First Lt. Garland English, 29, was a Bronze Star recipient, Ivy League graduate, activist and aspiring politician whose friends considered him larger than life.English, an engineer with the 8th Theater Sustainment Command at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, was killed in a rock climbing accident in nearby Makaha Valley on Jan. 10. He was rappelling down a tall cliff with a friend to retrieve a backpack when he fell 400 feet to his death.The week before, English and four college friends celebrated his homecoming from Iraq with a grueling two-day hike.They bushwhacked through jungle and edged along a narrow ridge above the valley. Horsing around, English lost his backpack over the ledge.A week later, he died trying to retrieve it.“Garland never let us down — to the last he was fearless, uncompromising, an adventurer, a guy who loved his friends as fearlessly as he climbed the campus buildings at Columbia,” Michael Crowley, a college friend from Columbia University, said in an e-mail. “He was alive, really and truly alive, in a way that most of us only dream about. I don’t know what we’ll do without him.”English grew up in Wynantskill, N.Y., graduated from Columbia’s engineering school, and traveled to dozens of countries, running with the bulls in Spain, shark cage diving in South Africa, and backpacking from Mexico to Peru.He tried his hand as a construction worker, actor and public school teacher.At Columbia, he skated by in engineering classes and charted his own course of study, friends said.“All his friends were deep in the famous core curriculum, the canon of western literature, which he was reading alongside of us on his own time, borrowing our books, marking them up,” said Mischa Byruck. “He read more of all of those books, from the ‘Iliad’ to the ‘Inferno.’ ”For all his good humor, English was adamant in his principles and fond of challenging others.A political activist and campaign volunteer, English listed arrests for civil disobedience on his resume and worked for the campaigns of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.Working on the New York City Council campaign of Dan Quart in 2005, he zipped around Manhattan on a scooter, delivering campaign literature.“What he really excelled at was working out on the street or knocking on doors with me; he loved the human interaction,” Quart said.“What always shocked me about Garland is he had no preconceived notions, he always gave people the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t have a drop of cynicism in him, which is why people loved to be around him.”English rallied against the war at the 2004 Republican National Convention but nevertheless enlisted in September 2007, motivated by a passion for adventure and service, friends said.Platoon leaderEnglish deployed to southern Iraq in November 2008 and led a platoon with the forward support company of the 84th Engineer Battalion, 8th TSC. The platoon constructed facilities in Tikrit for the Joint Coordination Center, as well as at the remote Patrol Base Doria, Combat Outpost Spider, and forward operating bases Warrior and Dagger.Friends sent him cards and packages, and he asked that they send them to his men instead.In an e-mail to friends from Iraq, he wrote:“I discovered that being a platoon leader, along with being responsible for tactical movements and logistics, also meant being a marriage counselor, financial adviser, standardized test tutor, and, in one case, a paternal caretaker at the base hospital … visiting a soldier after an emergency appendectomy, … bringing him a care package of comic books, apricots and some chocolate bars, … and having to order him to call his wife to tell her that he was OK.”Friends said the Army’s waste and bureaucratic inefficiency frustrated him, but the service taught him discipline, teamwork and how to reach goals within a hierarchical organization.First Lt. Patricia Connolly, one of English’s friends at his battalion, said he was known on duty as a strict but popular platoon leader and for his “flamboyant” sense of humor off duty.“He stressed on a daily basis that if you don’t live life to the fullest, you weren’t actually living. He actually said that to anyone and everyone, and he lived by that,” said Connolly. “It reminds people that there’s more to life than a job and a car to make yourself happy.”Connolly said that there has been a memorial service and added safety briefings at Schofield Barracks.“You just assume that when you’re back, you’re back safe, nothing can happen to you, but we’ve lost more here than we did in the desert,” Connolly said.English and his visiting friends had set out for the top of Mount Ka’ala, the highest point in Oahu. They hiked 10 hours the first day and 16 hours the next day.When they arrived at English’s home, exhausted, at the end of the second day, he offered a bet that he would get his pack back, Byruck said.No one took the bet.“Garland was a risk-taker, and it was yet another way in which he stretched us and pushed us,” Byruck said.“Garland’s presence in our lives had the effect of pushing our limitations, challenging us on moral, on ethical grounds, forcing you out of your comfort zone. In death, it’s as in life.”
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