Memorial for Kevin Howard

Raising money for a memorial to be placed at Sentinel Peak Park in Tucson, AZ in memory of Kevin Howard. The memorial will be a bench with the Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor emblem, the French Foreign Legion seven flame grenade emblem and the Assyrian star of Ashur, overlooking the Tucson skyline and next to it a bronze plaque which will tell Kevin's story.

For those of you who did not know Kevin. Kevin served in the US Marine Corps, the French Foreign Legion, and was a volunteer with Kurdish and Assyrian militias in the war against the Islamic State. Raised in an orphanage, Kevin joined the Marines at age seventeen and served in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2007, while serving in the Shengal region of Iraq, he became acquainted with the Kurds and Ezedi, a people he would come to love and respect dearly. He promised himself that he would one day return to Shengal; a promise he would fulfill a decade later under terrible circumstances.

In 2016, after hearing of the Sinjar Massacre against the Ezedi at the hands of ISIS, Kevin took it upon himself to return to the region and continue the fight he had begun a decade earlier. Volunteering with the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG,) Kevin and I met later that year when he joined my unit, the YBT (combat medical unit.) His skill, dedication and vision were readily apparent to all of us and we chose him to command our unit. Under his leadership, we established a course which trained and equipped nearly one hundred of the local militia in combat first aid. Kevin then lead the YBT during the battle of Tabqa, establishing forward field hospitals which saved hundreds of lives.

In the Summer of 2017, Kevin and I joined a local Assyrian militia and fought as a sniper team in the battle to retake Raqqa from ISIS. He distinguished himself countless times during the five month long battle, saving the lives of many of our friends and dispatching many enemies, earning himself the name "the tiger of Mesopotamia."

As many others who have served, Kevin fought a long and brutal battle with depression and PTSD upon returning home, and despite his best efforts and the support of countless friends and family who loved him dearly, Kevin took his own life on April 30th of 2019.

Those of us who knew him know that the world is now a much worse place for his passing. There will never be another Kevin Howard, and men of his calibre are very few and far in between. We will never forget him.

-Doc