Missing soldier’s body is found

Benjamin Sherman, a paratrooper with the Fourth Brigade Combat Team of the 82d Airborne Division, and a fellow soldier disappeared Nov. 4 when they went to retrieve supplies dropped into a river in western Afghanistan. Sherman may have tried to help his struggling comrade when both got caught up in the current, the military told his family.

The Army spent a week searching for the two soldiers, and their efforts were heightened with the Taliban claiming last week that it had recovered the bodies. Soon after, US and NATO forces pounded enemy strongholds in a search for the men. According to reports, 25 members of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and Afghan forces were wounded in the search.

The Taliban later released a statement saying they had not recovered the bodies.

The identity of the other soldier was not known yesterday, and it was not immediately clear whether his body had been found. Following policy, military officials do not discuss details of a soldier’s death until days after the family has been notified.

But Sherman’s family said yesterday that the announcement that he had been found, though heartbreaking, had still brought a sense of solace to his wife, mother, father, sisters, and friends, knowing his body will be returned to the United States.

“He loved his job and loved serving our country,’’ his distraught wife, Patricia Sherman, 21, said yesterday, surrounded by her family and Sherman’s. She is expecting their first child in March.

The couple already had two dogs, Spades and Lilli-Ann. And they recently bought a home in North Carolina, where Sherman was based and where he planned to live out a career in the military.

A 2006 graduate of Plymouth South High School, Sherman was the spontaneous one of his crew, the first to stand out in games of paintball or in bike rides, the “nut in the class,’’ as one friend put it. He loved his tattoos and played the drums and listened to the hardest of metal music.

He surprised his friends when he decided to join the military, telling them that “it was the right thing to do,’’ said one friend, Adam Travers.

“It kind of blew us away,’’ he said. Sherman wanted to do right by life, he said, and figured the military could steer him that way.

“I feel the Army made my brother a better person,’’ his sister Jessica said yesterday. “He learned respect, he learned responsibility. He became a man.’’

His other sister, Meredith, said he was “all about brotherhood.’’

“I know that day he jumped into the river to try to save his comrade, it was not because he didn’t just see another soldier in the water; he saw his brother,’’ she said.

Sherman was serving his second tour of duty in Afghanistan. He joined the military right after high school.

“He was raised under the American flag to be honorable, loyal, respectful and courteous,’’ his mother, Denise D. Sherman, said in a statement.

“Perhaps now you understand why he fit in the Army so well,’’ she said. “We called him the unstoppable one.’’

Sherman is the second area serviceman to die in Afghanistan in as many weeks. Marine Captain Kyle Rolf Van DeGiesen of North Attleboro was killed in late October in a helicopter crash in one of the deadliest days in Afghanistan since fighting began there eight years ago.

The parents of another serviceman who died in a recent helicopter crash in Afghanistan, Marine Captain Eric A. Jones, are from Mashpee.

The thought that Sherman was missing in action, or perhaps his body was in the custody of the Taliban, had the close-knit community in Plymouth on edge.

A Facebook page had been set up in his name, asking for prayers. Plymouth South High School even sent out an announcement detailing the search for him.

“I had no idea that so many people would be praying for Ben and me as well as his safe return,’’ his wife, Patricia said.

Milton Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@globe.com.