A Generous, But Dead, U.S. Military Officer

Air Force Lieut. Colonel John Darin Loftis, who was killed Saturday inside the Afghanistan interior ministry, was a father of two. He spoke to his mother three days before he died, on his 44^th birthday. A proficient speaker of Pashto, one of the common local languages in Afghanistan, he’d been given a Pashto name during an earlier deployment: Esan, meaning generous. He sent his family a video holiday greeting from Afghanistan in 2009: “Don’t worry about us over here.”