.  They should be remembered as well.