Airman

A 24-year-old airman from Westminster was killed when an improvised explosive device hit his vehicle in Afghanistan, the Defense Department said Saturday. Airman 1st Class Matthew R. Seidler died Thursday in the attack, which killed two other airmen. They were patrolling in Helmand, a southwestern province that remains a Taliban stronghold. "When he joined the Air Force, he blossomed. He became himself," said a cousin, Kalyn Masek, who last communicated with Seidler on Tuesday, his birthday.

An Air Force member who was assigned to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland has died in Afghanistan, the Defense Department announced Monday. Airman 1st Class Jerome D. Miller Jr., 23, of Washington, died Oct. 13 in a non-combat-related incident in Parwan province, the Defense Department said. Miller was assigned to the 459th Security Forces Squadron at Joint Base Andrews in Prince George's County.

Air Force Airman Charles E. Kirk graduated from basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. The airman completed an intensive, eight-week program that included training in military discipline and studies, Air Force core values, physical fitness, and basic warfare principles and skills. Airmen who complete basic training earn four credits toward an associate in applied science degree through the Community College of the Air Force. Kirk is the son of Charles Kirk of Edgewood.

George W. Holdefer, a retired civil engineer who during World War II flew Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, became a prisoner of war after his plane was damaged over Germany and recorded his experiences in a diary, died March 10 of multiple organ failure at the Edenwald retirement community. The former Campus Hills and Mays Chapel resident was 87. Mr. Holdefer, the son of an American Can Co. engineer and a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised near Patterson Park. After graduating from Polytechnic Institute in 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and was trained as a B-17 pilot at an airbase in Bradenton, Fla. He joined the 8th Air Force 486th Heavy Bomb Group based at Sudbury, England, northeast of London.

In the photo from 1943, Tech. Sgt. Charles A. Bode and his fellow airmen gaze into the camera, some shirtless, some smiling, looking to modern eyes like cast members of the musical "South Pacific. " But the B-24 bomber crew would soon embark on a very real mission during the intense combat for the Pacific in World War II. The men took off from a port in New Guinea on Nov. 20, 1943; after a routine radio check, the 11 crewmen were never seen or heard from again. The mission, in a sense, finally ends for the 23-year-old Bode on Friday afternoon, when the Highlandtown man is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Overhead soared a B-52. On the ground, the seven members of the firing party marched to their places. In the distance, drums could be heard, and then the entire band, leading a horse-drawn caisson carrying a flag-draped casket to its final destination. Traveling across the globe and through time, Technical Sgt. Charles A. Bode came home Friday from the Second World War. The Highlandtown man was 23 on Nov. 20, 1943, when he vanished with 10 fellow crew members during a B-24 bomber mission over the Pacific.

Jack Howard Jacobs, a retired mechanical engineer and World War II airman who was shot down over Austria and later became a prisoner of war, died of kidney failure Oct. 3 at his son's Severna Park home. He was 85. Born in Baltimore, the son of a shoemaker and a homemaker, Mr. Jacobs was raised on Pinkney Road. He was a 1942 graduate of Forest Park High School and was studying engineering at the University of Maryland when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1943. After being trained as an aerial gunner and navigator, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and sent to Italy, where he joined the 15th Air Force.

A few years after Army airman Sgt. Leonard J. Ray was shot down over an east German farm field in 1944, his father erected a headstone in a Joppa cemetery as a memorial, but the plot remained empty for decades. Now the World War II serviceman's remains are buried under that grave marker - interred a week ago next to his father. "He's at rest now, and at home," his youngest sister, Kathryn "Judy" Brazezicki of Kingsville, said yesterday, the day the Department of Defense announced the identifications of Ray and eight other airmen.