'He was a great leader'

Capt. Joshua Steele remembered by comrades in arms

Monday, June 25, 2007

By RON JENSEN

The Register-Mail

ALEXIS - Capt. Joshua E. Steele led from the front.

During a six-month period starting in late 2003, when he and his soldiers went on patrol in Iraq to find the roadside bombs that were killing so many of their colleagues, Steele was on the point.

"He was a great soldier," said Capt. James Smith, who served with Steele in the 5th Engineer Battalion near the unfriendly city of Samara, about one hour north of Baghdad. "He was a great leader. He was admired by his soldiers."

Smith quietly remembered his friend Sunday afternoon while hundreds of people paid respects to the fallen soldier during visitation at the fieldhouse in the old Alexis High School, which Steele attended until transferring his senior year to the Missouri Military Academy in Mexico, Mo.

The casket holding Steele, who was killed in Afghanistan one week earlier, was beneath the west basket of the basketball court. Above him, the scoreboard, which announced that this was Red Storm country, also promised Steele's "service to our country will never be forgotten."

Well before the announced start time of 4 p.m., many people had joined the queue outside. For more than one hour, the line grew at a steady rate, friends coming to offer condolences to the 26-year old's family members.

Smith was there as a friend and a comrade in arms, but also as the military's casualty assistance officer. It was a job he asked for after news of Steele's death reached him at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

"The very next day, I volunteered," he said.

With him were others from Fort Leonard Wood who knew Steele, the farm boy who dreamed of being a soldier, and volunteered to help with services.

Capt. Matthew Woods remembered when he and Steele, who was his roommate at Fort Leonard Wood, were given orders in 2003 for duty in South Korea. They both wanted to go to Iraq, but their requests for new orders were rejected.

Later, they were able to switch with two platoon leaders who were destined for Iraq.

"We traded our slots for Korea to those guys," Woods said.

They were separated in Iraq, but reunited in Missouri upon their return. They were separated again before Steele deployed to Afghanistan.

Woods said it was hard to believe when he heard of Steele's death. Dying is part of being a soldier, he said, and deaths are announced nearly every day.

Still, he said, "It's hard when you can put it with a face."

One man who saw in Steele the makings of a good soldier is Capt. Chad Pense, who taught Steele during his Reserve Officer Training Corps days at the University of Missouri-Rolla, where Steele earned a degree in geological engineering in 2002. Pense, too, was at the fieldhouse in uniform, honoring someone he knew as quiet, smart and disciplined.

"He didn't need a lot of guidance," he remembered. "Anytime we told him to do something, he did it."

Pense was surprised when he heard of Steele's death. He thought the first of any former cadet he knew to die in combat would be someone from a more traditional combat unit, like the infantry or armor, not a soldier with an engineer battalion.

"I didn't think it'd be Josh," he said.

Smith said times were hard around Samara during the six months he and Steele were there. The insurgency now so ingrained in the conflict was in its terrible infancy.

Roadside bombs, known in military parlance as IEDS, or improvised explosive devices, were new weapons of war, puzzling and dangerous, hidden along the roadside beneath rocks, within a pile of litter or even inside a dead animal.

"It was extremely violent," Smith said of that time. "Josh and his crew were finding in the neighborhood of four to five IEDs a week. Sometimes, they'd find four or five a day."

And each time they found one, the same type of weapon which eventually killed him, Steele was where he thought a leader should be. He was at the front.