How Sept. 11 Changed Us

Eddie Forrest Jr.’s mother and stepfather, Tina and Richard Hessler, hold a photo of their son in their High Ridge home.

Tina remembered when Forrest was young he watched the movie Top Gun.

“He told me, ‘I’m gonna be a Top Gun pilot and shoot down the bad guys,” she said.

After graduating from Rockwood Summit High School, he gave his mother a Christmas present and told her, “When you open this you’ll know what my profession will be.”

It was a figurine of a U.S. Army infantryman. This was just a couple of years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the United States already had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘I said, ‘Oh no, you can’t go now. There’s a war on,” Tina said. “He said, ‘What better time to go than when they need you?’”

Forrest joined the infantry, advanced to the rank of staff sergeant and learned to drive a Bradley armored personnel carrier. He also met his wife, Stephanie, in Colorado Springs, CO and they had two boys, Braden, now 5, and Jameson, who is 2.

During his second tour of Iraq, Eddie was able to come home for 15 days when Jameson was born March 9, 2009. He got to hold his youngest son.

On April 10, 2009, Eddie was back on patrol with his unit when a military checkpoint stopped a dump truck carrying grain. The truck had already made it through one checkpoint, but while going over speed bumps, the grain shifted, revealing explosives in the truck bed. Gunfire erupted.

Forrest, the unit’s gunner, got behind the APC’s .50 cal machine gun as his unit took stations inside the APC. Eddie fired all 200 rounds into the truck.

 “They told us he blew the front off that dump truck,” Richard said. “Their goal was to get to police headquarters where American MPs trained Iraqi police officers. There were hundreds of people in that building.”

But the dump truck struck a wall and exploded. Forrest and four others in his unit were killed. Forrest was 25.