Logan Tinsley remembered

She wouldn't let them in the door.

Lori Fairfax Tinsley was visited by two servicemen at 8 p.m. Tuesday, and she knew what they wanted.

“Don't you come in here and tell me he's dead,” she told them.

She'd had a dream months ago, in October, when her son was to be deployed. A dream that military officers came to her door to tell her one of her sons had died in the war. In her dream, she couldn't make out the name.

On Tuesday, her son Ryan, in training with the 82nd Airborne, was home on leave for the holidays. He'd stepped out to Wal-Mart to get some batteries and a phone card.

When she saw the officers, Lori knew they weren't coming to talk about Ryan. She knew they were there to talk about her firstborn son.

They told her what military protocol requires them to say, through her glass storm door. She could barely make it out.

“The Secretary of ... whatever,” she said, the tears welling up as she tried to repeat it.

The Secretary of Defense regrets to inform her that her son D. Logan Tinsley was killed when a roadside bomb exploded, rolling a Humvee into a ravine at noon Baghdad time Dec. 26.

D. Logan Tinsley served in the 509th Airborne, a medic in his company.

Since she wouldn't let them in to speak to her, she doesn't have all the details. They came back Wednesday night and told her more. She got a more fuller explanation of what happened to him, but she still doesn't know when she might expect to get Logan's body.

Lori spent the day calling others, family and friends, her ex-husband, greeting people who stopped by once they learned. She called Logan's Junior ROTC unit commander, MSG A.J. “Al” Boyd, who went to her home and spent about an hour and half with her Tuesday. He returned to help Wednesday.

She's missing her son, and wanting to let people know they need to pray for all the troops in Iraq, as she did last week when she wrote a letter to the editor of The N&R, published on Friday.

Amidst her grief and tears, she's trying to bear up. But she's also afraid.

Her other son, Logan's brother, Ryan, has been in training at Fort Bragg. One unit of the 82nd Airborne was ordered to go to Iraq on Wednesday.

“Now he's all fired up to get over there and avenge his brother,” Lori said.

Ryan says he is not seeking vengeance. He said he wanted to go over before his brother died, and his reasons have not changed.

“I want to do my part,” he said. “Somebody's got to.”

Lori's emotions are conflicted right now.

The United States needs to get out of Iraq, she says. Or they need to send in more troops and just get the job done.

As she sat with a representative of a local funeral home, she knows that she will be called on to make some decisions.

She and Logan actually made a lot of the plans. He was filling out forms before he was deployed, and he called her as he made his plans, just in case.

It's required for servicemen headed into combat. When his unit went from Fort Richardson in Alaska to Iraq, he had to fill out the paperwork.

“I can't remember all of it,” she said. But she was insistent with John Baker from Barron Funeral Home. Logan wanted his young friends to have some time to come together, play music. Whatever plans are made, she said, the young people need to have their time together, after any ceremony.

Logan was a brilliant musician, she said. He could play guitar and three, four other instruments. She had just shipped over two harmonicas to him for him to play.

The time with the young people will involve music, she said.

Several of Logan's classmates from Chester High were with her Wednesday morning, visiting her and Ryan. They came in and out, all day long.

She also has some pain, knowing that Logan was set to come home in January. He was to come home for more than a week on leave.

He was going to marry a girl he met while stationed in Alaska.

A couple of young ladies from Chester that Logan knew came over to see Lori.

Casey Snelgrove was Logan's first love. She'd known him since the fifth grade. She said he was the glue that bound a whole circle of friends together. She still has a letter from him, from when he enlisted, expressing his love for her, “whether you like it or not,” she said, quoting the letter.

When the word got around, one of Logan's other girlfriends called her.

“He brought us together again,” said Melissa Robinson.

Logan was a genuine person, who wouldn't change himself for you, nor expect you to change for him or anyone, both young ladies said.

When they heard, they went over to Lori's house.

“We brought food,” Casey said. “We're girls. We bring food.”

The two young ladies came in to her crowded, tiny living room Wednesday and burst into tears. Lori gathered them into her arms, sobbing again, but speaking to them..

“He loved you. I want you to know he had your pictures over there.” she said.

“I wish I could take away your pain,” she told them.

Logan had dated a few girls before, Lori said, but none that he ever told her was “the one.” So when he told her in an e-mail he was getting married, she was surprised.

Pleased, but surprised.

“He's the last of his friends to settle down,” she said.

Robinson and Snelgrove spoke fondly of Logan, but also broke down a few times during a phone interview.

“It comes in waves,” Robinson said.

Tears came in waves for Lori as well on Wednesday.

At one moment she is talking confidently about Logan, then she would lose her train of thought.

