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On this day, June 28, 2005, Lt. Cdr. Erik Kristensen, the SEAL officer who led the rescue force into the Hindu Kush, was killed during Operation Red Wings. When Lt. Michael Murphy’s call for help came down, Kristensen was the ground commander of the quick reaction force, and he did not have to be on that helicopter. As a senior officer in SEAL Team 10, he sat above the platoons that ran most of the direct action, and his own mother was told he likely wouldn’t be aboard. But these were his men in trouble, men he had trained, and so he went, leading from the front. He boarded Turbine 33 with 7 other SEALs and 8 Night Stalkers from the 160th, and an RPG brought the Chinook down before they could reach the team. All 16 aboard were killed. Kristensen’s road to that mountain was a long one. Born into a Navy family, son of a future rear admiral, he was a Naval Academy graduate who majored in English, taught the subject back at Annapolis, and was attending St. John’s College before he walked away from the classroom to chase a harder calling. He reported to BUD/S at 27, one of the oldest men in his class, and earned his Trident. Friends remembered a brilliant, funny, slightly absent minded man who once showed up to a dance class in flip flops, an officer who led with wit instead of weight. He was set to study in Paris on a scholarship after the deployment, thinking already about a life beyond the Teams. He never got the chance. In the wreckage of Turbine 33, recovery troops found a dog tag stamped not with a name but with the Warrior Ethos, ending in the line "I will never leave a fallen comrade." Erik Kristensen and the men he led embodied exactly that. He is buried in the Naval Academy Cemetery, and his example is still taught to the midshipmen who walk the grounds he once did. Not forgotten 🔱