"It's a god damn waste," exclaimed James Huffman in describing the death of his son to a Santa Cruz Sentinel reporter.

Kylan Alexander Huffman was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1972 to James and Dagmar Huffman. Kylan's father, a career army officer, took his family, which also consisted of another son, Niko, and a daughter, Alexia, with him on his assignments in Germany and the United States. Kylan's German born mother introduced her son to her native language and it became the second of his languages. Over the years he also became fluent in French, Arabic and Farsi.

In 1980 Colonel Huffman was reassigned to Fort Ord and the family moved into a home in Aptos, California. Kylan was enrolled in local schools and briefly attended a school for gifted children before transferring into the York School in Monterey. At York, a former teacher described him as, "a brilliant student fascinated with military history," and by others as being "a warm disciplined person with a captivating smile who accepted challenges without a murmur."

In 1990 Kylan graduated from York Academy and was appointed to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. Following his graduation in 1994, he enrolled in a master's program at the University of Maryland, which he completed the following year. In 1995 he married Heidi Lynn Jones who had been his sweetheart since high school and the two adopted the hyphenated surname of Jones-Huffman. In that same year he attended the Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island, and at its completion was assigned to the fleet.

Lt. (jg) Jones-Huffman served aboard the USS Raven and USS Ingraham prior to his release from active duty in 2001. He returned to Washington DC where he was employed by the Navy's Criminal Investigation Department. Kylan also taught the history of ancient Greece and Nazi Germany at the nearby US Naval Academy. During these years, he acquired a love for the Haiku style of Japanese poetry and soon became proficient in its use.

Because of his expertise in Middle Eastern affairs Jones-Huffman, was recalled to active duty in 2002 and assigned to Bahrain. On August 21, 2003 he was stalled in traffic in the southern Iraqi city of Hila when an Iraqi gunman approached and took his life with a bullet. His body was returned to the United States. The burial location of Kylan Jones-Huffman has not been identified.

(Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Remembering the Service Members Who Died in the Service of their Country, http:// www.fallenheroesmemorial.com/oif/profiles/joneshuffmankylana.htmlr, [16 September 2008]; SCSn 8/23/2003 1:1)