Spc Michael Christopher Balsley
Birth: June 30, 1983 in Castro Valley, California
Death: January 25, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq
Spc. Michael C. Balsley of Hayward, California was a graduate of Mount Eden High School. He was sensitive and looked at the world a little different than most. As a little boy, he climbed their home’s dangerously high roof to reach the neighborhood birds. His father built him cardboard wings and let him jump off a backyard picnic table instead. The family kept a mean-spirited Muscovy duck named Simon that used to attack everybody. But Mike was the only guy that Simon liked. He used to sit on his lap. Michael was a fairly poor student at Mount Eden High School and he often got into mischief. He worked the merry-go-round and children’s rides at Kennedy Park, then at Festival Cinema. He later worked with his father at an AC Delco auto parts warehouse, but after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks Balsley wanted to join the military to serve his country, following in the footsteps of his father, a Vietnam veteran. He was 23.
Army
3rd Squadron
61st Cavalry Regiment
2nd Infantry Division
Fort Carson, Colorado
Burial is at Hillcrest Cemetery in Porterville, California
The Spc Michael Christopher Balsley by Freedom Remembered, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
