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1991 – November 2026
The rolls: for the wars since 2001 the Defense Department's casualty record is kept by home town, and the statewide compilations of it were read whole. Indiana's Operation Enduring Freedom dead number 19 in the compilation read; no St. Joseph County name stands among them. Indiana's Operation Iraqi Freedom dead run past a hundred names; the county's one name among them is Technical Sergeant Ryan Andrew Balmer of Mishawaka, killed near Kirkuk on 5 June 2007 — Mishawaka's own, carried whole in that build, and printed here as the county frame and the boundary: the nearest post-2001 loss to this ground is the next city's. No name in either roll carries a Granger home of record, and the Gulf War of 1991 adds none on the lists consulted. The county veterans index agrees at its strength: its Iraq-era rows attribute men to South Bend, Mishawaka and North Liberty, and none to Granger.
The honest frame: Granger in these years is a place of some thirty thousand people, and it sends its sons and daughters to the services as every such place does; Penn High School's graduates from these subdivisions have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in numbers no one has rolled. What the record reached contains is no roll of them and no death among them under this ground's name — a negative about the records, printed as such, with the settling sources named: the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's Defense-Department-based roll of the state's military dead, which is the same record in its fullest public form, and the county's obituary record for the local tie. The file claims neither a sacrifice it cannot name nor an absence it cannot prove beyond the rolls it read.
Sources:
- The Defense Department casualty record as compiled in the statewide Indiana fallen lists (Genealogy Trails' Indiana Iraq/Afghanistan casualty compilations), read whole — OEF: 19 names, none of this county; OIF: the county's one name, Balmer of Mishawaka.
- The St. Joseph County veterans index — the Iraq-era rows.
- The Mishawaka build — Balmer's record whole.