Remembering CPT Kyle Van De Giesen ~ NH Hero

Remembering CPT Kyle Van De Giesen, KIA 10/26/09, by a collision between a UH-1 and an AH-1 helicopter at FOB Dwyer, Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom, Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 169, Marien Aircraft Group 393rd Marine Aircraft Wing. 1 Marine Expeditionary Force.

Sharing the following from his wife Megan:

Megan Van De Giesen was counting on her husband to be home from his seven-month deployment in Afghanistan for the birth of their second child. Marine Captain Kyle Van De Giesen had flown his last mission and couldn’t wait to be home, either. Soon he would be with Megan, nearly nine months pregnant, and their daughter, Avery, almost 18 months old. When last he’d seen them, Megan had just learned she was expecting and Avery was taking her first steps. Upon his return, the family planned to move to Yuma, Ariz., where he had been chosen for the prestigious post of teaching weapons and tactics at the Marine Corps Air Station. It was, his mom notes with pride, the Marine equivalent of “Top Gun.’’

On a Thursday night in October 2009, Megan and Kyle were able to Skype. “He asked me to lift up my shirt so he could see my belly,’’ says Megan. “He could also see Avery running around, building with blocks. She said, ‘Hi Daddy!’ ’’

Three days later, Megan was awakened at midnight to six Marines knocking at the door of the couple’s apartment near Camp Pendleton, Calif. – the same doorway where she had kissed her husband goodbye when he left nearly nine months earlier. Captain Van De Giesen, 29, a highly decorated helicopter pilot, was dead, killed in a crash in Helmand province. The family would later learn that he had been asked at the last minute to fill in for another pilot on a night mission.

Megan Van De Giesen, who grew up in Walpole, flew back east for the funeral and didn’t return to the apartment where the couple had spent happy months with other Marine families. “I never wanted to go back to that home where I heard the news,’’ she says. Other Marine wives packed up her belongings and shipped them to her.

Four days after Kyle Van De Giesen was buried in the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, his son, Colin Joseph, was born.

“Kyle said Afghanistan was a different beast, it was rough over there and communication was harder,’’ recalls Megan as she keeps an eye on Colin, now an active toddler and a miniature of his dad, down to the cowlicks on each side of his head. She and the children live in Franklin, not far from Kyle’s father, Calvin. On a recent day, they are at her mother-in-law’s home in North Attleboro, where Kyle grew up with two brothers and a sister.

Both Calvin and RuthAnn Van De Giesen, have found solace in the grandchildren and, along with Kyle’s siblings, see them often. It is, says his mother, the one unexpected blessing.

“We have beautiful children to raise and take care of, and for that we are grateful,’’ says RuthAnn, who keeps Avery and Colin every Thursday night and Friday, Colin sleeping in his father’s old bedroom. “We have babies to raise. We have to stay happy.’’ Megan and the children also spend time on the Cape with her parents, Paul and Pamela Francis.

And the entire family finds meaning in the Captain Kyle Rolf Van De Giesen Memorial Award Fund, which supports students who uphold the Marine Corps values of honor, courage, and commitment.

After his family, the thing Kyle Van De Giesen loved most was the Marine Corps. As a boy, he had been fascinated by helicopters and later was thrilled to be flying for the Marines. At St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., he enrolled in an officers training program and was commissioned as a second lieutenant two weeks after he graduated in 2002. He felt it was his calling.

He excelled in flight school and got his first pick: to fly Cobra helicopters on the West Coast. To prepare for deployment, he would fly day and night, in all kinds of weather. His favorite route was up the coast over the water, where, he told Megan, he could spot sharks. The military life, with its structure and discipline, suited him. He liked precision; his DVDs were in alphabetical order, his closet pristine.

A senior in college on Sept. 11, 2001, he called his mother, distraught, as he watched the terrorist attacks. “Why can’t anyone do something to stop this?’’ he asked her. He was already headed for a military career, but the events of 9/11 gave him more motivation. “It only made him want to work harder,’’ says Megan.

Megan Francis met Kyle Van De Giesen at a game of ultimate Frisbee the summer he graduated from college. It was an instant take, the handsome young man with the emerald eyes and the blue-eyed brunette who stood a foot shorter. When he trained in Florida and California, she accompanied him.

One evening in October 2006, as they sat on the beach near Camp Pendleton, he proposed. Ten hours later, he left for Iraq. They married when he returned the following May. She was 26, Kyle 27.

Five months later, just as Megan learned she was pregnant, he deployed again to Iraq, arriving home soon after Avery was born. He was delighted with fatherhood, prancing around the squadron room with Avery to show her off. As he was about to leave for Afghanistan, the couple learned that they were expecting another baby.

To Kyle, war was a job, not a political issue. He felt he was protecting his family and his country. “He loved every single moment of being in the Marine Corps,’’ says his father. “He never once gave me his political views.’’ On his left wrist, Calvin Van De Giesen wears an orange rubber bracelet that says: “KRV-Our Hero Forever.’’ He never takes it off, even when ordered to during a recent surgery. “He died doing what he loved and in his mind, it was all good,’’ says Van De Geisen. “It’s all good,’’ was the phrase Kyle used with his loved ones, to reassure them that things were going well.

Though he didn’t express his views about war, his widow has hers. “Sometimes, I think he died before anything was done in Afghanistan,’’ says Megan. “I just want to make sure progress has been made before we leave, and Kyle and others haven’t died in vain.’’

With help from the Marine Corps and a fund set up for the family, the children’s financial futures are secure. Megan has gone into an event planning and catering business with a friend. But the kids are obviously her focus. “It’s very, very important to me that they know who Daddy was and what he did,’’ she says.

At 3, Avery is getting inquisitive. She’ll point to helicopters overhead and say, “That’s my daddy!’’ She won’t go to bed without kissing her father’s picture. Already, Colin cocks his arm and releases a mini-football; his father was a star quarterback at North Attleboro High.

In some ways, Megan says, it’s a blessing that they won’t feel the pain of losing a father they didn’t get to know. “But someday, they may feel the sorrow of not meeting him,’’ she says, wiping away tears. Last October, on the first anniversary of his death, family and friends all over the country got onto Skype and saluted Captain Van De Geisen with his favorite drink, a shot of Jack Daniels and Coke. They plan to do the same next month, at the two-year mark.

His mother keeps a couple of “It’s all good,’’ signs in her home, and says she was at peace when she learned of his death. “Everything he wanted to accomplish, he had accomplished. He was flying, he had the wife he wanted, he had the babies. I could hear him saying, ‘Mom, it’s all good.’ ’’