Legacy Matters

Not an ordinary man but a Harvard Law Hero

Harvard Law Hero from Jules Crittenden

They keep coming out of the woodwork. Harvard war heroes. This one, when all the other Harvard Law graduates headed off to the white-shoe law firms, the non-profits, community organizing, that kind of thing, he headed off to the United States Marine Corps. Three combat tours later, it was the DEA because, his dad said, unlike CIA and other agencies, he could be assured of frontline action there. He found it in Afghanistan.

Peter Gelziniz  tells the story in Crittenden's paper The Boston Herald.  Final salute to a singular hero

On Oct. 26, Special Agents Weston, 37, Forrest N. Leamon, 37 and Chad L. Michael, 30, were part of an elite DEA-Special Forces strike team, which had just completed a successful night raid on an Afghan drug bazaar.

After a fierce, hour-long firefight, 31 enemy insurgents and heroin traffickers were dead, and a stockpile of drugs, IEDs and weapons were seized. Mike Weston and his team boarded the choppers for the flight back to their outpost in the western city of Herat, certain they had made a difference in the blackness before the Afghan dawn.

“A lot of what we do is done quietly,” said Matthew Murphy, in Boston’s DEA office. “The public isn’t generally aware of the dedication of character it takes to place oneself on the front lines of narco-terrorism . . . these were not ordinary men.”

Condolences and grateful thanks to his family, especially his wife Cindy whom he married on Memorial Day.  Cindy was the widow of his best friend at Harvard Law, Helge Boes, who died in 2003 while serving as a CIA officer in Afghanistan.