Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Eric A. Smith

Died April 2, 2003 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom

41, of Rochester, N.Y.; assigned to 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.; killed in a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crash in central Iraq.

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Eric A. Smith had wanted to fly since he was a little boy, but by the time he graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology he figured his grades would keep him grounded.

In the mid-1980s, some Air Force pilots he met at a bar in San Diego gave him new hope, said his mother, Lillian Lake, 70, of Lake Placid. They invited him to take a flight.

“They told him he would be better off going into the Army and being a helicopter pilot, even though it’s more difficult to fly a helicopter than a plane,” she said.

Smith, 41, a 16-year Army veteran, was killed April 2 when the helicopter he was in went down.

In December, he visited his mother and spoke of the possibility of not coming home.

“He said, ‘Remember it was my choice, I was not drafted. I was not in the reserves. I love what I’m doing and I want to die that way — flying a helicopter — if that’s the way it has to be,’ ” she recalled.

The youngest of three brothers, Smith played soccer at Brighton High School in the Rochester area and was, his mother said, “picky about his friends.”

He never married.

“He was always hoping to find a girl to marry,” his mother said. “But because he moved around so much, if he met somebody he felt it wouldn’t be fair to pick her up from her roots unless it was the right type of girl that could adjust.”

— USA Today, Associated Press