James Daniel Riekena
Army SGT
From: Missoula, Missoula County
Date of Death: 1/14/2007
Conflict: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Riekena, 22, a specialist in the guard’s 145th Brigade Support Battalion based in Post Falls, Idaho, died Sunday of injuries from a roadside bombing near his Humvee in Baghdad, the Defense Department confirmed Tuesday. He had volunteered for a second assignment in Iraq during the fall after his engineering company spent 16 months there with the Idaho National Guard’s 116th Brigade Combat Team. Born in Missoula, Montana, he moved with his parents to the Seattle area in 1993. After graduating from Redmond High School nine years later, he went to Idaho to work, joined the National Guard, and became a combat engineer. He then returned to Redmond before being sent to Iraq in 2004. He specialized in finding and disarming bombs. “When he got home and I’d said, ‘This is what fascinates me,’” McCue recalled. “‘Can’t you pick something safe like being a cook?’” Relatives and friends said he also enjoyed literature and writing and hoped to go to college and become an English teacher. During his first tour in Iraq, he wrote to his grandparents in Missoula: “It’s such an odd place. My heart aches at the sight of how they live, though from it, as with all things in life, I continue to learn. Respect and appreciation for all that I have. To really cherish the smallest of things I never did before. Another lesson is that again of hope — to keep hope for a people and place where it seems all hope is lost.”
