U.S. Navy

Lieutenant Commander Keith Taylor was born December 21, 1957, in Tucson, Arizona. He attended school in Jacksonville, Florida, thereafter joining the Navy and working as a Navy corpsman in San Diego. He earned a B.S. degree from Long Beach College in 1985 and a MBA degree from the University of California at Redlands in 1991. He joined the Navy Reserves in 1993 and served active duty tours in Haiti, Kosovo, Serbia, Germany, and Iraq. Before being called to duty as a reserve, Taylor worked for port operations in San Diego. Keith’s interests included, first and foremost, his daughters; running; foreign and independent films; music (especially Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole); reading and shopping. Keith also shared a love of baseball with his father. Keith was chief of contracting for the transportation and communication sector helping to reconstruct Iraq. He helped award and close out contracts for such improvements as roads, water-treatment plants, and schools. He received several awards in his military career, including the Navy Commendation Medal and the Navy Achievement Medal. Keith was killed on January 29, 2005, during a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Friends remember him as a positive, soft-spoken person who enjoyed talking to everyone.