Hawaii was Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician Sean P. Carson’s adopted home.
It was where the petty officer first class was stationed from 2001 to 2004, where he met his wife, Nicole, and where he loved to surf practically every day on visits, his widow said.
"It’s Hawaii. Coming here, it calmed him," said Nicole Carson. "There was no work. He got to relax and go to all the warm beaches and all the warm ocean water."
It’s also where the father of a 4-year-old daughter will return after he was killed Thursday in the crash of a Schofield Barracks Black Hawk helicopter in southern Afghanistan.
Nicole Carson said she plans to spread her 32-year-old husband’s ashes in the surf at Leftovers on the North Shore, one of his favorite surf spots.
She was at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Sunday when his body was returned to U.S. soil.
"Our ultimate goal was to get back to Hawaii and have a home here and settle down," she said.
Now, Nicole Carson is processing a new reality and a very different future.
"There’s so much stuff that needs to be taken care of," she said. "I’m just trying to be strong and get through that, and we have a daughter, so I want to make sure that she’s OK."
Carson, based in San Diego with Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 3, was killed in the crash with four Hawaii-based soldiers — the crew on the Black Hawk — along with two San Diego-based Navy SEALs, three Afghan security force members and a civilian Afghan interpreter.
Mayme Dyslin, aunt of Sgt. Richard A. Essex, 23, of Kelseyville, Calif., a door gunner who was killed, said Friday that Army officials did not discuss the cause of the crash.
"They didn’t say it was shot down or anything; they just said it had crashed and that they (all on board) had passed away," Dyslin said. "I know that the Afghanistan rebels are taking responsibility for it, but the U.S. Army didn’t confirm that to us."
Nicole Carson, who was born and raised in Hawaii and graduated from Maryknoll School, said she and her husband lived in San Diego, and when Sean was not deployed, the family would come out to Hawaii at least twice a year during the summer and winter swells.
"Sean was an avid surfer. He lived and loved it," she said.
He also doted on his daughter, Leila.
"He loved to take her out, anywhere. Anything she wanted to do, he would do it for her," Nicole Carson said.
Carson said that during the 10-month deployment — which would have been over in about three weeks — she and her daughter were staying with her parents in Waipahu.
Before her husband, who grew up in California and Washington state, became an explosives technician, he was a parachute rigger at the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps base, his wife said.
He had deployed before to Iraq. In Afghanistan he worked on roadside bombs and loved his job, but the deployment was taking a toll, she said.
"He lost a friend in April that was his partner," Carson said. "I know they were really good friends. It was hard for all of us."
That friend, Navy Lt. Christopher Mosko, 28, also assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 3 in San Diego, was killed April 25 along with two other troops when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
Sean Carson, who was 6 feet 3 inches tall and grew a bushy beard on deployment to Afghanistan like other explosive technicians and SEALs, was quiet around people he didn’t know, but "once you got to know him and he figured you out, he liked to make trouble and play pranks. Very goofy," his wife said.
With his death occurring just last week, Nicole Carson doesn’t know yet when she’ll return her husband to the isle waves that he loved.
"He was a wonderful person, and the world has truly lost somebody great," she said.
