Eulogy for Ken Ballard

A vibrant young man was lost to us last week. 

When Ken Ballard was killed all of us realized a deeper meaning to terms such as heartache, heartbreak, and heartsick.

We all knew Ken in different ways, so we carry different parts of him with us.

Professors and advisors, whether they admit it or not, have favorites.  Ken was one of my favorites and favorite students are like family—they become part of you.  Strangely, I knew nothing of his personal life and a little about his professional life, but my heartache comes from knowing his potential.  Over fours years time, in the classroom, as his advisor, and through his work with the Society of International Affairs (MUN/Crisis Simulation), I recognized his leadership capabilities and watched them grow and saw his ability to easily connect with people who were often very different from himself.  I also knew some of his thinking about where he wanted to go in the long haul.  Many of our conversations his senior year revolved around that and his hopes of eventually going to graduate school and working in Washington.

Ken was bright, brash, funny, and sometimes irreverent.  Think of the picture in the Hawaiian shirt on his mom’s website.  And how can you not love a guy who used e-mail names like TankerKen and Armormoose?

He touched the hearts of many and those hearts hurt for him and those he left behind.

Here are some of the reactions to Ken’s death by some of my other graduates who were in school with him.

Deanna Jones: “This is extremely sad.  My heart dropped when I saw the title of the email.”

Ashle Baxter:  “Although I hadn’t seen Ken since my last MUN trip, I was shocked and saddened to hear about his death.” [Ashle graduated in 1999.]

Sara Rainwater:  I hadn’t been in touch with him in quite awhile, but I thought about him often and worried that he was one of the guys I would hear bout on the news….Ken was such a wonderful person and I am very sad to hear about this.”

Ken’s commanding officer wrote the following in a Charlie Company website newsletter:

Ken fell on my left flank just after midnight on Memorial Day.  I eulogized Ken by publicly stating that he was the most aggressive officer in my command and that he died as such.  It is true.  That night I personally selected him to serve on my left in the most forward position in the company during hours of intense contact with enemy forces in downtown Kufa.  I selected Ken because I knew he was fearless and he was a brilliant fighter.

Ken was commanding the 2^nd Platoon, Charlie Company, 2^nd Battalion, 37^th
Armored Regiment, 1^st Armored Division.

When I talked to his mom last Wednesday, she told me his unit had been under fire every day in May.

Ken traveled with us in the Fall of 1998 to the National Collegiate Security Conference at Georgetown University.  Spring semester he was unable to make the trip with us to Charlottesville, VA for another conference.

When I arrived at the Rec Center to pick up student in a 15 seat van in the middle of the night, one of the students had a tank round.  After saying to the student, “it’s not live is it” and being told it wasn’t.  I said, “OK, why do you want to take a tank round to Virginia?  The reply was, “Ken couldn’t come with us because of his military obligations, but we wanted him to be there in spirit.”  I just last week found out that it was a tank round given him as a memento by his commander in Bosnia.

In some way, it is fitting that we lost Ken at the beginning of Memorial Day and are remembering him the day after the 60^th anniversary of D-Day.  Ken had the same sort of spirit as those young men lost on the beaches and in the towns of Normandy so many years ago—gallantry, bravery, and heroism—heroism born not from thoughts of glory but a sense of responsibility and obligation to do the best to meet their commitments—regardless of the cost.

We have lost Ken the person, lost his potential, because our hero was meeting his military obligations, yet once again; but his spirit will always be with us.  His legacy will be the pieces of that noble spirit we can pass on to others.

Professor Anne Sloan