SPOTLIGHT A Summit for Sam:

Through their grief, the Marti family is honoring the life and legacy of Staff Sergeant Samuel “Sam” Marti, from leading a “Summit for Sam” in Alaska to raising awareness of what it means to be a Gold Star family.

Sam was the second of five children in a “close-knit family.” They moved to Goshen in 2005 when he was in seventh grade.

After graduating, Sam enrolled at the University of Vermont, intending to become an orthopedic surgeon after he broke an elbow in high school and needed surgery. Sam left the school, with Dawn Marti, saying “it wasn’t the right fit for him.”

He returned home, and after being stuck in “a little bit of a rut,” he joined the United States Air Force in 2014 at the age of 21, acing the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery exam and choosing the path of Special Operations.

Dawn and his father, Ken, said that at first, they had doubts on how he would do in the military, but his first letter home, he told them he loved it there and that it fit him so well.

“He just fit in with everybody that was there,” Ken said. “He went through basic, no problem.”

Sam was originally stationed at Beale Air Force Base in California as a multi-source analyst, monitoring drones and drone strikes, Dawn and Ken explained. Then, at the suggestion of his boss, Sam auditioned and was selected for a “highly competitive position,” a lead intelligence analyst with the 724th Intelligence Squadron, a Tier One Special Operations unit based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“He surprised us from the military, he came up to visit with us on vacation, and he brought Ken and I in a room, and he was very secretive,” Dawn said. “He’s like, ‘I’m joining this unit but you can never tell anybody what it is.’”

Though Sam’s military work was “deeply complex and largely classified,” the family shared he became fluent in Russian and Ukrainian, playing a “significant role in U.S. intelligence operations overseas,” which included a “major assignment in Ukraine.”

He was deployed four times in support of Joint Task Force contingency operations and was entrusted with leading a “high-risk intelligence collection team.”

“After he passed away, they told us his IQ was in the top half of 1%,” Dawn said. “That’s how smart he was.”

His service earned Sam “several prestigious military honors,” including the Air Force Meritorious Service Medal, Air Force Achievement Medal, the Meritorious Unit Award (two devices), 2016 Senior Airmen Below the Zone Award, 2018 Airman Leadership School John L. Levitow Award and the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, which is “one of the highest peacetime decorations awarded by the Department of Defense.”

At the age of 27 — the day before he was scheduled to leave on his fifth deployment — Sam died in a non-combat-related motorcycle accident.

“He rode a motorcycle since he was 5 years old,” Ken said. “It was a pure accident … the three oldest boys and myself were all kind of adrenaline junkies … I think that’s why he thrived in the military.”

The Martis became a Gold Star family, which is a designation for families who have lost an immediate family member while in active duty to the country, regardless of the cause. 

In June, the family, a group of eight total, including three of their four other children, traveled to Alaska to honor Sam by climbing Gold Star Peak. In the Chugach Mountains, about an hour outside of Anchorage, it is a 4,148-foot mountain dedicated to honoring fallen service members.

The journey, which they called “Summit for Sam,” was made possible thanks to the Alexander Caldwell Whitridge Sabbatical from Salisbury School, the high school-aged private boarding school for boys where Dawn works.

“We kept telling stories about Sam,” Ken said of the hike, which ended up being a three-hour trek up and two hours to get down. “We’d take breaks and everything, and it was just to honor him and do it for him, but it was hard and it was exhausting.”

For Dawn, she said the climb was not just about Sam, but “every service member that gave up their life for the freedom of our country.” At the summit, there is a monument, which Dawn described as a tree with a star at the top, with “hundreds” of dog tags of the fallen hung, where they chime together in the wind. This is where they placed Sam’s dog tags. 

“Climbing that mountain, for me, I knew it was going to be a challenge physically,” Dawn said. “But for me, it was more about coming together as a family and just supporting each other on that climb and building each other up. I told the kids at the bottom of the climb: ‘Let this mountain be a metaphor for the way we live our lives, how we still put one foot in front of the other, even when it’s hard.’”

Another way they honor Sam is by doing 27 acts of kindness each year, the age he was when he died. 

Dawn has spoken to raise awareness about Gold Star families and “the unseen sacrifices that military families endure” at community events, including the Litchfield Memorial Day Parade.

Sam will also be memorialized permanently in Connecticut, as a portion of Route 63 between Goshen and Litchfield has been designated the “SSGt Samuel Ryan Marti Memorial Highway.”

Dawn said her father was “instrumental” in getting the highway signs placed, saying: “I’m going to do it before I die — he’s 85 — and he did that.”

“For Sam to accomplish where he ended up with his military career and never be able to tell anybody what he was doing, it’s hard to find,” Dawn said. “There’s a lot of smart people in the military, in the Air Force especially, but for somebody to be that smart and achieve that greatness in the military where he was, at such a young age, and never be able to tell anyone. That's something that was really rare to be able to find that.”