Army Staff Sergeant William E. Hasenflu

The content below includes audio from Army Staff Sergeant William Hasenflu's father, Earl Hasenflu. Audio transcripts are available below.

 

SSG William Hasenflu, military headshot

Army Staff Sergeant William E. Hasenflu, 38

1st Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, KY

K.I.A. September 28th, 2008 by hostile small arms fire in Paktia Province, Afghanistan

 

Remembering Bill Hasenflu

Born on September 29th, 1969 in Butler, Pennsylvania and having grown up in the nearby city of Meadville, Bill Hasenflu enlisted in the Navy at the age of 17—while still in high school--in a bid to travel and see the world. From there, he carried on to serve in the Naval Reserves, for a total of nine years of Navy service.

Hasenflu adopted Bradenton as his hometown toward the end of his Naval career, working at his father’s antifreeze recycling business. He also spent his time volunteering at local veterans centers, helping his mother at the daycare center she operated, and working as an instructor of both martial arts and Red Cross classes. He liked the beach and going out on the water—he often spent time with his family there, including his wife and three daughters. Hasenflu was also an amateur writer and sketch artist, and was working on a science fiction book at the time of his death.

AUDIO: Bill's life in Bradenton (Earl Hasenflu)

Described by his family as a person who always sought to help others no matter the cost, Hasenflu was moved by the events of 9/11 and enlisted in the Army in 2001, becoming a cavalry scout. He hoped to make a career out of military service: to earn a retirement pension to support his family, a feat which requires 20 total years in the armed forces.

AUDIO: Remembering Bill (Earl Hasenflu)


After serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq, Hasenflu deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 with the 4th Brigade Combat Team in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, the long fight to displace the fundamentalist Taliban from the region. On September 28th, Staff Sergeant Hasenflu was detaining suspected militants at a police station in the Afghan city of Gardez when an Afghan policeman turned on coalition forces and ambushed Hasenflu’s unit, killing Hasenflu and wounding three other U.S. soldiers, one of the detainees, and an Afghan interpreter working with the Americans.

Hasenflu pushed a younger soldier who was doing paperwork out of the way, saving that soldier’s life but being mortally wounded himself by five of the rogue policeman’s gunshots. He was thirty-eight years old, and died just one day before his thirty-ninth birthday. 

The two constants in Bill’s life were his love for his homeland and the love and commitment to his family, wife Judith, daughters Savannah, Veronica and Ashley. He will be forever missed, but never forgotten.

AUDIO: The incident at the Afghan police station (Earl Hasenflu)


Audio Transcripts

Transcript #1: Life in Bradenton (Earl Hasenflu)

(Laughter) Well, we lived in northwestern Pennsylvania, just 40 miles south of Erie, PA, right at the edge of the Snowbelt, so that’s pretty much what brought us down to Florida: I got real tired of shoveling snow.

He was actually still in the Navy when we came down, and then I think it was like a year or so later he had come out of the Navy, and at that point I had started an antifreeze recycling business. So, he started working for me in the recycling business, recycling antifreeze at different locations all throughout this part of the state, and we even did Kennedy Space Center, so.

He liked to play pool—he didn’t hang out at bars that much, only just to play pool. He wasn’t much of a drinker or a social drinker. He made friends very easily, and he liked to go out on the water—we'd go out on the boat a lot, hang out at the beaches, spend time like that, and he would spend time with his wife and kids, so we would take them out on the boat with us a lot of times.

And he liked to write. He was a pretty good artist also. And the sad part is he was working on a book when he got killed in Afghanistan—and it was pretty much a sci-fi type of book—sad part is he never got to finish it and I never got to read a lot of it, so. I got to read some of it,--it was really good, I thought—but unfortunately he didn’t get to finish it, so.

Transcript #2: Remembering Bill (Earl Hasenflu)

He was pretty concerned if somebody was having a problem. If there was some way he would try to maybe help them out some way, he would do that, he would go out of his way—he was very outgoing, and very considerate, and very concerned about other people.

I think that was another reason for him signing back up after 9/11: He was just really disturbed about what had gone on with the World Trade Center and everything, and he felt he needed to try to do his part to make things better or help out if he could, so.

I think just, you know, like I said, he was quite a humanitarian, so he definitely liked people, he liked to help people when he could. He would go out of his way to do that, so he just tried to be an all-around very decent individual, and I think he succeeded.

Transcript #3: The incident at the police station (Earl Hasenflu)

When—the day he got killed, he was—there was a younger soldier assisting him, doing paperwork on the hood of a Humvee about the incident they were just involved in, and when Bill’s seen this guy coming down with a gun, he figured out what’s going to happen real fast, I guess, and he shoved the young guy down to the ground, and then the guy started shooting.

When he started shooting, he had the gun pointed down, and hit Bill—my understanding was he started shooting, he hit Bill in the ankles, and shot him four times after that. He got hit a total of about five times. As he was raising the gun up he was still shooting and hit Bill five times, so.

Hasenflu and his family

Hasenflu and his wife