Kevin McCray Jones

Washington, North Carolina

September 22, 2005

 Killed near Al Taqaddum, Iraq, on Sept. 22, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.

I have known him since Kindergarden and we stayed pretty close growing up. I still think about him daily, all the good times that we had together growing up. Some of the crazy things that Kevin and I did bring a smile to his mother's face every time I mention them. I really appreciate your response, and the fact that he was already listed on your website. Kevin really enjoyed what he did in the Army. He enjoyed being in Iraq and enjoyed helping out he Iraqi people. According to Kevin, the Iraqi people enjoyed having him around, like a friend. Most of the Iraqi people wanted the American soldiers there and were very friendly towards them. 

Burial brings war's cost home Oct 2, 2005 5:37 AM
Iraq casualty laid to rest Down East

By JAY PRICE, Staff Writer

WASHINGTON, N.C. -- In a bigger place, Kevin Jones wouldn't have had time to leave much of a mark. 

He was, after all, barely 21 when he was fatally wounded Sept. 22 in Iraq, the life leaking out of him even as he cracked jokes to another wounded soldier on the medevac helicopter. 

Spc. Kevin McCray Jones was the 37th serviceman who called North Carolina home to be killed in the Iraq war. 

His death wasn't some sort of national milestone. He wasn't No. 2,000, nor was he the first female helicopter pilot to be killed, the oldest soldier, or the youngest. He won't be the last -- at least 19 more U.S. troops have been killed there already, according to an Associated Press database. 

He wasn't even the only Jones. There have been nine others. 

But his death was the one that brought the war back to his small city, to his family, and to Second Baptist Church, where nearly 400 people filed past his casket Friday night. On Saturday he was eulogized before a crowd so big the church had to run a television feed to a second room. 

Few institutions underpin rural America like volunteer fire departments, where people risk their lives for free to protect their fellow residents from fires. Jones joined the Old Ford Volunteer Fire Department just north of the city when he was 16. A couple of years later, he became an emergency medical technician. 

"It's like a piece of the foundation is gone," said Bryan Lilley, 24, who had served with Jones at the fire department since Jones joined and who led him into his first structure fire. "You could always depend on him. Always. If you told him to be somewhere at 7 in the morning, he was there at 6:30 cooking you breakfast." 

Lilley and other members of Old Ford were among the first in line Friday night for visitation. 

Jones' death, they said, erased one of the widest grins Beaufort County had ever seen. 

Jones was happiest tinkering with his Toyota pickup, racing to fight a fire, treating an accident victim, fishing for catfish. He didn't care much for schoolwork, said Lt. Col. Tom Meeks, Jones' JROTC instructor at Washington High. 

"He was an action kid, not a book kid," Meeks said. "It was 'Let me get my hands on it, let me get out in the woods, but don't make me sit down and write a paper.' And when he started something, he really jumped into it. There were no half measures with Kevin." 

He got his diploma in 2002. For a few months afterward, he worked in the auto department at Wal-Mart with his friend since kindergarten, Christopher Haislip. 

In school, Jones channeled his energy toward helping out, even when the role was literally behind the scenes: For the school drama department, he and Haislip were "tech rats," running the lights and other equipment so the actors could be in the spotlight. 

He played football, too. Lilley was a senior on the team when Jones was a freshman trying his best to play like the older boys. 

"You could knock him down 100 times," Lilley said, "and he'd still be up before you every time, grinning." 

A military family 

Haislip said Jones was the most patriotic person he knew, and it wasn't a surprise when he left Wal-Mart to join the Army. The Joneses are a military family. Jones' older brother, Ken, a truck driver who lives in nearby Chocowinity, served in the Marines. 

His father, Kenneth, is a Navy commander who also works as an aerospace engineer for NASA, commuting weekly to Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Jones' mother, Rebecca, works for the county health department, and his sister, Kamlyn, is a doctor in Greenwood, S.C. His brother said Saturday that Jones thought that what he was doing in Iraq was one more way to help people and that the Iraqis needed him. "He really thought there was a need to be there, and he wanted to go back after that first time," Ken Jones said. 

During the service, the Rev. Phil Hayes, the pastor of Second Baptist, quoted a letter that Jones had mailed to the Washington Daily News last year. "All I am asking is that you don't be afraid of supporting us," Jones wrote. "We were not forced to serve in the Armed Forces, we volunteered. We stand ready to protect you, and watch over you, while we spend many months far from home, training for the worst, that you may rest comfortably in your home, and watch your children grow up to follow their dreams." 

In the Army, his love for hands-on work and action led Jones to a job with a transportation unit based in Germany, and from there to a particularly dangerous job in Iraq. Always a volunteer The improvised roadside bomb is the Iraqi insurgent's deadliest weapon against U.S. troops, and the risk that American soldiers face is proportional to the amount of time they spend on the roads. Jones surely knew that when he died. It was his second deployment in Iraq, and he had already lost some of his hearing in April when a bomb hit another truck he was riding in. But he always volunteered to go out rather than hang around base, said his brother, Ken. It was on a road near Al Taqaddum, west of Baghdad, that the bomb exploded near his truck. 

This time, his wounds were worse, but he was still able to talk and joke around as he was flown to a field hospital. There, Marines with his blood type lined up to provide transfusions, a futile gesture. No one was home at the Jones residence when the soldiers from Fort Bragg arrived Sept. 23, so a neighbor drove to the county health department to get his mother. Jones' friend Haislip worked in the same office, and someone told him, too. 

Saturday morning, the volunteer firefighters were honorary pallbearers, and the church was jammed. Five fire trucks led the procession to the cemetery, where three more fire trucks were waiting, one with a flag the size of a bed wafting from its bucket. More than 300 people ringed the grave, including a wall of Old Ford firefighters in monogrammed white shirts. These days, there are so many military funerals that the families often have to make do with minimal military honor detachments and recorded versions of taps. Not this time. 

The honor guard of the entire XVIII Airborne Corps drove up from Fort Bragg. Maj. Gen. Virgil L. Packett II, the acting commanding general of the corps and of Bragg, took the flag from the coffin, fell to one knee and handed it to the soldier's mother, Rebecca Jones. "This flag is presented on behalf of a grateful nation and the United States Army as a token of appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service," he said. Later, the people who knew Kevin Jones walked away from the grave, thinking about their own words to describe him: Gung- ho. Enthusiastic. Happy. 

Lilley, the firefighter, had his own in mind. "If you had to describe Kevin in a word," he said, "there was only one word, and that was 'Kevin.' " The other firefighters standing around nodded. Then they did what Kevin would have done. They grinned. Jones' family asked that any contributions be made to any fire department or emergency medical service.