Faith bolsters Topeka family after son dies in Iraq war

Soldier's letter rekindles memories

? Raymond Thomas was talking with a father’s pride about his soldier son when he decided to get the day’s mail. He thumbed through the stack of bills and sympathy cards and suddenly saw the familiar handwriting.

The letter from Army Spc. Kyle Thomas was dated Sept. 11 — two weeks before he was killed by a bomb blast in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

He reads the words penned by the 23-year-old paratrooper, smiling at times. He said his son thanked him for socks and T-shirts the family sent and asked for some things his buddies needed.

“He always thought of others first,” said Raymond Thomas, an elementary school principal.

The letter included three photographs of his son with fellow members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade plus some Iraqi currency with Saddam’s picture.

The Thomas family always has been closeknit — father, mother, Kyle, and younger brother Craig. After his unit was sent from Italy to Iraq in March, the family received maybe a dozen letters.

There have been tears and sadness and there will be more, his father said. But the family’s bedrock beliefs will sustain them, Raymond Thomas said.

“I’m going to miss him, but what gives me peace is that he’s in heaven with God,” he said. “He gave not only his heart, mind and soul, but his body as well. Like with everything else, he gave his all.”

As Craig Thomas sees it: “Faith took him over there, faith took him to heaven and faith allows us to understand.”

By all accounts, Kyle Thomas was a man of many talents. Whether it was building a grandfather clock, designing theater sets, playing football, tinkering with a car or being a ballet dancer, he excelled.

“He was the jack of all trades and wrote the book on every one of them,” said his 21-year-old brother.

wyatt Johnston, left, listens as Raymond Thomas reads a letter from his son Army Spc. Kyle Thomas. The letter, dated Sept. 11, arrived in the mail five days after Kyle was killed in an explosion in Iraq. Johnston is a longtime friend of Kyle.

Kyle Thomas didn’t start out to be a soldier.

At Topeka West High School, he played football and wrestled. By his junior year, he swapped his football helmet for ballet shoes.

Mark Smith said he got his friend, a member of the Topeka Fencing Club, interested in ballet when he asked him to help out with a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.”

“He agreed to come and do some fencing for Romeo and Juliet and got interested in dancing,” Smith recalled.

While performing in Topeka, he met another dancer, Cari Dyke, whom he married in July 2002. She’s with a dance company in Louisville, Ky.

He earned two summer scholarships at the Rock School of Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia. Graduating high school in 1998, he found work with the Dayton Ballet Company in Ohio and the Evansville Dance Theater in Indiana.

With a bright dance future, he suddenly shifted directions, his mother, Deborah Thomas, said. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks he was kayaking at Clinton Lake near Lawrence when his craft flipped over and he almost drowned.

“He said that as he was going down the Lord spoke to him and said he needed him to go into the Army,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Mom, I won’t be coming back from this mission.’ I said I knew it was a calling from God.”

Raymond Thomas recalled a similar conversation.

“He said ‘I’ve been called by God to serve and I’ve got to do this,'” he said. “What can you say to that? There was no comeback to that. His mind was made up and he was going to do it.”