Military Families Once Again Brace for a Knock
Even before his son was in high school, Mylo Simmons told me, there was something about flying that fascinated him. Some days, Simmons and his son, Tyler, would sit in the car together, pulled over on a street with a clear view of an airport runway, watching planes taking off and landing. Tyler was “looking up at the sky all the time,” his father said. “He wanted to be up there.” It was that desire that led Tyler first to a youth program sponsored by the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black aviators to serve in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, then to the National Guard, and then to the Air Force, where he worked up to being a technical sergeant, responsible for refueling tanker aircrafts midflight.
When Tyler Simmons died earlier this month—he and five other American service members were killed in a plane crash over Iraq—his family became one of the 13 American families to receive the news that their loved one had died since the war in Iran began. “The doorbell rang, and when I opened the door and I saw the military, I said, Oh no. Oh no,” Mylo Simmons said. “The worst thing you can imagine.”
These families have been thrust into the national spotlight as they process immense loss and navigate logistics and formalities—answer a flurry of calls, get on a plane, go to Dover, witness a dignified transfer, travel home, plan a funeral, do paperwork and then more paperwork. And for the families who lost a loved one in earlier conflicts, news of these most recent deaths has reopened deep pockets of grief. These are the first U.S. service members lost in a foreign war since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Captain Ariana G. Savino “died doing the one thing she loved the most—flying,” her family said in a statement. Captain Cody A. Khork “was deeply patriotic and took great pride in serving something greater than himself,” his family wrote. Technical Sergeant Ashley B. Pruitt’s husband said she “was a light in the room.” Major John A. Klinner loved his wife, 2-year-old son, and seven-month-old twins “fiercely and completely.” His sister-in-law, Sarah Rose Harrill, told MS NOW what every military family understands acutely, both in times of peace and in times of war: “There are real people and real families that are being impacted and will continue to be impacted by these events.”
I spoke with Mylo Simmons last week when he and his family were on their way from Columbus, Ohio, to Dover, Delaware, to attend the dignified-transfer ceremony honoring their only child and the five other service members who died with him. Tyler’s path to the Air Force wasn’t direct. In ninth grade, a deacon at his family’s church in Columbus—a Tuskegee Airman himself—took the family out to an airfield. “The next thing we know, we’re up in the air, and Tyler’s flying the plane,” Simmons said. Tyler’s plan was to get a pilot’s license, but being a star quarterback in high school—and maybe a bit “girl crazy,” as his dad put it—pushed that to the wayside. When he was a year into college, his father told him that if he was going to be girl crazy, he could do it on his own dime. Tyler took a job as a ramp agent at the local airport, then enlisted in 2017. He started working toward the boom-operator role he would hold through his last flight. His mother had initially hoped that he would choose another, less dangerous path, but the Air Force was Tyler’s dream. He hoped to eventually become a commercial pilot.
“This is so surreal, unbelievable, unthinkable,” Simmons said. There are, he told me “no words” to describe the pain.
Taryn Davis’s husband, Army Corporal Michael Davis, was only 22 years old when he was killed in action in Baghdad in 2007. “I don’t think anyone who has lost a family member in war can look at any number of casualties and not feel like it’s already too much,” Davis, who founded the American Widow Project, a nonprofit that supports military widows as they heal and rebuild their lives, told me. The scars left behind from that kind of loss, she said, are difficult to understand for anyone who isn’t “receiving that knock on the door or being handed that folded flag.”
In the days immediately after her husband’s death, Davis was consumed by one obligation after the next. The military provided an officer to help her work through each step: There were the two weeks it took for her husband’s body to be returned home, the days she waited to get a response on where his wedding band was, and the decision she had to make on how to handle his remains. All of the while she and her pain were on display for the nation—a level of attention that can take a toll. “I don’t want to say it stunts the grieving process,” Davis said, “but it definitely has a way of throwing kindling in the ‘grief fire.’”
Krista Simpson Anderson founded the Unquiet Professional, a nonprofit serving grieving military families, after losing her husband, Army Staff Sergeant Michael H. Simpson, to injuries sustained in Afghanistan in 2013. She told me that one choice she has made in her grieving process has been to actively avoid the news. “Listening to the news, in my opinion, only can lead you down a path that makes you angry, right? Whose fault is it? What was supposed to happen?” she said.
The journey toward healing is long, nonlinear, and different for every person, the Gold Star family members I spoke with reminded me. To the extent that these experiences have common threads, they are the language the families speak and the spaces to which they return to honor their loved ones. Because of that, many families find that having a support system of other grieving military families can make a big difference. The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a resource network, has in recent days heard from multiple families whose loved ones died in past aviation mass-casualty events similar to the one that killed Tyler Simmons, the network’s founder, Bonnie Carroll, told me.
“We have different words when we talk about a death in the military: gave one’s life in service to their country, or made the ultimate sacrifice,” said Carroll, who lost her husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, in a 1992 Army plane crash. “When you walk through Arlington, you don’t see the difference between whether it was a suicide or a motorcycle accident or a combat loss; you see lives lived in service to this country, honored and remembered.”