TUCSON, AZ, U.S.A. U.S.ARMY SSG,CO A, 3RD BN, 5TH SFG (AIRBORNE), FORT CAMPBELL, KY 11/04/2016, JAFR, JORDAN
SSG Kevin J. McEnroe was born in Colorado in 1986 and moved with his family to Tucson in 1995. His mother Linda Frost, who lives in Tucson, said SSG McEnroe loved to play guitar, enjoyed fashion and travel and had an “incredible sense of humor.”
“He was a little bit of a class clown in school,” added McEnroe’s mother. Kevin attended Green Fields Country Day School. “When he walked into the room, he had this magnetism.”
SSG McEnroe was already two years in at University of Colorado, Boulder, when he decided he wanted to join the Army.
“We don’t really have a military background,” Linda Frost said. “He just said he wanted to make a difference and become a Green Beret.”
Linda Frost talked about her son:“I think that’s what made him good at what he did. His mind was scientific, mathematical. That’s why he was good at music. He was a ‘MacGyver’ type guy. He could make things work.” But he was also richly diverse — a creative cook and a skilled guitar player who spoke fluent Arabic and Russian, his mother said, and was at once tough and sensitive, authoritative and warmly likable.
“He was just this very loving, sensitive soul,” his mother said. “Even though he was this very rough and tough, get-it-done guy to the rest to the world.”
SSG McEnroe’s roommate explained that during a deployment to Afghanistan, the men were staying in a damp, stinking place in Kabul. Kevin decided the guys needed a place to sit and relax. So he and his roommate dug a fire pit, lining the wall with bricks and using an old satellite dish as the pit liner. The first time they lit a fire, chemical fumes nearly choked them, he said. But after that, he would go out there with his guitar and play songs by the fire.
In that landlocked, embattled capital, SSG McEnroe created a retreat. He nicknamed the fire pit “OFP” — short for oceanfront property.
SSG McEnroe was thinking about getting out. When he got back from his 4th and last deployment, SSG McEnroe was planning a trip with Kimberly Argo to Italy, where he intended to propose. But SSG McEnroe signed up for a 5th tour training troops in Jordan. SSG Kevin J. McEnroe of Tucson was killed with 2 other soldiers when the convoy they were in was attacked as it entered a Jordanian military base at Jafr.
SSG McEnroe is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Section 60. “The place where valor rests,” the Army chaplain explained.