The Department of Defense announced today the death of Col. James W. Harrison Jr., 47, of Missouri. He was assigned to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Harrison was serving as a detention policy expert with the Combined Forces Command Afghanistan. He died supporting Operation Enduring Freedom on May 6, 2007 at Pol-e-Charki, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered from small arms fire.

He is survived by his wife and three sons.

Col. Harrison was interred on May 14, 2007 at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Colonel from Fort Leavenworth dies

The Associated Press TOPEKA, Kan. — An Army colonel from Fort Leavenworth and a master sergeant from Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood were identified Tuesday as the victims of a fatal shooting at a prison in Afghanistan. Col. James W. Harrison, 47, who listed Missouri as his legal state of residence, and Master Sgt. Wilberto Sabalu Jr., 36, of Chicago, were killed Sunday at Pul-e-Charkhi prison, about 20 miles east of Kabul. The gunman was an Afghan soldier posted outside the prison, which is being revamped to house Afghans transferred from Guantanamo Bay. The gunman was shot dead by other Afghan troops. Harrison, Sabalu and two U.S. soldiers who were wounded in the shootings were working as mentors to Afghan troops providing external security for the prison, the Army said Sunday. Harrison, who moved frequently in an Air Force family while growing up, was serving as a detention policy expert with the Combined Forces Command Afghanistan. Before going to Afghanistan in December 2006, he was assigned to Fort Leavenworth as director of the School for Command Preparation at the Command and General Staff College, according to a news release from the post’s public affairs office. He served before that as commandant of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. A 1981 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, Harrison had also served as an inspector general at Fort Belvoir, Va., and as a strategy and policy officer at Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va.