'I Need To Go And Do This'
Devoted Soldier Is Laid to Rest
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 30, 2004; Page B03
The day before Sgt. Maj. Michael B. Stack left for Iraq, he talked to his brother, Cecil, about death.
The men, both career soldiers, knew risk well. Cecil had been stationed in Panama, Haiti and Grenada. Michael was a Green Beret, a member of the Army's elite Special Forces, and had served in the Persian Gulf War during his 28 years in the military.
But Cecil Stack, now a retired Army sergeant major living in Alexandria, saw Iraq "turning nasty" and knew that his brother, at 48, was within two years of retirement and had six children back home at Fort Campbell, Ky.
"I said, 'Mike, be careful, because this war takes sergeants major,' " Cecil Stack recalled. "It's a mobile job. You don't stay locked behind doors; you're not at a desk."
Michael Stack responded: "I need to go and do this. I need to take my unit over and bring my unit home."
On Easter Sunday, the war took Mike Stack. He was killed during an ambush by small arms fire while manning a .50-caliber machine gun on a Humvee patrol near Baghdad. In the last e-mail Cecil Stack received from his brother -- within two weeks of his death -- his brother said that things were going pretty well and that he would explain it all over a good glass of red wine when he got home.
Yesterday, under a blue sky striated by the white contrails of jets, Stack was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. More than 100 people followed a horse-drawn caisson under the warm sun to his grave site. Stack was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, the military's third-highest honor for heroism in combat. He was the 58th soldier killed in Iraq to be buried at Arlington.
Stack was not the stereotypical Green Beret, friends and family said. He was calm and funny, not a Type A personality, or macho. Former Special Forces colleague Mike Lasko said Stack would smile and laugh in the most difficult times. He never swore, choosing instead: "What the flip are you doing?"
The others were "hell-raisers and barroom brawlers, but Mike was different," Lasko said. "He was always there to extend that hand with love."
Stack had an artistic bent; some of his early drawings are still framed in his parents' home in South Carolina. He loved to cook -- he would deep-fry turkeys for Thanksgiving and whip up jalapeño corn bread. He taught his brother how to make egg rolls. In his free time, Stack could be found fishing in rivers, ponds and the Atlantic surf. He was a devout Christian who taught Bible classes at home and organized a prayer group in Iraq.
He cherished his wife, Suzanne, six children and three grandchildren, Cecil Stack said, and "did everything to make sure that they were provided for, not just in death, but when he was alive."
On Mother's Day, or when he was on leave, he would go with his parents to Lynches River Freewill Baptist Church, outside Lake City, S.C. Former pastor Gerald Owens said Stack distributed crucifixes to each of his men the night before he was shot. He prayed with them and told them to put their faith in God. At the church, he would arrive in his crisp military uniform, and to the "teenagers and kids, he was a hero," Owens said.
One of those kids, Owens's son Andy, is now the news editor at the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. He said that whenever he saw Stack in church, he knew "he was a leader, there was no doubt about that. You just knew you were in the presence of somebody who had it together."
Andy Owens said that he sees the near-daily stories about soldiers dying in Iraq and that they mean something different to him now.
"It's changed the way I approach my job," he said. "It's not just news -- these are people."
Sergeant Major is the highest enlisted rank in the Army, a rank held by 1% of the enlisted force at any given time. Generally speaking "gunner" is no longer in the official job description.
But Sar' Majors get to write their own job descriptions. |
