One was a top military linguist who worked closely with the National Security Agency and was on her eighth deployment. One was a hard-pounding rebounder on his high school basketball team who joined the Army Special Forces and served a half-dozen times in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And one was a former Navy SEAL who later supervised the collection of intelligence for a Pentagon agency.
A fourth American killed worked for a private defense contractor, Valiant Integrated Services.
Before Wednesday, there had been only two American combat deaths in Syria since 2015.
The suicide bombing in a restaurant in Manbij in northern Syria came shortly after President Donald Trump called for a pullout of U.S. troops from the country, asserting that the Islamic State — which claimed credit for the attack — had been “largely defeated.” But administration officials have struggled to articulate a coherent policy or plan for withdrawal.
Senior military officials said Friday that they had started to withdraw some nonessential equipment and were still preparing to pull out about 2,000 troops over the next four to six months. But it was not clear whether conditions on the ground would dictate the pace of withdrawal, as John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser said this month.
The attack came as eight Americans were meeting local leaders. Three of those Americans were wounded in the blast, which prompted U.S. forces throughout northern Syria to increase operational security measures.
On Friday, as some relatives of the victims made the sorrowing trek to Dover, Delaware, to recover the remains of their loved ones, old friends remembered them.
— One of the Military’s Top Linguists
Shannon M. Kent had a position that in the bureaucratic lingo of the military might sound like a ho-hum desk job: Navy chief cryptologic technician (interpretive).
In reality, Kent had been deployed eight times into hard-fought war zones like Syria, serving in places where bombings and snipers were a common risk. She worked closely with the nation’s most secretive intelligence agency interpreting and assessing foreign communications and other intercepts, and her work was used in the highest reaches of the military.
Kent, 35, grew up in upstate New York and graduated in 2001 from Stissing Mountain Junior/Senior High School in Pine Plains, Tara Grieb, the school’s principal, told The Daily Freeman of Kingston.
Grieb said Kent was an honor student and performed in school plays, and graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh before enlisting in the Navy in 2003, where she rose to become a chief petty officer. Her father is a colonel and field commander in the New York State Police.
Last year, she joined the unit she was with in Syria — the Navy’s Cryptologic Warfare Activity 66, which is based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Her commanding officer, Cmdr. Joseph Harrison, called her a “rock star.”
— From the Basketball Court to Army Special Forces
Jonathan R. Farmer enrolled in a private college preparatory school after moving to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, during his junior year of high school. He was an immediate presence.
He was a 6-foot-4 teenager “with a grin as big as his shoulders,” recalled Ron Ream, a longtime athletic director and football coach at the Benjamin School. “He was one of those kids everyone gravitated toward.”
One of those who quickly gravitated was Ream himself. Watching Farmer’s tough rebounding on the basketball court, he thought Farmer would be a standout on the football team, and tried to persuade him to play. But Farmer was focused on hoops.
“It broke my heart,” Ream recalled. “You could see tight end written all over him.”
On the basketball court, Farmer grabbed almost nine rebounds a game (and scored 15 points per game) his senior year and was named to the Palm Beach Post’s All-Area small schools team. Former coaches said he was one of the players who helped turn the program around.
Clifton Perry, who was a teacher and coach at the school, said that while Farmer was always willing to help anyone who asked, on the court he was a “down-and-dirty rebounder, and the kind of guy who liked taking a charge.”
“He was a really tough, gritty kind of kid,” said Perry, now the head equipment manager for Princeton University athletics.
Though Perry had not known that Farmer joined the military — where he rose to the rank of chief warrant officer 2 — he said he was not surprised he wound up in a selective unit like Special Forces.
“He was one of those kids who respected authority, but didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Perry said.
Farmer’s father, Duncan, told The Palm Beach Post in a brief video interview that he could not count how many times his son had traveled overseas with his unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, which was based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Asked the best way to describe his son, who was 37 and married with four children, he said: “Good man, good son, good father, good husband, good friend.”
A neighbor in Palm Beach Gardens, Carol Ann Sternlieb, said she had been crying since 2 in the morning after learning Farmer had died.
She said she spent the day frustrated because she had asked an official from her neighborhood association to lower the flag at the entrance to their development, but was told that could not happen until Trump ordered it.
“This guy gave his life for his country,” Sternlieb said. “The least we can do is fly the flag at half-staff for him. He is a father of four, and his life is gone.”
— A SEAL Who Returned to the Mideast as a Civilian
Scott A. Wirtz, or “Scotty” to friends, grew up in Missouri. When he joined the military, he sought out one of its most selective and difficult programs, graduating from the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in 1998 and serving as a SEAL until 2005.
He deployed three times to the Middle East as a civilian with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s own intelligence-gathering operation. For the past two years, he had supervised the collection of intelligence in the same sort of restive regions to which he deployed as a Navy SEAL.
His death, said the Defense Intelligence Agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr., was “a stark reminder of the dangerous missions we conduct for the nation and of the threats we work hard to mitigate.”
Wirtz, 42, was also known for his jocular side, friends said.
“He had that rare quality of being a laid-back, fun-loving dude, but would be all business when needed to be,” said Dean Kahu, who worked with him in the Middle East.
In a sense, Kahu said, Wirtz’s deployments after he left the Navy continued to fill a desire that many high-level military operators have after they leave the service.
The deployments provided, he said, “the same adrenaline rush as the military.”
“Most of us need that in our lives once we have served in that tempo and at the highest level in our militaries,” Kahu said. “It never goes away.”
— An Interpreter With Roots in Syria
Ghadir Taher, 27, was an Arabic interpreter from East Point, Georgia, who worked for Valiant Integrated Services. The company on Friday called her “a talented and highly-respected colleague loved by many who will be dearly missed.”
Taher was born in Syria and became a naturalized U.S. citizen after immigrating in 2001, her younger brother told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Her smile lit up the room. She was kind,” her brother, Ali, told the newspaper. “You could go on for hours, talking to her about your worries and about your troubles. And she would make them seem like they were hers.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.