Wiger recalled him as an individual who was able to inspire good graces in everyone he met.
“Jimmy was one of those guys. In the army it’s very hard to be liked by both your commanders and your subordinates. Jimmy was able to balance both. He was loved up and down the chain of command,” Wiger said.
On one occasion, according to his father, Barbara Walters and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf were on the West Point campus, waiting for cameras to set up. Adamouski walked up and struck a conversation with the two luminaries.
“Twenty minutes later, [Walters and Schwarzkopf] had to be pried away,” Frank Adamouski said.
After graduating from West Point, Adamouski was accepted to flight school in Ft. Rutger, Ala., where he learned to fly Black Hawk helicopters.
After his first assignment to Geibelstadt, Germany, Adamouski went on two deployments to Bosnia and one to Albania during the Kosovo conflict, after which he returned to Ft. Rutger for advanced training.
Last August, Adamouski married his wife, Meighan, before he was deployed to Iraq. At the time of his death, they had lived together for four and a half of the seven months they had been married.
Meighan Adamouski could not be reached yesterday.
According to his father, Adamouski was also a committed Christian and a lay Eucharistic minister in the Catholic Church.
Frank Adamouski said that the family received a letter from their son after his death detailing how he conducted prayer services, scripture readings and served communion for his fellow soldiers in Iraq.
“Since his mother had always wanted him to be a priest, his company started calling him ‘Father Jimmy,’” Frank Adamouski said.
His father said he received a stream of phone calls and e-mails from people whose lives his son had impacted.
According to Frank Adamouski, one message reads, “I served with Jimmy in Germany. He encouraged me to go back to school and now I’m getting my Bachelor’s in the spring. I owe it all to Jimmy.”
Full military burial services for Adamouski at Arlington National Cemetery are tentatively slated for the week following Easter.