Memorial Visit Guides Widow To Soldier's Final Resting Place

Army Special Forces Chief Warrant Officer Stanley L. Harriman was the first American combat casualty of Operation Anaconda, killed four years ago in Afghanistan.

It was months before his wife, Sheila, knew the truth: that shrapnel from an Air Force AC-130 gunship, not an al-Qaeda mortar, took the life of her husband. At 34, he had given 16 years to the service he loved.

Reluctant to let go, she kept his ashes in a custom-made glass case, which she displayed proudly in the home they shared in Wade, N.C.

The ashes might have remained there for good had she not made a trip to Arlington National Cemetery last fall to see a memorial to fallen soldiers.

It was then that she realized that's where he belonged.

"It was like standing on holy ground," she said. "The Lord said, 'It's time, and this is where he needs to be.' There was no other place for him. It was the right thing to do."

So yesterday, under a dazzling, sunny sky, Harriman's ashes arrived at his grave at Arlington National Cemetery, delivered with ceremony by a horse-drawn caisson.

Sheila Harriman and the couple's children -- Darbi, 10, and Christopher, 7 -- gathered with family and friends to say goodbye to a "man of perseverance, " who gave his life for others' freedoms.

Harriman said her husband joined the Army right out of high school in 1986. He entered the Special Forces in 1993. "He was going to be a lifer," she said. "He would say he was going to be in until they'd tell him, 'You're too old to move.' "

Harriman, who was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., was killed March 2, 2002, at the outset of a major battle in eastern Afghanistan. At the time of the attack, he was riding in a pickup truck, traveling in a column of U.S. and Afghan troops.

It wasn't until October of that year that a Pentagon report revealed that Harriman and three Afghan soldiers killed in the attack were slain by friendly fire.

The revelation made national headlines and raised renewed questions about the AC-130, whose primary mission is to hover over the battlefield and support ground forces with heavy fire.

In a "60 Minutes II" story on friendly fire that aired a year after Harriman's death, Sheila Harriman described the results of the harrowing, accidental attack on her husband's vehicle. Shrapnel came up through the passenger seat of the truck where her husband was sitting, she said.

"It went through his legs, his chest, his arm, severed a couple of his fingers, through his face, ripped most of his ear off and up through the back of his head," Sheila Harriman told reporter David Martin.

Harriman said the attack was so swift that her husband didn't feel any pain, but she said her grief was later compounded when she learned from a news reporter -- not the Army -- that her husband died from friendly fire.

"It was rather a shock," Harriman said yesterday in an interview after the memorial service. "General [Tommy] Franks made a blooper at a press conference, and there was [a reporter] banging on my door, asking how I felt."

Putting aside her grief, Harriman said her husband's devotion to the Army and President Bush has sustained her.

"He loved his job," she said. "He was doing exactly what he wanted to do, and he would not have wanted to go any other way than standing up to fight and support the American people."