Master Sergeant Tom Stone of the Vermont Guard died in Afghanistan in 2006.  Stone was an old soldier by most standards; he joined the Army right out of Woodstock High School.  He was 53 when he died, having volunteered for three successive deployments in Afghanistan where he served as a medic.

By all accounts he spent his life constantly on the move:  He was a rancher and a logger and he worked on oil rigs.  And he walked all the way around the planet.  He embodied a rare combination:  A restless spirit, yet an ability to make lifelong friends wherever he went. 

I bring all this up because Tom Stone's second cousin, Specialist Mariah Stone of Hartford, is also in Afghanistan, serving her first deployment with the Vermont National Guard.  She’s based at Camp Phoenix in Kabul where she works in logistics.

Spc. Stone says she didn’t join the guard because of Tom, but she tries to emulate the values she feels he embodied.  She says Stone’s life is “a huge inspiration to me in my military career, because of his ability to connect with people on a deep level in a very short amount of time.”

She was a child when Stone took off for his walk around the world.  It took him 8 years to walk 22,000 miles.  By the time she was older, Stone was deployed.  Her sense of him as a soldier is based on talking with people who knew him and witnessed what she calls his “deeply human” nature and his concern for both his fellow soldiers and the Afghan people he came into contact with as a medic.

Next to Mariah Stone’s desk are reminders of her cousin, including photos and memorials that she’s begun to collect.

Stone’s partner Rose Loving of Tunbridge has dedicated herself to building schools in Afghanistan in his memory.  She’s teamed up with Vermonter Jonathan Hoffman who has spent a number of years helping Afghans build schools in their villages.  Last summer Hoffman’s non-profit,  Direct Aid International began building its first schools with money raised in Tom Stone’s name.