Sergeant First Class Aaron Henderson wasn’t scheduled to go to Afghanistan, but the Hodgdon native wanted to be there with a younger group of soldiers. Henderson died from IED injuries on October 2nd, 2012. He was 33-years-old. While Henderson’s life ended too soon, his story of selflessness will be shared forever, partly because of The Summit Project. “Well I’ll be honest, I just didn’t think much about it. I thought,you know a rock. Okay. It didn’t mean anything to me. I was too deep into the grieving process,” said Aaron Henderson’s mother Chris. Almost a year after her son’s death, Chris Henderson was asked to choose a memorial stone for The Summit Project, a program that memorializes Maine soldiers killed in the line of duty since September 11th. “I think some people thought it was a wonderful idea from the get go, but it took me awhile to process it,” she said. She picked a rock from property Aaron had purchased next to her’s in Hodgdon. “It just brought the whole farm back together again and he had plans to, when he retired, to probably come back there and build a little house on that land,” said Henderson. While the stone didn’t mean much to her at the time, she had no idea where it would travel one year later.
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