Curtis Donald Feistner

West Point, 1990

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by Major John Lance, USAF (retired) on May 30, 2016:

I first met Curt back in 2000. My unit, the 31st Special Operations Squadron, was getting ready to de-activate and a company from the 160th SOAR would pick up our mission on the Korean peninsula. As the chief of plans at the time, I was tasked with meeting the commander of this new company and getting him spun up on the OPLAN for the ROK, all the exercises we supported and everything else that fell under flying operations. I was a bit disgruntled, figuring that the Army would send some humorless Major who would be a total pain in my ass for the next two or three weeks. So you can imagine my surprise when I actually met with Curt Feistner, an MH-47 pilot about my age (I graduated from USAFA back in '92). He was a great guy, funny, down to earth and smart as hell. He didn't even make that much fun of me when I went running with him up the 260-meter hill in Namsan Park in Seoul (I'm more a weight-lifter than a runner, so you can imagine how badly I got smoked by Curt). I felt much better about the hand-over between our squadron and the new company after Curt's TDY and told everyone I knew that the commander was a real pro, completely squared away. During the next couple of years, I kept in touch with Curt. 9/11 happened and suddenly Korea took a back-seat for SOF operations. Everyone was getting prepped for Afghanistan, even my training unit in New Mexico. Curt stopped by Albuquerque in Summer 2001 to see me when the MH-47s were doing some high-altitude training at Kirtland AFB (I was an MH-53J instructor there at that time). He even gave me a Nightstalker coin after we went out drinking his last night in ABQ, and if you know anything about the harsh history between the Pave Low community and the 160th, you know how unusual that was. But Curt was that kind of guy, you couldn't help but like and admire him and I was very honored to receive something like that from Curt. About 5 months after I dropped Curt off at his hotel, I heard about the crash in the P.I. I dreaded seeing the list of guys on the MH-47 that went down and sure enough, Curt was on board. It hit me pretty hard, because it was difficult to imagine Curt not being around, he was just one of those guys you always knew you were going to run into again as some exercise or deployment. He was a great person and an outstanding officer, I really wish more of the officers I knew in all the branches I worked with were more like Curt. As I sit here on this Memorial Day, I'm thinking about Curt, wondering if he would have been a colonel or even a general by now, leading the fight against ISIS or AQ. I still have that coin, and I'm looking at it right now, wondering if, maybe in the hereafter, I'll get another chance to go running with ol' Curt again....

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