Army Sgt. Benjamin C. Morton

Died May 22, 2005 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom

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24, of Wright, Kan.; assigned to the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), Fort Lewis, Wash.; killed May 22 when his dismounted patrol encountered enemy small-arms fire in Mosul, Iraq.

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Soldier killed in Iraq known as “Rat” to comrades

By Hugo Kugiya

Associated Press

Sgt. Ben Morton, 24, picked up the nickname Rat in the Army, because he could never throw anything away. If he stood in one place for more than a few minutes, he would eventually be surrounded by refuse. He drove a Humvee for a Stryker brigade based in Ft. Lewis, Wash.; his seat was usually covered with food wrappers and containers of all kinds.

He grew up in rural Wright, Kan., and the adoring big brother to two boys and two girls. His mother was a teacher; His father worked at an ammonia plant. He played football and ran track and joined the 4-H Club.

He was a few years out of high school, operating a grain elevator, when he joined the Army and trained as a paratrooper and sniper.

His dad, Allen Morton, didn’t talk too much to his son about the war — Ben kept a lot to himself. The one thing his son often told him was that “people living here do not realize how blessed they are.”

He knows Ben and a comrade once pulled wounded soldiers out of a burning Humvee and put out the flames while taking small arms fire. He thinks his son came under fire other times before he was killed during a May 22 raid, shot while searching the home of a suspected bomb maker.

Ben married a year before he died. His wife Elaina was an indirect casualty of the war, too. Three months after Rat died, she took her own life.

“She couldn’t live without him, I guess,” said his father.