Officials with Air Force Reserve Command’s 315th Airlift Wing at Charleston AFB, S.C., recently held a ceremony to rededicate Building 60 on the base in memory of TSgt. Carl Church, an airman who died in 1974. Church, a native of Bucyrus, Ohio, was an Air Reserve Technician and a C-141 flight engineer assigned to the wing’s 701st Airlift Squadron. He died in August 1974 when his C-141 crashed while on a mission to La Paz, Bolivia. Building 60, which now houses the 315th AW headquarters, was originally named in Church’s honor in November 1975. But following a renovation in 1999, the building no longer carried the plaque dedicated to Church. Now it does once again, and it is the only building on the base named in memory of a Reserve airman. (Charleston report by SrA. Dani Pacheco)
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.