Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Perspective: War's chosen high school

Sam Huff, Kenneth Ross, Chad Kenyon, Bud Cote, and Alan McPeek.

Sam Huff, class of '04 at Mountain View High School, was the first to be killed. The 18-year-old died on April 17, 2005, less than a year after her high school prom, when the humvee she was driving hit a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Months later, Kenneth Ross, 24, class of '99, was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

The next year, an insurgent's bomb in Iraq's Anbar province blew up Chad Kenyon, 20, class of '04.

Another bomb in Anbar killed Budd Cote, 21, class of '03.

In February, another member of the class of '04, Alan McPeek, 20, died in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, when an insurgent's shell killed him on the last day of his 14-month deployment.

"Everybody I knew who was over there is no longer with us," said Shaun Moreland, 21, McPeek's best friend, who also graduated from Mountain View High in 2004.

Read the rest at the SF Chronicle