FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) – Three soldiers stationed at Fort Hood were killed over the weekend when their vehicle struck a homemade explosive device near the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk, the Defense Department reported Monday.
The soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were identified as Sgt. Eliu Miersandoval, 27, of San Clemente, Calif.; Cpl. Juan Cabral Banuelos, 25, of Emporia, Kan.; and Pfc. Holly McGeogh, 19, of Taylor, Mich.
All three were light-truck mechanics assigned to the Company A, 4th Forward Support Battalion, officials at Fort Hood said. Their vehicle hit the improvised mine while traveling as part of a convoy about 27 miles south of Kirkuk.
Dan Hassett, a Fort Hood spokesman, said Monday that another soldier from the post near Killeen was killed Sunday in a separate incident, but that person’s identity has not been released.
About 20,000 troops from Fort Hood are scheduled to return home from Iraq this spring, while some 20,000 other soldiers from the post are preparing to be deployed.
Counting the yet-unnamed casualty, 54 soldiers from Fort Hood have been killed in Iraq since the war started nearly a year ago, Hassett said.Miersandoval, born in Mexico, joined the Army in 1998 and spent nearly all of his military career at Fort Hood.
Cabral’s cousin, Marisol Gomez, said her cousin was a native of Geres, Mexico. She said her cousin spent most of his childhood in Riverdale, Utah, and moved to Emporia with his family as a teenager.
She said her cousin was a popular student in high school who dreamed of enlisting in the Army after graduation. He became an Army mechanic and was stationed in Fort Hood before he was deployed to Iraq.
”When he was in high school that was one of his goals to finish high school and graduate and go to the Army when he graduated,” Gomez said. ”He said he liked it there (in the Army). It was difficult but he liked it. He liked what he was doing.”
Gomez said he will be buried in Utah, where most of his family lives.She said the soldier’s death is extremely painful because in just a few weeks he would have been reunited with his wife and two small children.
Cabral’s wife, Anita Cabral, 24, told the Standard-Examiner of Ogden, Utah, that she met her husband-to-be when she was a young child. The pair married in September 1998, a few months after Cabral enlisted.
”He was proud of his boys, proud of his family … I’m going to go back to Utah and raise my boys like he wanted me to,” Anita Cabral said. The boys 7 years and 18 months old.
Anita Cabral said her husband loved to tinker, especially on his 1963 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport. That love of cars helped make him a light-truck mechanic in the military.McGeogh became a soldier in 2002 and was assigned to Fort Hood last March.