A South Carolina War Hero Is the Namesake for the Navy’s Newest Destroyer

The U.S. Navy is adding a new battleship, and its namesake will be a South Carolina war hero.

A few days before Thanksgiving 2010 and about a month after his 21st birthday, Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter launched himself in front of a live grenade to save a fellow Marine.

The impact of the blast took Carpenter’s right eye and decimated the rest of his body. One doctor told Vanity Fair in 2016 that Carpenter’s right arm had been so badly hurt it was like splinting a wet rag.

But miraculously, Carpenter lived. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2014 – the highest award given by the United States president. In the years since, he earned a degree in international studies from the University of South Carolina, and got a standing ovation at his 2017 graduation ceremony. He backpacked across Europe. He took up skydiving and marathon running. And in 2020 he published a memoir about his experiences called “You Are Worth It: Building a Life Worth Fighting For.”

Now, Carpenter has been selected as the namesake for the newest U.S. Navy destroyer – small battleships used in a variety of military operations. The new ship will be built at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine, according to an announcement from Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan.

The U.S.S Kyle Carpenter will join several other new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers commissioned by the U.S. Among recent missions, U.S. destroyers have been sent to patrol the country’s southern border and work with the U.S. Coast Guard to intercept illegal drug shipments, according to reporting from Military Times.

Carpenter grew up about 40 minutes from Columbia, in Batesburg-Leesville, where he played football and enjoyed being a big brother, according to excerpts from his memoir.

He joined the Marines in 2009 and did his Marine bootcamp training at Parris Island, near Beaufort. In July 2010, his team was deployed to the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold and a major site for opium farming.

The December prior, then-President Barack Obama signed an order to deploy another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, setting the stage for what would become the deadliest year in the Afghanistan war for U.S. and NATO troops, and among the deadliest for civilians.

By the end of 2010, more than 700 people serving in the military, either with the United States or another allied country, had died during the war. By the time the U.S. formalized its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2020, nearly 2,500 U.S. soldiers had died. But 2010 remained the deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan, according to casualty reports compiled by iCasualties.org.

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