USA Today Memorializes Slain Upstate Soldier

When the 9/11 attacks stunned America and the world in 2001, Easley's Barrett Austin was a just an 8-year-old second-grader. Little did he know then the toll that day would take on him and his family.

Austin, who would grow up to volunteer and fight for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2011, died April 21 after sustaining injuries suffered in a roadside bomb just four days earlier. 

Austin, one of seven South Carolina soldiers to die in the 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past year, and one of the nearly 6,700 soldiers to die on both wars in the past 12 years, was memorialized along with two other soldiers in a poignant story of the war's toll in an article by USA Today as part of its Memorial Day coverage.

Austin's parents said they believed the war would never last long enough to ensnare their young child in its clutches.

"His final thing to me was, 'Mom, I'm going to do this and I need you to support me. I want you to go down with me to the (enlistment) office. I'm going to do it regardless," Austin's mother, Yolanda, told USA Today.

The newly minted private first class, who would leave behind his parents and a new wife, would meet his end while driving an armored truck on patrol in Wardak province south of Kabul when insurgents attacked. A bomb exploded, causing massive head and chest trauma on April 17. Just four days later he was taken off life support.

"I said, 'Good Lord, if you just let me have my son, I'll give him back to you when the time comes,'" Yolanda told the newspaper. "Little did I know it was going to be a short 20 years."

To read the entire USA Today article and see a video of the family, click here.

To read Patch's coverage of Austin, click here.