American Volunteers Devoted to Helping Others in Afghanistan

At LAT:

They were a disparate group of American altruists who had long cared for the poor and ailing, thrown together on a mission to provide medical help in the most daunting and needy of places.

Last week, the six Americans were among 10 volunteers shot to death in a remote swath of Afghanistan while returning from an aid mission, a tragic end to their years of risk-laden service in the war-ravaged and impoverished nation.

Tom Little [pictured above], for one, remained in Afghanistan through its brutal civil war in the 1990s, talking his way through checkpoints manned by various ethnic militias, and saving the lives of co-workers who might otherwise have been dragged from the car and killed.

Colorado dentist Thomas Grams often traveled with a bodyguard and told friends how he'd persuaded a tribal leader to bring his mother in for a dental exam by agreeing that she'd peel back as little of her burka as possible.

"He was just there out of kindness," Katy Shaw, a friend of Grams, said Sunday, her voice catching. "I can't get my arms around why someone would do that to a group of people trying to be helpful."

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the ambush in a rugged, isolated valley, which also killed two Afghan men, a German woman and a British woman working with the International Assistance Mission. The Taliban accused the Christian group's volunteers of proselytizing and spying for Western military forces, which the charity vehemently denied.

The charity team, which had been providing eye care and other health services to villagers, had hiked over a steep mountain pass into neighboring Nuristan province, where insurgents had been battling Afghan and Western forces. Police theorized that the assailants might have followed them back from there.

Two other Afghan members of the group escaped the massacre: an interpreter who had left before the ambush and a driver who told police he recited verses from the Koran as he pleaded for his life. Afghan authorities are still questioning the driver about his account of the incident, and police said it would take two days for investigators to reach the scene of the killings.

The Western military condemned the attack as part of a pattern of insurgent behavior that exacerbated the suffering of Afghan civilians.

"This is something the Afghan population has to face," said Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force. "Because of these brutal, indiscriminate and absolutely deranged tactics and activities of the Taliban, international aid workers and nongovernmental organizations can't do their job, which is so necessary for this country" ....

Another victim, Cheryl Beckett [pictured above], 32, was a former senior class president in Ohio with a sharp sense of humor and a strong Christian faith, said her grandmother Jean Fink. Both characteristics helped the aid worker power through the last six years, with Beckett educating Afghan villagers in nutritional gardening and mother-child health, and herself in the local languages.

RELATED: "Afghan driver for slain aid volunteers being held by authorities." More at Blazing Cat Fur, along with the press release from the International Assistance Mission.