To the Daddy I never met, I’m so proud of you
HIS father’s medals pinned to his chest, four-year-old Ashton Sexton-Farquhar pays tribute to the ‘hero’ he never met.
Former soldier Shaun Sexton was only days away from coming home to see his five-month-old son for the first time when he was shot and killed by the Taliban.
Yesterday he would have been brimming with pride as Ashton donned a suit and tie to join veteran soldiers in laying wreaths at the war memorial in Colchester, Essex, where his father was based.
His offering carried the message, ‘To Daddy, love Ashton’, and he later
‘His dad is not coming home’
planted a cross in the ground for his father, saying: ‘I am very proud of my daddy – he’s my hero.’
Sgt Sexton was a paratrooper for 14 years, serving with the 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Northern Ireland.
He left the Army in 2010 but died months later, aged 30, in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan when Taliban fighters stormed the compound where he was working for a private security firm protecting US aid workers.
Ashton’s mother Trudy Farquhar, 37, revealed that yesterday would have been Mr Sexton’s 35th birthday. She added: ‘ Shaun never got to meet Ashton as he was training and then sent straight to Afghanistan. He only saw pictures and messages. Now Ashton is school age, he sees dads in uniform picking up their children from school and that is particularly hard as he knows his dad is not coming home.’
Tragically Miss Farquhar’s own father, Danny Farquhar, who served with the Royal Artillery, died on a training exercise in 1982 when she was five.
She said: ‘It’s like history repeating itself.
‘I don’t know anything about my dad and his time in the military because when I was growing up, he was never talked about.
‘I am making sure that it is not going to be like that for Ashton and I tell him lots of stories about his Dad, and his nan does the same thing too.
And Miss Farquhar’s 20-yearold cousin Jamie Janes, a Grenadier Guard, was killed by an enemy mine in Afghanistan in October 2009.