What is a friend? What is a true "hero"? Read on.

Ultimate sacrifice saved friend's life
Selfless action placed Colburn between bomb, driver

Spc. Michelle Pfister, 20, poses for a photo while on duty in Iraq. Friends Colburn and Pfister were "completely inseparable," according to Pfister's sister, April Shah.

Colburn

At 20 years old, Spc. Gavin Colburn made the ultimate sacrifice while serving in Iraq.

And while his friends and family grieve his loss, another family grieves as well - while also knowing their loved one will be coming home because of Colburn's selflessness.

April 20, Colburn and a fellow specialist, 20-year-old Michelle Pfister, were part of a convoy riding along a supply route. As they made their way, two homemade bombs were detonated in their path.

"They got hit by an (improvised explosive device), and then when they got hit by the second one, I guess he realized it was going to go off and he placed himself between the blast and the female co-driver," said Sgt. 1st Class James Maynard, truckmaster and training non-commissioned officer for the 542nd Transportation Company.

Colburn was killed. Pfister was wounded in the attack, but had Gavin not acted quickly and selflessly, she'd likely have been killed.

Maynard said Colburn had been assigned to the 542nd, based in Kingsbury, Ind. During a drill Maynard supervised in April 2004, he met Colburn.

"He was a real nice guy," Maynard said. "He'd make you laugh - a very good sense of humor about himself. If you were down, you couldn't be down long around him."


Completely inseparable
It was that personality that helped form the fast friendship between Pfister and Gavin, said April Shah, Pfister's older sister.
"They were, like, completely inseparable," Shah said. "Every time she would call home, Gavin would be right there, and they would switch phones so she could talk to his family and he could talk to our family."

Pfister is still in or near Iraq, still recovering from the attack, Shah said. It took her a few days for it to sink in her best friend had traded his life for hers.

"For a while, she was kind of in denial, I guess, of the whole thing even happening," Shah said. "About a week after or so, she said things started to settle in. Gavin would wake her up, come to her door every morning and say, 'Are you ready to go to breakfast?' The first morning after (the attack), it started to settle down. She was lying in bed and said, 'Gavin should be here right now.'"

For Shah and her parents, the news of the attack hit hard despite the knowledge that Pfister would be OK. Shah's mother called her at 8:30 a.m. local time following the attack to ask Shah to come over under the pretense of showing her vacation photos.

"I'm driving down there, and I'm like, 'Something's up,' " Shah said. "My mom says, 'I'm going to tell you something, and I don't want you to get upset.' You know that's never good."

"It's not like when she was here and she'd broken her arm, and you can go over to see her and see that she's okay. She's thousands of miles away. You have to take her word that she's going to be okay. That's a little bit harder."

'Take care of her'
Shah wasn't able to make it to Gavin's funeral - missing it was "the hardest thing for me," she said - but she spent a week writing Gavin's family a letter, but she didn't know what to say. Figuring that out gave Shah a chance to work through her emotions and start to heal.
Once the letter was finished, she stood at the mailbox for about five minutes - trying to decide whether to mail it - before opening the slot.

"I just dropped the letter in the mail," she said. "It was extremely difficult. My sister's OK, for the most part. She's banged up, bruised. She's going to come home."

Pfister's father, Brian, recently spoke of what Colburn told him the last time they spoke when Michelle called home.

"He told us that he would watch out for her and take care of her," Pfister said to the Associated Press. "He did."

Shah recognizes a large part of her family's satisfaction comes at the expense of Colburn's family, whose sacrifice pains her too.

"(I want) to thank his family for just raising a person who wouldn't even think twice about saving someone else, knowing that if he saved my sister, he was probably going to die from that," she said.

"He didn't even think twice."