Capt.Humayun Khan

"Capt. Humayun Khan had been the very soul of kindness and decency. He had made her feel safe. He had always said leaders lead from the front. He understood that you have to know what it means to be at the bottom before you can rightly be at the top. Army Pfc. Vanessa Brenes-Ramirez’s first encounter with that philosophy in action had been during a field training exercise in September of 2003, several months before her unit, the 201st Forward Support Battalion, deployed to Iraq. A sergeant had ordered her to dig a foxhole after she had been on guard duty all night. She was already exhausted, but she had set to digging when Khan happened past.

“What are you doing?” Khan asked by her recollection “You just did guard duty. Go sit down.” “That’s an order.”
The 19-year-old private found herself sitting and watching an officer work the shovel. The sergeant returned.
“What are you doing, sir?” the sergeant asked Khan. “I’m helping,” Khan replied.

And helping was what Khan continued to do as he settled with the unit at a base in Iraq that was dubbed Warhorse. He was the 27-year-old force protection officer, in charge of base security, and he had a way of making everybody feel more secure. He had a keen strategic and tactical sense, seeming to know exactly what to do when. He was always attentive when his soldiers were on guard duty, making sure Brenes-Ramirez and the others had coffee when they wanted coffee and water when they needed water.

“I felt like he was my protector,” Brenes-Ramirez would say. He was all in.
“There was no in between for him,” Brenes-Ramirez would recall. She did not consider Khan’s religion.
“I didn’t even know he was a Muslim,” she would recall. “He was American. That’s what he was. All the colors we saw were green.”

Then came the morning of June 8, 2004. Khan had worked the overnight detail but wanted to see some security improvements a sergeant had been making to the front gate. By one estimate, eight other Americans were in the vicinity of the gate when an orange vehicle approached. Khan’s first concern was that none of his soldiers get hurt, and he called for everybody to get down. But Khan was also likely concerned about the two Iraqis who were in the front seat. He was no doubt mindful of earlier incidents in which an approaching vehicle had failed to stop when ordered and the guards had opened fire with unfortunate results.
He approached the taxi and held up his hand for it to stop. The Iraqis responded by detonating a 200-pound bomb.
One of those who came running was Sgt. Laci Walker, then 21. She had never heard Khan speak ill of anybody and knew him always to look for the best in people.

“All the soldiers loved him,” she would later say. “He was just so good, and everybody looked up to him.”
“I liked to be on guard duty when he was in charge,” Walker would recall. “I knew it would be safer. I knew he would be the one looking out for me.”

She was off duty when she heard the explosion, and she got on a handheld radio. She learned that a vehicle-borne device had exploded at the gate. She was initially told there had been no American casualties, but when she arrived a fellow sergeant told her there had been one.

“He asked, ‘How are you with body parts?’” Walker would recall. “I said, ‘No problem. Who is it?’ And he told me and I puked my brains out.”
“I’ve never seen so many people cry,” she would say. “Grown people. I mean hitting the floor crying.”

~ Michael Daly, Daily Beast