Army Sgt. Russell A. Kurtz

Died February 11, 2007 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom

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22, of Bethel Park, Pa.; assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Airborne Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Richardson, Alaska; died Feb. 11 of wounds sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations in Fallujah, Iraq.

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Soldier killed in explosion in Iraq, family says

The Associated Press

BETHEL PARK, Pa. — An Alaska-based soldier from western Pennsylvania was killed in an explosion in Iraq, his family said Monday.

Sgt. Russell Kurtz, of Bethel Park, Pa., who turned 22 last month, was a passenger in a Humvee that hit an improvised explosive device at 8:30 a.m. Sunday, said his mother, Jill Kurtz. Military authorities said they could not immediately confirm the death.

“He was doing what he wanted to be doing,” she said.

Russell Kurtz was interested in military history from an early age and enlisted as a senior in high school, although he had been accepted at colleges.

Jill Kurtz said her son “decided that he had to do something; he didn’t want others over there fighting and dying without him being willing to do the same, and we supported him.”

Russell Kurtz played football and baseball in school and loved the outdoors, his mother said.

“He was stationed up in Alaska, and loved it up there — the skiing and the hunting and the fishing and the mountains and all that,” she said.

Kurtz said her son went through airborne training and was part of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry. He was stationed at Fort Richardson in Alaska and sent to Iraq in October.

“He didn’t tell us as much as some other people. He didn’t want us to worry,” Jill Kurtz said. The last few weeks he described as “pretty much what people envision war being, where he was and what he was doing,” she said.

He only had one complaint about the military: the food.

After military service, he wanted to come back home, go to college and someday work for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“He loved his friends and he loved the Lord,” she said of her son, a Lutheran. “He’s home with the Lord now, so he’s doing better than we are.”

Kurtz also is survived by his father, Roger, and by his sister, Stephanie, a sophomore at the University of Delaware.