On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress voted to establish the Continental Army, the first national military force of the nascent United States of America. This article, the first part of which was published one day before the 250th anniversary of the event, pays tribute to the countless American patriots who have served their nation in the military, who have risked, and very often lost, their lives in defense of their country. Our way of saying thanks is to recount the brief stories of the first Americans to die in some of the nation’s most important wars. The first part of our article (The First to Die – Part I) covered the first soldiers to die in the War of Independence, the Civil War and World War I; this part, first published on July 4, covers World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
World War II
The first American military casualty of World War II actually died before the U.S. entered the war. Captain Robert Moffat Losey was an aeronautical meteorologist, considered to be perhaps the Army's greatest meteorological expert at the time.

In February 1940, Losey served as the air assistant of the military attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Finland. The Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland was already on, and the harsh winter weather allowed Losey to study the relationship between meteorology and aircraft design.
 
In April, Nazi Germany invaded neighboring Norway. (The German invasion of Norway) Losey was directed to move there, but once he arrived, his first task was to help with the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy. The legation escaped in two separate groups. The group with Losey and the U.S. Ambassador to Norway safely made it to neutral Sweden, but they lost contact with the others. Losey and the ambassador's chauffeur turned back to look for them.
 
While looking for the second group, they reached the strategically important railway intersection of Dombås on April 29, right when the Luftwaffe attacked the place. The two Americans and some Norwegians took refuge in a nearby train tunnel. Losey stayed relatively close to the tunnel's mouth to observe the bombardment until a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart. Several days later, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring sent a message of regret to Losey's superior.

We should also mention Second Lieutenant Edward Vincent Loustalot, the first American soldier to die (and also to kill a German soldier) in Europe in ground combat. You might expect that Loustalot died in Sicily, but you’d be wrong. He was serving in the 1st Ranger Battalion, and was temporarily assigned to the British No. 3 Commando for the disastrous Dieppe Raid. (The Dieppe Raid) The unit’s three boats, each carrying 15 men, were dispersed by German fire early in the landings. They nevertheless made landfall and attacked a greatly superior German force. Loustalot took control of the unit after the death of the British commanding officer, and led the men in scaling a steep cliff. He was wounded three times and eventually cut down while trying to reach a machine gun nest. No. 3 Commando still managed to die down a larger German force, allowing another unit to reach their own objectives with minimal opposition a mile away.

On July 5, 1950, Shadrick’s unit found itself in the way of an overwhelming North Korean tank offensive near Osan. The unit almost completely comprised teenagers with no combat experience and only eight weeks of training. A war photographer asked Shadrick to time the firing of his bazooka (The Bazooka) so that he could photograph the flash. Shadrick complied, then rose from his concealed position to see if he had hit his target. In that moment, he was struck in the chest by two rounds from the tank’s machine gun, dying almost instantly.
 
Slightly earlier, not far from the spot, the likely actual first dead American of the war was also killed. He was a member of a machine gun crew, and a North Korean tank was damaged and set on fire in his vicinity. One of the North Korean crewmen managed to climb out of the burning wreck and shot the man with his submachine gun before he himself was gunned down. The unknown American machine gunner was later mistakenly identified as Kenneth Shadrick, and his real identity remains unknown.  
 
Vietnam War
The first U.S. soldier to die in connection to the Vietnam War was Lieutenant Colonel Albert Peter Dewey. In the fall of 1945, in the aftermath of World War II, Vietnam, which was part of French Indochina at the time, was getting embroiled in conflict. The French, recently liberated from German occupation, wanted to re-establish their colonial rule over the country with British assistance. Opposing them were the Viet Minh, a native nationalist group with communist connections formed by Ho Chi Minh, who fought for Vietnamese independence. Dewey was present as the head of a team from the Office of Strategic Services (the indirect predecessor of the CIA) charged with collecting intelligence and representing American interests. In that status, he co-operated with the Viet Minh in repatriating Allied POWs previously captured by the Japanese.

With tensions running high, Dewey was riding in a jeep to lunch on September 26, when a Viet Minh ambush stopped him. He tried to speak to them in French, but the guerillas mistook him for a French officer and shot him dead, a long time before the U.S. seriously became involved with Vietnam. His body was probably dumped in a river and never found. Dewey’s name is missing from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., because the Department of Defense ruled that his death occurred before the U.S. was officially in the war.
 
