Class of '73 Remembers Classmate Kurush Bharucha-Reid

As they celebrate their 50th reunion, the class of '73 is holding each of their classmates who have passed away very close and will be sharing stories and honoring their memories as they gather on campus in June. One classmate, Colonel Kurush Bharucha-Reid will be remembered with a brick installed at the Museum of the US Army in Virginia thanks to a tribute by members of his class. Bharucha Reid was an intelligence and special operations expert in the United States Army from 1973 to 2010, when he died from pancreatic cancer. During his career, Bharucha-Reid had considerable impacts on both training and combat missions around the world, earning numerous combat decorations and medals throughout his career. In 2014 he was inducted into the US Army Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.

Classmate and fellow veteran John Beatty remembers:
"[Kurush] went into Special Forces in June '73 and I went into the Infantry in July. Remarkably; we ran into each other at Fort Benning that fall, in jump school. He was a class ahead of me until Tower--second--Week, when he got recycled into my class (they were three week long classes). He just could not get the hang of rear parachute landing falls on the swing-landing trainer and got recycled again. I went on to Jump Week and left for Ranger school after that. That was December 1973. He called me at home a week after Christmas--I just happened to be there on leave. He'd finally graduated Jump School and was headed for Fort Bragg in January. I couldn't finish Ranger school and ended up at Bragg myself, in the 82nd Airborne in '74. I ran into Kurush again at Bragg; he was in Special Forces "B" School at the time. "Basic" SF training then took about 14 months and he was just finishing up. We saw each other a couple times before he went to his first Group: 1st Group, as it happened, in Bavaria.

I never saw him again, but we talked on the phone often enough. Once was when he was at the Defense Language Institute in I believe '79; again just after he finished OCS in I think '82. The last time was in 2000, just when he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and working at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Maryland. I saluted his promotion and he congratulated me on the birth of my grandson. We also talked about my imminent retirement from the Army Reserves and how our military service had beaten the hell out of both of us...but we wouldn't have traded it for the world."

Learn more about the career of Kurush Bharucha-Reid here.
View Beatty's book The Devil's Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War which he dedicated to Bharucha-Reid here.
Click HERE to return to the main reunion page 
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    • Kurush Bharucha-Reid Certificate of Dedication

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