I was finishing my morning coffee when the radio crackled with the announcement: “Fallen Angel.”

All activity ceased. The operations center became silent. My team’s and my attention focused on the radio. A Blackhawk helicopter had crashed in Kandahar province —callsign “Ozzie 72,” named after Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness.

We pulled up the live feed from the Gray Eagle drone. On the side of the Afghanistan mountain, a large black plume of smoke rose into the air. Zooming in, we saw the wrecked fuselage of a helicopter engulfed in smoke and flames.

Looking around the rugged mountain terrain at the site: no bodies, no movement. It was clear that all on board were dead.

The flight company was small, only about twenty pilots and twenty crew chiefs. Although I was assigned as the chief operations officer for the sister support battalion, I still flew combat missions with the flight company once or twice a week. The pilots and crew chiefs there were my friends, my brothers and sisters in arms. Now, at least four of them were dead.

Usually, our missions involved flying SEAL Team 3, searching for bad guys in Kandahar province. The previous day, I had encouraged my intelligence collection sergeant to join the mission to see what it was like “outside the wire.” Now, I realized that some of those SEALs and my own soldier whom I sent out on the mission may also have been killed.

For the next few hours, I barely had time to process the emotional impact of the events. As the chief operations officer, I was responsible for coordinating the recovery of the aircraft and the bodies. The aircraft was not salvageable, but we had to do everything we could to recover the bodies, or whatever was left of them.

I prepared the casualty collection team for the mission. Making sure they inventoried their equipment, had accurate team rosters, and coordinated a Chinook helicopter for transport. All while wondering: which of my friends were dead? Was my soldier dead?

It was the most challenging day of my military career.

When my intelligence collection sergeant walked into the operations center a few hours later, we were all grateful. He had been in the other Blackhawk—the wingman—and was shell-shocked to have barely survived death. Others were not as lucky.

About three hours after the crash, operations had settled down enough for me to walk over to the flight company. There, I met my friend Macky, the commander of the unit. Relief washed over me to see him alive.

“Who was it?” I asked Macky.

“Hornsby, Krause, Essex, and Oliver-Galbteath.”

I spent the next few moments with the flight company, mostly in solemn silence.

“I got to get back to operations,” I told them as I departed, “Hang in there.”

As I walked back to my operations center, I found a wooden picnic bench, shaded by a camouflage netting and tucked behind some concrete blast walls. There I sat, and for the first time that day, wept uncontrollably.

Seven great Americans died that day.

Rest in my love: CW3 Brian D. Hornsby, CW2 Suresh N. Krause, SGT Richard A. Essex, SGT Luis A. Oliver-Galbreath, SO1 Pat Feeks, SO1 Dave Warsen, and EOD1 Sean Carson.

Over the next few weeks, we mourned their loss. We came together as a community, rendered military honors, and built a monument in their honor. That process taught me a lot about the grieving process.

A month after that, my wife asked me for a divorce.

And the wounds I sustained from that process were much worse.