A eulogy for a fellow planner

Captain Dan Utley was killed in a vehicle accident in Mali on April 20, 2012.

I was extraordinarily fortunate to have shared Dan's professionalism, skill, work ethic, sense of humor, and above all, his friendship, if only for the short time that we (and his wife Katie) worked together as members of the Combined/Joint Task Force-101 Joint Plans Group.

I've written about when a certain staff director pulled the plug on his directorate’s participation in writing the second framework order that Combined/Joint Task Force-101 wrote during my Afghanistan tour from 2008-2009. Never mind that the civil affairs directorate was normally responsible for writing the (economic) development concept of operations for the framework order. It didn’t matter, because as I learned, I could trust that senior officer about as far as I could throw him.

Dan was the one military member of the CJ9 directorate who came to the CJ5 directorate to voice his displeasure. He was as pissed off as I was when he was told by someone three paygrades senior to him to stop working on the order. He had no choice - and felt like he was turning his back on the people in the Joint Plans Group. We understood - and knew he would more than make up for it later on. He was a captain, and a junior one at that, when he was in the JPG. It didn’t matter. He punched so far above his weight class as a planner that we were glad to have him on any project we worked. He made every group he worked with better, and I save that praise for extraordinarily few planners.

Dan gave me his copy of Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell about midway through the tour. I will, of course, keep my copy of that book in perpetuity. That was a much-needed comic break from what was, as I look back at the pages of this blog from February 2008 to April 2009, a very, very bleak period of my life.

We are all lessened with his passing. Rest in peace, Dan.

For the record, that makes 15. Dan is the second whose death was in the line of duty but not in combat. And the war grinds inexorably on...