Patrick Durham was 15 and starting the second month of his freshman year at Red Bank High School when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
Three years away from adulthood, Durham couldn’t know he’d eventually father three children or walk the streets of the Middle East as a U.S. Army soldier.
And while Durham showed an early interest in joining the military, his family never predicted a nine-year war would bring him home inside a flag-draped casket, one of 56 Americans to be killed in Afghanistan in August.
“You question and you do get upset,” his wife, Kristy Durham, said before her husband’s burial service. “You couldn’t find a better hero. He was full of life and a damn good soldier.”