Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Capt. Michael Todd Fiscus, 36, of Milford, became one of the latest casualties of the War on Terror when he and three other Hoosier National Guardsmen were killed in Afghanistan Saturday. A land mine exploded under their vehicle south of Kabul, Afghanistan, military officials said.
Fiscus' widow, Paula, is a Milford Middle School teacher. The couple have two children, Alexandra, 5, and Gabrielle, 4.
Master Sgt. Michael Heister, 33, of Bluffton, who was killed in the same explosion, also has ties to the area. His great-uncle is Jerry Richardson of Syracuse.
Spc. Norman Snyder, 19, of Carlisle, and Spc. Brett Hershey, 23, of Indianapolis, also were killed along with Fiscus. The men were members of the 76th Infantry Brigade based in Indianapolis.
Fiscus was an Image Air charter pilot, with a hangar at Warsaw Municipal Airport.
The four deaths bring to seven the number of U.S. military personnel from Indiana who have died in Afghanistan or Pakistan since America's anti-terrorism operation began there in late 2001. Since early 2003, 39 people from Indiana have died after being sent to the Mideast since the invasion of Iraq began.
The blast highlighted the dangers still facing foreign and Afghan troops more than three years after the fall of the Taliban, although there were conflicting accounts about whether the mine was freshly laid or left over from Afghanistan's long wars.
A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the blast. But U.S. spokeswoman Lt. Cindy Moore said investigators suspect the mine was an old charge dislodged by recent rain and snow or that the vehicle had wandered into an unmapped minefield.
"We believe it was an old mine which could have shifted," she said.
The victims were among a group of American and Afghan officials scouting a potential site for a shooting range in Logar Province, 25 miles south of the Afghan capital, when one of their three vehicles hit the mine, Moore said.
About 17,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan battling a stubborn Taliban-led insurgency focused on the south and east, and training the new Afghan army. The U.S. military says its air and ground operations have killed eight suspected militants and four civilians in the past week alone.
According to U.S. Department of Defense statistics, 122 American soldiers have died since American forces invaded to oust the former Taliban government for harboring al-Qaida militants after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Many have been killed in accidents, including strikes on old mines left behind by Soviet troops, who occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, or the Afghan factions, including the Taliban, who fought each other after the Soviets withdrew.
Moore said U.S. troops had first toured the scene of Saturday's incident about a week earlier in search of a site for a training range for the Afghan army.
Gov. Mohammed Aman Hamini said the incident occurred in a desert area crisscrossed by rough tracks.
"It's an old mine. There's no traffic on the route they took, but the Russians used to use it because they were afraid of the main road," Hamini told The Associated Press.
However, Mullah Hakim Latifi, a man who claims to speak for the Taliban, said its fighters detonated the mine by remote control.
"We've said again and again that we would resume our holy war in the spring," Latifi told AP by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.
The blast Saturday was the deadliest incident for the U.S. military since May 29, 2004, when four American special forces soldiers were killed in Zabul province, near the Pakistani border, reportedly by an intentionally laid mine.
The bloodiest incident was an accidental explosion at an arms dump in Ghazni province that killed eight American soldiers in January last year.
Fiscus' death brings the Kosciusko County death toll to two.
The first Kosciusko County casualty was David Fribley of Warsaw, who was killed in Iraq March 23, 2003.
Killed in action during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. Marine Corps lance corporal was the first Hoosier casualty, too. From Atwood, Fribley was a 1996 Warsaw Community High School graduate.
