Charles Wilmarth 'Wil' Kouns, Army Officer And EPA Engineer, 90

[DGH]

.

Charles Wilmarth "Wil" Kouns, a World War II prisoner of war and
retired Army colonel who also had careers as an engineer with NASA and
the Environmental Protection Agency, died of congestive heart failure
March 9, 2004, at Goodwin House retirement community in Alexandria,
Virginia, at the age of 90.

Col. Kouns, who had lived in Alexandria off and on since 1950, was a
native of Salina, Kan. He began his military career as a 1939 graduate
of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

At the start of World War II, he was a commanding officer in the 82nd
Airborne Division. He led a battalion in a parachute drop behind enemy
lines in Sicily in 1943 and was captured and held prisoner in Italy,
Germany and Poland.

After two other attempts, he successfully escaped at the end of the
war in 1945.

His postwar assignments included various staff positions on the joint
Brazilian-U.S. military commission in Rio de Janeiro, the Command and
General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and headquarters of
the Caribbean Command in Panama.

He retired from active military duty in 1961 and five years later
received a master's degree in geology from George Washington
University.

Col. Kouns then worked about 20 years at Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Maryland, mainly analyzing moon rocks. As a geologist,
he selected the lunar rock embedded in a stained-glass panel at
Washington National Cathedral. He also held two patents on remote
optical sensing.

In the late 1980s, he became an engineer at the EPA, from which he
retired in 1994.

Col. Kouns was a member of the George Washington Chapter of the Sons
of the American Revolution and Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria.

W.

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Note: One of his patents in number 4,560,279 and can be found at:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-bool.html

by entering Charles and Kouns at the appropriate places.

I am not sure, but the other patent MIGHT be 3627451