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After 7 Deployments and 6 Bronze Stars, Killed by an Afghan Ally

An Army carry team at Dover Air Force Base transferred the remains of Command Sgt. Maj. Timothy A. Bolyard, who was killed on Monday in an insider attack in Afghanistan.Credit...Alex Brandon/Associated Press

Command Sgt. Maj. Timothy A. Bolyard did not wear all his body armor on Monday for a routine meeting with Afghan troops at a base outside Kabul. He was an experienced Army leader among allies. It was a customary gesture of trust and respect.

But in a smoldering war where closure has proved elusive, even years after American combat operations officially ended, that gesture of friendship was his last.

As Sergeant Major Bolyard, the top-ranking American enlisted soldier in the 3rd Squadron, 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, walked with other advisers across the base in Logar Province, two Afghan police officers opened fire with a rifle and a machine gun, killing Sergeant Major Bolyard and wounding another American soldier, according to an American military official familiar with the episode.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the specific motive for the attack was not yet clear, but that tensions had been simmering between American and Afghan troops in the region since an airstrike in August, which the Afghans say killed more than a dozen Afghan police officers.

After the shooting on Monday, American advisers in the area went on lockdown, the official said. The Army said the episode was under investigation.

The sergeant major’s death was the latest in a long string of what are called green-on-blue killings of coalition soldiers by their Afghan allies. It ended a 24-year Army career that spanned the entire history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sergeant Major Bolyard, 42, was deployed to combat zones seven times. He drove over the desert berm that marked the Kuwait-Iraq border during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for what Pentagon planners had said would be a short and relatively tidy liberation, and he stayed through repeated extensions of that mission as lawlessness ignited into insurgency in Iraq. He went back again to lead soldiers through the bloodiest months of sectarian fighting around Baghdad in 2006, and helped forge the calm that emerged in Iraq, at least for a few years, at the end of the American occupation, when bombings subsided, markets reopened and families returned to shattered neighborhoods.

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Sergeant Major Bolyard’s 24-year Army career included seven deployments to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. He earned six Bronze Stars, two of them for valor in combat.Credit...Department of Defense

“This man’s career was this war — he was the boots on the ground in nearly every stage of this effort,” said Nathan Metcalf, who served with Sergeant Major Bolyard in Iraq.

Comrades called him Sergeant Bull. He earned six Bronze Stars, including two for valor in combat. Roadside bombs, firefights, mortar shells whistling down in the night — men he fought with say he faced them with a generous wad of tobacco in his cheek and a laconic confidence they found contagious.

“If there was anyone I wanted to fight beside, it was him; there was none better, and everyone knew it,” one of his commanders in Iraq, Darron Wright, wrote in a book about their 2003 deployment.

Tim Bolyard grew up on a quiet country road in the West Virginia hills, and joined the Army right after high school in 1994. He liked fishing. He liked Metallica. And he liked the Army. As he rose through the enlisted ranks, he read widely and took classes toward a college degree, according to Adam Tymensky, who served with Sergeant Major Bolyard on two deployments to Iraq.

“He was constantly trying to learn, always wanting to better himself,” Mr. Tymensky said. “He never cut corners.”

The meandering strategies of wars that have dragged on for a generation were Sergeant Major Bolyard’s to execute. For much of his adult life, his home was a simple military cot with a photo of his son taped to the wall.

During the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Tymensky said, their scout platoon would often go days without rest: providing security for the battalion commander during the day, and raiding houses at night to search for insurgent fighters. “We’d be dead tired, but if someone needed something, he was right back up again,” he said.

Combat experience made the sergeant major a demanding leader. He rarely raised his voice, men who served under him said, but he pushed them hard to be ready for the worst.

On one training exercise in 2007, he had his troops run through the hills outside Fort Carson, Colo., taking turns carrying loaded stretchers.

“It was brutal,” said Mr. Metcalf, who shared a stretcher with the sergeant major. “But he had been in combat, and knew this training would pay off.”

In combat zones, he found time to dress as Santa and hand out gifts, and to grill holiday steaks for his soldiers.

Repeated deployments left a long list of birthdays missed and anniversaries apart. His marriage ended in divorce. Even so, his son, Preston Bolyard, 20, thanked him in a Facebook post for managing to be a “great father, husband, and friend to many people.”

“My dad is definitely my hero,” he wrote.

Sergeant Major Bolyard died on what was likely to be his last deployment before retirement. Though the United States officially ended combat operations in Afghanistan nearly four years ago, the Army still has some 15,000 troops in the country. Many of them are doing what the sergeant major was sent to do: help train Afghan forces and pave the way for an eventual American pullout from what veterans of the conflict have come to call “the forever war.”

He was sent to Forward Operating Base Shank, a small base that had been shuttered in 2014 only to be reopened in recent months, along with some other abandoned posts, as American advisers shifted their activities closer to the front lines.

Sergeant Major Bolyard was the 154th member of the American-led coalition to be killed by an insider attack, according to an Army document. The frequency of those attacks reached a peak in 2012, accounting for roughly 15 percent of coalition deaths that year, and then dwindled as Western troops withdrew. There were four insider attacks in 2017, and there have been two so far this year. Significant numbers of heavily armed troops are assigned to try to protect trainers like the sergeant major against threats from their allies.

As news of the sergeant major’s death circulated through his network of Army friends on Facebook, there was little talk of strategy or mission; the focus of most comments was on a man they loved and respected who gave his all, even though his efforts could sometimes be swallowed up and forgotten in the “forever war.”

“When I first saw the news, something slipped out of my mouth,” Mr. Metcalf said. “I said, ‘He was just killed, and for what?’ And I was ashamed of myself for saying it.”

“I know what he died for,” Mr. Metcalf continued. “He died because he really did believe in protecting innocence and looking for the bad guys.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Soldier Who Dodged Enemy Fire in Two Wars Is Shot Dead by Allies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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