THREE RIVERS — At Three Rivers High School, a driven Clovis Ray kept spreadsheets that tracked the hours he studied, the miles he ran and books he read.
Much later, while thinking of joining the Army, Ray calculated his chances of being killed.
“I don't remember the exact numbers,” said Eddie Ray, his twin brother. “He said, ‘I'm willing to accept the risk.'”
Until he went to Afghanistan, Clovis Tim Ray had always beaten the odds. Growing up in a housing project, he became a high school honors student and All-District football player who helped lead his team into the playoffs two years in a row. In college, Ray earned a degree in sociology. He became a successful investment banker in San Antonio but often thought of serving.
Family, friends and strangers gathered Saturday to salute Ray, a first lieutenant killed two weeks ago by an insurgent bomb. The event was billed as a celebration of an extraordinary life, but the sound of people sniffing away tears and choking up while speaking underscored the grief felt for a man cut down at age 34.
Many old school friends took to the lectern during the 2-hour, 21-minute ceremony, but one was a stranger — the soldier Ray replaced in Kunar Province, 1st Lt. Andrew Simmons, who was wounded in a mortar attack.
Standing before Ray's casket and an audience that filled Live Oak County's coliseum, a room about the size of the Alamodome's football field, he recalled hearing about Ray's arrival in Afghanistan through a soldier's email he read while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“He said, ‘Sir, Lt. Ray showed up yesterday. He's incredibly smart, motivated and better looking than you,'” Simmons, 25, of Fairfax, Va., said, drawing laughter. “‘And most of all, he always puts us first.'”