Staff Sgt. David Staats of Colorado Springs was military to the core, enlisting 10 years ago before his high school graduation.
Pfc. Seth Stanton, who grew up in Old Colorado City, loved bragging about his Jeep with its gargantuan 36-inch wheels. He routinely exchanged instant messages from Iraq with his uncle, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War.
Even during his days at Lake County Middle School in Leadville, Nick Palmer dreamed of joining the Marines and whipped himself into shape by carrying a 40-pound backpack on 10-mile training runs.
All three died over the weekend in Iraq. A roadside bomb exploded under the Humvee carrying Staats, 30, and Stanton, 19, as they led a patrol Saturday in Taji, north of Baghdad. Staats was killed in the explosion. Stanton died the following day.
Palmer, 19, was killed Saturday by a sniper in Fallujah.
Their deaths occurred just 12 days after the Dec. 4 death of Navy hospitalman Christopher “Doc” Anderson of Longmont. The latest spike in deaths of Colorado soldiers puts December 2006 on par with the grim months of March 2003 and November 2005, which each claimed the lives of four Colorado service members.
Tim Drago, a Gulf War veteran and founder of the Colorado Veterans Monument, tracks the number of Coloradans killed in this war. His heart sank as he read the newspaper this week.
“That’s the first time I’ve noticed two guys from Colorado whose deaths occurred, side by side, at one time,” said Drago, who counts 45 Colorado casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002.
Staats joined the military after graduating from high school in 1995. After an 18-month tour in Iraq, he left the service for a year but couldn’t stand it and signed up again. He was back in Iraq only six weeks when he died.
“The military was his life,” said his sister, Bethany Staats.
Staats’ 8-year-old son from his first marriage visited him in October in Texas, where he was stationed at Fort Hood. The boy idolized Staats, a fun-loving guy who played video games with his son and took him to SeaWorld, Bethany Staats said.
Staats lived with his wife and stepdaughter, who were from Colorado Springs.
Stanton was deployed to Iraq only eight weeks before he died.
Even as a tot, Stanton looked up to his uncle, Eric DeMello, who served in the 1991 Gulf War.
“He was 3 or 4 then, and he was impressed with the military uniform,” recalled grandfather Joe DeMello of Woodland Park.
Stanton was skipped to 12th grade at Coronado High School after years of home schooling.
He loved four-wheeling and wrote proudly on his MySpace blog about the day three military rangers and a military police officer stopped him “to tell me how illegal my Jeep is.”
His last blog entry, written in July, includes his wry description of an average soldier who seemed Stanton’s mirror image: a “short haired, tight-muscled kid … half man, half boy. Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer, but old enough to die for his country.”
Nick Palmer had wanted to join the Marines since he was in junior high. A football player in high school, he took up running to prepare for the military.
Three weeks before his death, Palmer told his father he felt like a target working a machine gun on his Humvee. He was killed by a sniper in Fallujah on Saturday.
Anderson, a fourth-generation Navy man, was killed by mortar fire in Anbar province. At age 24, he was already a seasoned baseball umpire, certified at age 14 and one of the few umpires whose grandfather escorted him to tournaments.
Anderson’s death inspired massive outpouring in Longmont, where several hundred people packed his church, remembering him as an energetic, driven young man who never did anything halfway.
Staff researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