She also broke down a bit when Robert Lucas came in. They are family and Logan had worked for him in the exterminating business.

“He had no fear,” Robert Lucas said. “He'd dive under a house, no fear.”

Friends started arriving with food. The funeral home sent over a lectern for people to sign the visitation book, and put a black and white floral arrangement on a tree in front of her house, one already bedecked with a flag and a yellow ribbon, since his deployment.

She had spoken earlier to U.S. Rep. John Spratt.

“He's in tears,” Lori said.

Spratt knew Logan personally, she said. He served as Spratt's escort to a JROTC function more than once.

She wanted to make sure that Ryan, if he is deployed before Logan's funeral, would be allowed to come back. Spratt assured her that would be done, she said.

Reached at his York home Wednesday night, Spratt said he wasn't crying, but his throat was certainly “clenching up.”

“He was a sharp, impressive young man,” Spratt said.

The congressman said he talked to duty officers at Fort Jackson about arrangements, but knows it is too soon to get all the answers.

Lori also talked to Spratt about Ryan.

“She wants him to know what his options are,” he said. I told her that was better handled after the funeral.”

He said he helped Logan get a citizenship question cleared up to join the Army. Logan was born in Canada, Lori said.

He said he didn't feel guilt about helping him.

It's clearly something he wanted to do,” Spratt said. “He came to us.”

“I do have great sadness,” Spratt said.

Ryan spent the night at his mother's house, but got up midmorning and went to Rock Hill to be with their dad.

Douglas Vance Tinsley's new wife said Thursday morning he was not talking to anyone about Logan.

Baker, from the funeral home, said Logan's death will be more than just a funeral for family and friends. It will impact Chester County.

Baker wasn't sure, but said he thought Logan was the first casualty of the war from Chester County.

“The county is going to have to deal with this,” he said.

D. Logan Tinsley is the first casualty of war since the Vietnam War, Boyd said. The casualty unit out of Fort Jackson in Columbia should be helping her and handling the arrangements, he said.

Baker said the Department of Defense handles and pays for all the arrangements, and the funeral home would be working for them. Those are taken care of, she said.

Boyd said he talked to Logan before he was deployed, and that was the last time he spoke to him.

Logan's aunt, Sherry Fairfax Malphrus of Hartsville said she spoke to Tinsley's mother, Lori who told her “Two servicemen came to her door in Chester to inform her that her son, Logan, had been killed in Iraq.”

“As you can imagine, Lori is devastated.,” Malphrus said. “She will need much love and support in the coming days to get through this horrific loss. Logan was a citizen of Chester before he joined the Army. He graduated from Chester High School and was one of the most decorated ROTC officers ever to serve at Chester High. Please keep him in your prayers and let your readers know of the loss of one of our beloved sons.”

He leaves behind a fiancee, Sarah Nelson of Anchorage, Alaska, his brother, a sister and two step-brothers, as well as Lori and his father.

Logan had basically seen nothing but combat service since he was deployed, Lori said. He rarely had anytime to himself.

He was a medic in his unit, she said.

“He was the doctor for 40 guys in his company,” she said. “They teach him to do anything a doctor can do.”

He maintained a web page that listed much of what he did, and had pictures.

One showed her son doing an emergency chest surgery to reinflate the punctured lung of a wounded soldier.

The last picture Lori got showed him cutting up, in full combat gear, but smiling and pointing at a hole in the ground.

In her letter to the paper, she said he had killed a man, and he was thinking a lot about it. He had killed another.

“It was really bothering him,” she said.

“He kept seeing the man's face,” Lori said Wednesday, sobbing.

“His e-mail to me broke my heart as he revealed to me had no choice. He says he dreams of his face and death every night but he knows he is a U.S. soldier and that is his mission,” she wrote in her letter to the paper.

She knows some of the young people who are deployed, but says they should all be remembered.

“There ought to be a place to remember people in the war zone,” she said.

Every day of his life, Lori said, she prayed that God would take her son into his “white shining light.”

She is religious, but doesn't go to church in Chester. Her sons were raised to be Christians, but weren't believers.

She wanted the comfort of a church.

When the Rev. Chris Snelgrove, father of Logan's former girlfriend, came to her house Wednesday, she went over, shook his hand, then clasped it. Then she dropped her head into his chest and started sobbing.

She doesn't know when she will get him back, but she asked Snelgrove to speak and help coordinate whatever service is held.

“You knew him,” she said.

She wants it held at the Chester High School gym, if that can be arranged. So people can know.

Snelgrove said he would help her, and continued to hold her for a few moments.

“My baby's dead and I don't know what to do,” she said, the tears coming again, in waves.

From the News & Reporter

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Logan (Douglas L.) Tinsley killed in rollover accident