Date: 6/12/2007
Rank: Corporal
Branch: U.S. Army
Operation: Operation Iraqi Freedom
CPL Damon LeGrand, a former Mormon missionary with fiery red hair and a passion for the outdoors, had accomplished several goals when his Army unit was dispatched to Iraq last year. The San Diego native had married, started a family and was serving as a military police officer, a launching point for a possible career in law enforcement. Assigned to help train Iraq’s new police force, the specialist was killed June 12 when insurgents ambushed his convoy with anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad. He was 27.
“I always told him, ‘Don’t be a sheep, be a leader.’ And he took that to heart. He did that in the Army. He did that in his life,” LeGrand’s father, Donald, said from his home in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Legrand grew up in San Diego’s Clairemont neighborhood, graduated from Clairemont High School in 1995 and later served a two-year Mormon mission in Utah. He joined the Army in 2005 and was assigned to the 571st Military Police Company, 504th Military Police Battalion, 42nd Military Police Brigade at Ft. Lewis, Wash. While he was stationed in Iraq, LeGrand’s wife, Ashley, gave birth to the couple’s second daughter, Kelsie, now 7 months old. He never met her. The couple’s older daughter, Moira, is 2.
LeGrand died about six weeks before he was to return to Idaho, where he, his family and his parents had moved a few years ago. He planned to go hunting and fishing with his father, to see Kelsie for the first time and to help his wife purchase a new home.
In addition to his wife, daughters and father, LeGrand is survived by his mother, Glenna; a brother, Michael; and two sisters, Emily and Meghan.
“It was a pretty short life,” his father said. “But I know he’s in a better place and he’s probably doing exactly what he was supposed to do. Only now he’s doing it in heaven instead of [on] Earth, trying to help people. He was doing that over there: trying to help people.”