A second claim could be made for Technical Sergeant Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon, Jr. On June 8, 1956, Fitzgibbon reprimanded another airman over some incident. After going off duty, the man started to drink heavily at a club at the base. Leaving the club, the drunken man saw Fitzgibbon on the other side of the street as he was playing with children and giving them candy. He walked up to him and shot him with his pistol several times. The man then fled the scene and either jumped or fell to his death from a second-floor balcony while being pursued by the police.

Fitzgibbon’s family was hit hard by his death. His son, Richard Fitzgibbon III, enlisted with the Marines to fight in Vietnam. He died after stepping on a landmine in 1965. Like Dewey, Fitzgibbon was originally missing from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as he died before the official starting date of the war. After much effort and with the aid of a congressman, the Department of Defense eventually changed the official date so Fitzgibbon’s death could be included. 
 
Afghanistan
The first American to die in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was Johnny Micheal Spann. While Spann was a former Marine (a field artillery officer), he was no longer technically in the military – he was a member of the Special Activities Division (today Special Activities Center), the paramilitary force of the CIA, and one of the first Americans behind Taliban lines.
 
After a Taliban mass surrender in November 2001, over 400 non-Afghan Taliban were transported to the 19th century Qala-i-Jangi fortress, which was hastily transformed into a prison, on November 25. The prisoners were not searched while herded in, and several of them managed to smuggle in grenades and other weapons.

The Taliban were held in the open courtyard, where Spann and CIA case officer David Tyson were to hold interviews. Spann picked out John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen who joined the Taliban and was clearly of a different ethnicity than all the others. While he was Spann was talking to Lindh, several of the Taliban drew their concealed weapons and attacked. Spann discharged his Kalashnikov several times before he was pushed on the ground, then drew his pistol and continued firing from under a pile of bodies until he himself was killed by two shots through the head. Tyson managed to grab Lindh’s assault rifle, fought his way to a relatively secure part of the compound where he found himself trapped together with a German television crew. He borrowed the crew’s satellite phone to call first his wife, then the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan. The prison riot was defeated by (pro-American) Northern Alliance forces and American and British Special Forces operatives in six days.
 
The first actively serving U.S. soldier to die in Afghanistan was Sergeant First Class Nathan Ross Chapman. While an Army NCO, Chapman was actually also there as part of a CIA mission. Chapman was a Green Beret, a Ranger, a qualified scuba diver and sniper who loved to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. He was detailed to six-man CIA unit named Team Hotel (two CIA operatives, a CIA contractor and three Special Forces soldiers) as a communications expert who could interface satellite radios with computers, a new discipline at the time.

On January 4, 2002, Team Hotel was in the city of Khost in Southeast Afghanistan. In the morning, the team and an additional CIA officer had a meeting with tribal leaders in an abandoned government building in an attempt to secure the tribes’ cooperation. The meeting got off to a rocky start but the team managed to smooth feathers and depart on a somewhat positive note after promising to help rebuild the city. On the way back to Khost, the team’s four Toyota pickups were ambushed by unknown attackers. Chapman was hit by a round from a Kalashnikov that shattered his pelvis and femoral artery. He returned fire, shooting until the magazine of his rifle was empty. The trucks gunned it and made it back to the CIA safehouse, but Chapman lost consciousness and died five minutes before the evacuation helicopter arrived.
 
Iraq
The first U.S. serviceman to die in Iraq, on March 21, 2003, the first day of the war, was 1st Lieutenant Therrel Shane Childers (2nd Lieutenant at the time of death, promoted posthumously). Childers fell in love with the Marine Corps at the age of five, when he lived in Tehran, the capital of Iran (a few years before the Islamic Revolution), where his Navy Seabee father worked as a security engineer at the U.S. Embassy. As a grown-up, Childers became a dedicated Marine and a “mustang,” the rare breed of serviceman who began his career as enlisted and was commissioned as an officer relatively late in life. He trained his men hard: he would regularly spend his own money on batteries, lumber and other things he wanted for training exercises, and would phone his staff sergeant at 3 a.m. to discuss exercise plans.