On the final calls that Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton made home to North Carolina, the strain of a yearlong deployment that had brought him to the Middle East — and into the thick of the ongoing war in Iran — was beginning to show. He hadn’t been sleeping. His appetite was diminishing. He longed to return home.
Fear had crept into his voice, his wife, Jamiah Swinton, said. “I could always tell, when the tone would change, that something was going on.”
There were drone attacks at Erbil Air Base, in northern Iraq, where he was stationed, he told her, and they kept coming. “There was no peace,” she said.
His last video call to his wife was extra loving, she said, and very short. He asked to see their 4-year-old daughter, but she was at preschool. It had been a year since he last saw them in person.
Four days later, uniformed men arrived at Ms. Swinton’s door to report that her husband had been killed.
Sergeant Swinton was one of 18 U.S. soldiers who have lost their lives since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. There was a recent high school graduate who was 19 and loved to dance. A 42-year-old father who dreamed of opening his own martial arts studio. A 39-year-old mother of two on her last deployment. And more than a dozen others.
Sergeant Swinton was among four service members whose deaths occurred last week during escalating clashes between U.S. and Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf, where tensions have worsened since the collapse of a cease-fire last month.
The Defense Department said that he died on Saturday during the disposal of an Iranian drone. The episode, a controlled detonation at the Erbil base, is under investigation, the Pentagon said.
Sergeant Swinton, 30, was not involved in the actual detonation but was killed by flying debris from the blast, said a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
Sergeant Swinton was assigned to the 108th Air Defense Artillery Brigade at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.
Ms. Swinton, 27, had been in the Army, too, and she met her husband when both were deployed to Bahrain in 2020. They had different jobs — he watched radar, and she worked on missile launchers — but they gravitated to one another when they had free time.
“What caught my eye was, obviously, how handsome he is,” Ms. Swinton said, adding that he was endlessly goofy and still managed to command respect. “He knew his job so well, and it made people listen to him.”
Ms. Swinton grew up in Southern California. She joined the military because she wanted to see more of the world, and because her mother had also served. Sergeant Swinton, who lived in Fayetteville, told his wife that he had joined the Army because he did not want to get stuck in North Carolina, and that he had been motivated to do well by the birth of his son, now 6.
After meeting in Bahrain, they fell in love fast. They moved to Texas — they had both been stationed there, at Fort Hood — and got married in a courthouse in 2021. They had a daughter, Aleia, now 4, and moved to North Carolina.
“He had more experience with babies, so he taught me everything,” Ms. Swinton said. “He was an amazing father. He was always my daughter’s favorite.”
Ms. Swinton left the Army in 2023, she said. Her husband’s deployments were hard, she added, and his last was the longest they had been apart since they married. But they kept in contact as best they could.
In February, the war began. And this month, she heard the angst creep into Sergeant Swinton’s voice. “When I did see him on videos, he just looked so tired,” Ms. Swinton said. “And he would tell me he wanted to come home so bad.”
Sergeant Swinton’s remains were returned to the United States on Wednesday. Ms. Swinton went to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to see the flag-draped caskets of her husband and the three other young Army soldiers. She met President Trump, who she said spoke warmly of her husband’s service.
Ms. Swinton felt both supported and overwhelmed, she said, as she watched her daughter grapple with the meaning of death. “When they were transferring Michael, she said: ‘Is that my Dada in that box?’”
In his remarks, Mr. Trump said that the four soldiers had supported the war. Ms. Swinton said that she would rather talk about her husband than discuss politics.
“Nobody can tell you how a military career will go,” she said. “There’s so much uncertainty, and you have to be strong enough to go along with it and hope that it will turn out OK.”
Sergeant Swinton had hoped that his deployment to Iraq would be his last, Ms. Swinton said, and so had she. “I just wanted to be glued to him,” she said.
“Everything he did — the way he spoke, his voice, everything — I just, I love him,” she said.
Eric Schmitt and Maia Spoto contributed reporting.
