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Staff Sgt. Kevin Pape, a larger-than-life 1/75 Ranger squad leader, was killed 10 years ago this week during Team Darby’s plunge into the Gambir Jungle in pursuit of insurgents who had killed six 1-327 Infantry soldiers during Operation Bulldog Bite
Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Kevin Pape "was one of those kids that had all the G.I. Joes. He’d make tanks out of cardboard boxes," his late father, Marc, told me a few years ago. As a teenager in the mid '90s he paintballed and was on the track and cross-country teams.
Pape enlisted at 25 in 2005, following a childhood friend into 1st Ranger Battalion. Deploying to Iraq for the first time in 2006, then again and again, he was there for the heyday of the Rangers' Stryker-mounted missions against the forerunners of ISIS in places like Mosul.
Other Rangers nicknamed Pape "GQ" for his photogenic looks (he's often grinning in photos, sometimes blowing kisses in videos). He and his wife had a daughter while he was in 1/75, and he rose to team leader and then squad leader in Charlie Company.
For his sixth deployment in 5 years, Pape headed to Tikrit, delaying a surgery to go. A couple months in, in Sept. 2010, his platoon moved to Afghanistan (where part of C Company already was, attached to the SEALs in TF East). Pape had already been in Afg two times already.
Pape's platoon and C Company headquarters formed Team Darby, a roving element based out of Paktika that the JSOC task force used during the Afghan surge to take on targets that were too much for a typical strike force (a Ranger platoon or special mission unit troop).
Most of the platoon's missions were going down quietly—night raids where nobody fired a shot. Pape's Rangers were getting ready for another of these one night in mid-Nov when Team Darby's commander got a call and told the platoon they'd be going to Kunar instead, for a tough one.
