Army Reserve Spc. Adam Kinser, 21; Killed in Explosion

All through high school, Adam Kinser was a star quarterback, basketball point guard and honor roll student in the Sacramento River delta town of Rio Vista, where he grew up.

On Wednesday, more than 1,400 people -- nearly a third of the town’s population -- gathered in the school gymnasium to honor the first Rio Vista soldier to die in an overseas combat zone since the Vietnam War.

Kinser, 21, an Army Reserve specialist who joined the service to help finance his college education, was killed Jan. 29 along with at least six other U.S. soldiers in southern Afghanistan when a weapons cache they were inspecting near the town of Ghazni exploded. U.S. military inspectors have preliminarily classified the explosion as an accident.

Kinser’s death came only weeks before his scheduled return home for the birth of his first child, due in March. His wife, Tiffany Madewell Kinser, 20, of Vacaville was among the mourners, who also included relatives and friends from Southern California, where Kinser’s family lived before moving to Rio Vista in 1988, when he was 5.

“We were already in a major countdown for him to come home,” said his father, Paul Kinser Jr., a construction company vice president. “We had an apartment already picked out. The baby shower was in the works.”

The stage at the memorial service Wednesday was draped in camouflage netting and featured large photographs of the young couple along with a pair of desert boots, a helmet and an M-16 rifle representing the slain soldier. “It was my bright idea that he join the Army Reserves,” Kinser’s father said. “It was a time of peace. I really thought it would be a great opportunity for him to learn and have the military pay for part of his education.”

The reservist, who as a teenager helped manage a family-owned pizza parlor in Rio Vista, was in boot camp at Ft. Bragg, N.C., when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. He was called to active duty in April with the Sacramento-based 304th Psychological Operations Company and assigned to Afghanistan. “He was a Christian with strong religious beliefs,” said his grandmother, Audrey Kinser, also of Rio Vista.

In addition to his wife, parents and grandparents, Kinser is survived by two brothers and two sisters. A private family funeral is planned this week.

Kinser’s friend Army Sgt. John Wade, who was wounded in Afghanistan in September and back home recovering from his injuries, left for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Thursday to accompany his comrade’s remains back to California.