Logan Tinsley honored, remembered at memorial

CHESTER -- On Christmas night in Iraq, as insurgents battled U.S. Army troops in Baghdad, one Iraqi -- likely trying to kill Americans just minutes before -- lay dying from wounds in the dust and dirt. An Army medic called 'Doc T' by his buddies in Delta Company of the 509th Airborne knelt down as the bullets were flying and screamed out: "I can save him!"

An officer yelled no, the medic's mother was told. But the medic insisted because medics save people shot and dying. The 21-year-old Doc T performed field surgery anyway. The Iraqi lived.

The next day at noon Iraq time, 'Doc T,' Spc. Logan Tinsley from Chester, was dead.

When you are the mother of a dead soldier from the 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division like Chester's Lori Fairfax Tinsley is, the men who serve with your son tell you how he lived like a hero, as in saving that Iraqi and so many Americans before him.

"Two of them were saying how they never had a doc like my son," she said.

And they also told her how Logan Tinsley died. He drowned, his mother said.

"They were coming back from a firefight and it was raining so hard the road was like ice and the Humvee flipped into a canal 12 feet deep," Lori Tinsley said Wednesday night. "I just got a call from his commanding officer in Iraq. Last night they held the memorial service for Logan. There was 85 paratroopers weeping like babies."

Lori Tinsley said all this as she watched a video clip the funeral home made of still photos of her son, ranging from his infancy to the last picture taken of him before he died. In the back of the last picture is water with a reflection. She said the reflection is angels.

She was surrounded by her aunt and cousins and brother and other family in her Chester home across the world from where Logan Tinsley died. Logan Tinsley's sixth-grade teacher, Beverly Burgess, sat on a couch and cried like the rest of the room cried.

"Oh those eyes of Logan's," Burgess said. "I will never forget him."

Lori Tinsley spoke of a dream she had about three weeks ago, where the Army was coming to her house about one of her sons. Another Army son, Logan's younger brother Ryan, is based at Fort Bragg and now has a choice to go to war or stay home because his brother is dead. Ryan has not yet decided, she said.

Lori Tinsley's mother had a dream soon afterward, about her Korean War veteran late husband, Lori Tinsley's father, who was reaching out to help a soldier in the sand.

"There is no doubt my father was reaching out to get my son," Lori Tinsley said.

The group watching the video heard Lori Tinsley talk of how she drove to Charlotte to pick up who would have been her daughter-in-law in a few weeks, Sarah Rose Nelson of Alaska. Logan met Sarah while stationed in Alaska before he went to Iraq in October. Nelson had never met any of Logan's family until meeting Lori Tinsley on Wednesday.

Nelson is in Chester for the burial and funeral. Before that, she and Lori Tinsley will go pick out the engagement ring that Logan Tinsley had wanted her to have. The wedding bands were already bought.

The funeral will be Saturday at Chester High School's gymnasium because the crowd will be so huge. The current members of Chester's Army ROTC squad, the unit Logan Tinsley was executive officer for in high school, will usher.

Chester has taken the death of the son of Douglas Tinsley and Lori Tinsley like a rabbit punch to the back of the head.

"Everybody knew that boy was a good boy, liked that boy," said Henry Wessinger, 77, driving Wednesday with an American flag on a pole attached to the window of his pickup truck. "I know his daddy. Good people."

Wessinger knows more than a little bit about good people and what wars do. They kill sons and brothers.

"My brother's name was James Daniel Wessinger, and he died in France in World War II," Henry Wessinger said. "He was 21 years old. My daddy never recovered. He up and had a heart attack soon after, and then he was dead, too."

At City True Value Hardware, where Chester goes to get the nuts and bolts that hold life together, one of the workers put an American flag up Saturday on the sign at the corner. One guy coming in for paint recalled playing Rotary ball as a kid with Lori Tinsley. The guys at the counter, lingering over sales like men do at hardware stores, either knew Tinsley or his family or knew of them.

"I hung around with him some, our groups kind of hung around at the same places," said the store's Michael Crouch, selling paint for a living just a few years after he and Tinsley chased after girls and fun together.

Crouch stayed in Chester and worked. Tinsley left for a life in the Army -- he wanted to get out eventually and move to Austin, Texas, and work in the medical field and play guitar, his mother said. Instead, he got killed.

"Everybody knew him. This is a small town, man. I'm two years older. He was an awesome guy, brave as they come, and he was doing what he wanted. And he got killed for it."

Like so many, people like 77-year-old Wessinger and 23-year-old Crouch in Chester are wondering why this war is still being fought.

Like Lori Tinsley, the strong mother who loves her country and loves her sons even more, but wants "either they send enough men over there to finish the job, or bring all the soldiers home."

Logan Tinsley did come home Wednesday. A military-chartered transport plane landed at Chester's tiny airport. The funeral home hearse met the plane and picked up his body. The hearse drove to his mother's house on Walnut Street. About 10 minutes later, the hearse went to the funeral home.

Lori Tinsley went inside and saw her son.

After her plane landed, Sarah Nelson came to Chester for the first time and went to the funeral home to see the soldier who would have been her husband.

From the Herald

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