A spring day, a country road, a soldier's
life: Remembering Spc. Larry Mossalli
By Ward Sanderson,
Stars and Stripes
Soldiers die in the line of duty.
They know this.
They’ve seen this in movies. They’ve heard this in boot camp.
Many die in great campaigns, the stuff of stone monuments. But Memorial Day brings not
only the black-and-white memories of world wars, the mourning for grandparents long gone,
but also recent deaths.
Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines — all still sacrifice all. They still fall at
sea, like the 17 sailors in the attack on USS Cole in Yemen. And they still die while
braving the sky, like the two Air Force pilots killed when their fighters crashed in
Scotland.
A soldier can even die on a spring morning in the country.
Back in December 1991, that spring day was a decade away for Larry Mossalli. He was
hyper-alive. Just out of high school. A kid.
And he was about to meet his wife — in boot camp.
Who would’ve thought you could find love at Lackland Air Force Base?
The Texas facility had a recreation center, though, where recruits could dance or play
video games. Mossalli began talking to this young woman recruit there. She seemed, what?
So familiar. Kristen was her name.
Soon they were best friends. It was like they’d always known each other.
This couldn’t lead anywhere, could it? Mossalli was headed to Colorado after camp.
She was off to Illinois.
Then the military handed Mossalli unexpected orders: He was off to Illinois himself. He
hadn’t even asked.
The couple began dating in January in Chanute, Ill. He was funny. And big — over 6
feet tall, all muscle. He was now a missile maintenance crewman. She was an aerospace
ground equipment mechanic.
When Mossalli was little, only 11, he ran a bicycle repair business. Kristen could
handle a 5-ton truck, both behind the wheel and beneath the hood. They both liked to fix
things.
Soon they were fixing to get married.
Mossalli proposed on Valentine’s Day. They had known each other two months.
Kristen Mossalli stayed in the service for two years. He stayed in for four, this first
time.
While stationed in North Dakota, he ran into his nickname. He was driving in the
country, and WHACK, he drove smack into a moose. But the thing didn’t die. It got up
and chased him. That moose flew.
After that, Mossalli was known as Moose.
A gentle Moose. A Moose who helped out with the Special Olympics and Christmas
charities.
Eventually, he left the service and became a trucker in Las Vegas.
Kristen remembers once walking out of a pizzeria there, a take-out place, when Moose
spotted a homeless family on the side of the road. Dinner plans had just hanged.
He said, "I guess we know where the pizza’s going." He gave them the
pie.
Kristen gave birth to two daughters, Jera and Loren. Kristen and her husband worked on
cars together, even rebuilding engines. "It’s a horsepower thing," Kristen
jokes.
They camped, rock climbed, went target shooting. But Moose grew restless.
"He just got to missing the military," Kristen says, "and decided to go
Army."
In 1999, he was off to Fort Sill, Okla., for another round of basic training. He
volunteered to be a paratrooper, so there would be more school at Fort Benning, Ga. There,
he earned his parachutist badge.
Now this Moose could fly, too.
Spc. Larry Mossalli knew parachuting was dangerous. "He was always — he was
convinced if he was going to die, it would be from ‘burning in,’ from
jumping," Kristen remembers. But the family was so proud.
It was during December ’99, eight years after he met Kristen, that he transferred
to Italy.
Kristen loved Vicenza and being overseas. Moose was more wait-and-see. He had been
around.
He was born in Los Angeles, had lived New Mexico with his grandparents, gone to high
school in Korea with his airline-employee stepfather. Italy was duty, not novelty.
He was assigned to be a howitzer man with the Battery D, 319th Airborne Field Artillery
Regiment. This he loved.
"He liked to play in the mud with the other boys," Kristen says, "and
blow things up."
With the 12 Bravo Cannon Crew, he handled ammunition and set up cannons.
Moose would heft 100-pound crates up over the sides of trucks by himself. He and his
fellow soldiers would put together a 2.5-ton howitzer in six minutes flat.
"It’s a lot of hard labor," says Sgt. David Parsons, a fellow cannon
man.
Moose never went far without his cell phone. Soldiers say he would be assigned to the
field for weeks but couldn’t stand to be away from his girls.
"He always talked about his kids and his wife," Parsons says.
"He was a great father," Kristen remembers. "Tremendous. Because he was
a big kid himself."
He always watched goofy movies with Jera, his oldest daughter. They’d watch
something funny, just one time, and they’d recite all the jokes. "He always had
new material," Kristen remembers.
And they’d soon have another new girl, Marissa. Their "Italy baby."
Moose loved his kids and he loved the parachute jumping, too, though he injured his
knee during a hard landing. After the surgery, he needed months of physical therapy.
This never stopped him. Take two months ago.
"We did a 20-mile road march," remembers Staff Sgt. Andrew Volk. "He had
surgery recently. But not only did he do it, he pushed me."
This discipline showed everywhere. "He was always real meticulous about his
trucks," Parsons says. Whenever his crew had to load pallets, Moose would make sure
his truck was swept out first. Swept spotless to shove pallets onto. That was just him.
He would visit the barracks to check up on the boys. If some had been drinking but
wanted to go out on the town, he’d volunteer to be designated driver.
Once Spc. Corky Ousley broke his leg in a parachute jump. He needed a ride from a
clinic to the hospital. And like magic, there’s Moose.
"It’s hard to find someone who would actually watch out for soldiers,"
Ousley says.
Moose’s Italian days soon became a cycle of heavy work and field training,
mellowed by all-comer barbecues at his place and off-days with the kids.
But something moved him in January. An Aviano soldier, Spc. Ray Collins, was killed
when a car he was driving collided with an oncoming truck. Collins was off-duty and had
picked up the car from a garage for a friend. He died returning from Vicenza.
Moose told Kristen: See. It can happen to anybody, any time.
Last month, Moose was riding in one of those 5-ton trucks, the kind Kristen used to
drive. It was Tuesday, April 24, and he was headed to a parachute drop zone. He
wasn’t flying out of an airplane. He was just going to pick up the parachutes after
paratroops landed.
This was duty on a spring morning in the country.
At 11:15 a.m., police reports say, the truck slid out of control during a turn. It went
over a road barrier and overturned down an embankment. One soldier broke an arm, another
was relatively unharmed.
Spc. Larry Mossalli was killed.
Everyone was stunned. He was only 28.
"I didn’t believe it," Parsons says. "I didn’t want to believe
it."
When asked to describe the feeling, Volk gets quiet. He struggles for the words.
"When you jump out of airplanes and deal with explosives," he begins, "you
don’t expect it to happen on a drive in the country."
The Mossalli girls are 8, 3 and 6 months old. The family will stay in Vicenza until
school lets out. Kristen isn’t sure where they’ll move then.
Her voice wavers some when she talks about this, but she tries to sound sunny. The
middle girl knows her father’s gone. The baby knows something’s wrong. The
oldest one is the one everyone worries over.
"It’s going to be hardest on Jera," Kristen’s mother said.
"She raised her daddy."
But something happened at Mossalli’s memorial service this month. The adults wept,
some terribly. But Jera got up to speak in front of everyone.
She held a drawing. A crayon field of stars, four people beneath, lined up tallest to
smallest: Mom, Jera, Loren, Marissa. They held hands. They didn’t look sad. Over
their heads, there was an angel.
Now the Moose flies forever.
Back to May stories
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Stories from March, 2001
Stories from February,2001
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Stories from December, 2000
Stories from November, 2000
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