Two Air Force Academy graduates were among nine Americans killed in an attack at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
Defense officials said Friday that 34-year-old Maj. David Brodeur of Auburn, Mass., and 37-year-old Lt. Col. Frank Bryant Jr. of Knoxville, Tenn., were fatally shot in the attack Wednesday.
It was previously reported that Maj. Philip Ambard, a foreign languages professor, was also killed in the shootings by an Afghan military pilot. Ambard was on a year-long deployment to Afghanistan.
Officials say Bryant graduated from the academy in 1995 and Brodeur graduated in 1999. They were serving on a NATO team training the Afghan air force. Bryant was assigned to Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., and Brodeur was assigned to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.
Brodeur was married to a Colorado Springs native. The Alaska-based fighter pilot and father of two married his wife, Susan, in the academy’s chapel in 2000, a year after he graduated, said his father- in-law, Frank Williams of Colorado Springs.
A Massachusetts native, Brodeur deployed in February to train Afghan air force pilots.
Bryant, a high school wrestling champion in Tennessee, had served in Iraq, where he piloted an F-16 on more than a dozen bombing missions in Baghdad and helped support a surprise raid aimed at Saddam Hussein and his sons.
The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Bryant left behind a wife and a son.
The Gazette and Denver Post wire reports
