A sergeant first class with the Nevada Army National Guard whose time in uniform included a stint with the 82nd Airborne Division was among the victims in Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Charleston Hartfield, 34, also wore a uniform for his full-time job, serving as a Las Vegas police officer. He spent more than a decade in law enforcement, according to notes on his memoir, which he self-published in July. He was off duty at the time of the shooting.
“He would do anything for his soldiers, if they needed it, without question, without fail,” Master Sgt. Lemuel Iniguez said in a Nevada National Guard news release. “He was that kind of a soldier. If you were a good troop or needed help, he’d do anything for you.”
Iniguez led a combatives class with the 6-foot-4 Hartfield, per the release.
The fallen NCO joined the Nevada Guard in 2004, shortly after wrapping up a yearlong deployment to Iraq, the release states. He served with the 82nd Airborne and as an instructor at the Nevada Army National Guard’s 421st Regional Training Institute prior to taking on what would become his final assignment as first sergeant of the Guard’s 100th Quartermaster Company.
Hartfield was married and had two children, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He also coached youth football; a post on the Henderson (Nevada) Cowboys Facebook page called about “Coach Chucky” said “he‘d touched many lives both on and off the field. He was a great man who we all lost way [too] early.”
Hartfield’s military awards included two Army Commendation Medals and five Army Achievement Medals. The Nevada National Guard held an “internal memorial” for Hartfield on Tuesday, per the news release.
“Charleston Hartfield lived to serve the public and protect his family,” Brig. Gen. William Burks, adjutant general of the Nevada National Guard, said in the release. “Losing any member of the Guard family is difficult, especially in such an unexpected manner: he is the epitome of a citizen-soldier.”
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Pentagon officials said there were no active-duty military among the 59 people killed in Sunday’s attack. At least 500 people were wounded.
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