Christopher Speer
Recipient of the Purple Heart medal
Christopher James Speer (September 9, 1973 – August 6, 2002) was a United States Army combat medic and an armed member of a special operations team who was killed during a skirmish in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002. Speer, who was not wearing a helmet at the time because the mission called for indigenous clothing, suffered a head wound from a grenade and succumbed to his injuries approximately two weeks later. Omar Khadr was charged and convicted of throwing the grenade that killed Speer.
Training and deployment
Speer enlisted in the United States Army in July 1992 and after initial training as a combat medic, was assigned to the Army Hospital at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, until 1994. He received 18 Delta combat medic training at the Joint Special Operations University at Hurlburt Field,
Florida.
Speer was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group upon completing training as a Special Forces medic in 1997. As part of the 1st SFOD-D (known as Delta Force and based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina), he deployed to Afghanistan in Spring 2002 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Death
On July 27, 2002, Christopher Speer and a group of four other soldiers on reconnaissance patrol were injured during a firefight upon attacking a building in Khost Province, Afghanistan. SFC Christopher Speer was part of a squad assigned the task of going through the ruins of the building after it had been destroyed.
The injured Speer was evacuated by air to Bagram Air Force Base and then to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where he died on August 6, 2002.
“Christopher Speer” enters the record as recipient of the Purple Heart medal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Christopher, Speer and Recipient can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5113263. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 2002, 1992 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christopher Speer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.