Keating's mother, Krista Joseph, has said she was proud of him, revealing that he had wanted to be a SEAL since he was a boy. He'd even put a SEAL poster on his bedroom wall at the age of nine.
.
In a phone interview with the Associated Press, she said: 'He was our golden boy and he had a million-dollar smile.
'And he had the best luck in the world, and he always made it through, so that's why this is so shocking.'
Warren said that a small team of American advisers had gone to Teleskof, about 14 miles north of Mosul, to meet with Kurdish Peshmerga forces on Tuesday.
But they had been ambushed by ISIS fighters in armored Humvees and bulldozers at 7.30am who had broken through the front lines in one of the largest attacks by the terror group in recent months. It comes in the wake of several recent defeats of the militants in the region.
Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters that the U.S. advisers were less than two miles behind the front lines when they called for help just before 8am.
When the attack began, the US military advisers called Keating's quick reaction force to help get them away from the chaos.
'When the fire erupted, the quick reaction force... came to the battle and provided the additional firepower' needed to 'extract the remainder of our personnel,' Warren said in a video call to Pentagon reporters.
The special quick reaction force, which included Special Warfare Operator Officer 1st Class Keating, has been deployed.
Keating was struck during the ensuing battle. Although a Black Hawk helicopter evacuated him to a hospital within an hour, he did not survive.
'This was a gun fight, you know, a dynamic gun fight, so he got hit just in the course of this gun battle. Whether it was a sniper or some fighter with his (AK-47) is unclear,' Warren said. 'There were bullets everywhere.'
Warren said that even as the U.S. advisers were being rescued from the fight, a barrage of coalition aircraft — including F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, B-52 bombers, A-10 close air support aircraft and drones — responded and launched airstrikes.
More than 30 locations were hit, killing 60 enemy fighters. Peshmerga have now regained control of the town.
The fighting lasted all day, with US forces involved on the ground for at least a couple of hours.
The US-coalition carried out 31 plane and drone strikes, destroying 20 IS vehicles and other gear, Warren said.
By the end of the day, the peshmerga forces had recaptured Tal Asquf.
There are 30 SEALs in Iraq as part of a Special Forces advise and assist mission.
Warren declined to release details about the quick reaction force, but said teams of commandos are often set up and put on standby when U.S. forces go out on missions in dangerous areas.
Keating's death is the third death of a U.S. service member in Iraq since U.S. forces returned there in mid-2014 to help the Iraqi government regain the wide swaths of territory captured by the Islamic State.
'It is a combat death, of course. And a very sad loss,' U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said.
The 31-year-old, who was on his third deployment to Iraq and had also served in Afghanistan, had been due to get married to his fiancee Brooke Clark in November.
A 2004 graduate of Phoenix's Arcadia High School, Keating was city and region champion in the 1,600-meter run as a sophomore, junior and senior.
Rob Reniewicki, Keating's former track coach at Arcadia, said he has kept in touch with him through Facebook over the years, and he is heartbroken by the news.
'He was a tremendous athlete, a tremendous person. I'm devastated. I'm crushed. I'm trying to hold myself together,' Reniewicki told Phoenix TV station KTVK.
At Indiana University, where his father was a three-time All-America swimmer from 1974-77, Keating ran cross country and track from 2004-06.
He was a member of the 2004-05 Hoosiers team that was Big Ten Conference runner-up in both the indoor and outdoor seasons. Keating competed in the mile run.
'When Charlie left IU to enlist and try to become a SEAL, I don't think it really surprised any of us,' said Robert Chapman, professor of kinesiology at IU Bloomington, who served as Indiana men's cross country coach from 1998-2007. 'You could tell he was a guy who wanted to be the best and find out what he was made of, and serving as special operations forces for his country embodied that.'
According to the Arizona Republic, Keating was known as C-4 because he had the same name as three generations before him.
His grandfather, the late Arizona financier, Charles Keating, was at the center of a scandal which shook the political world.
Keating was jailed after five senators who received campaign donations from Charles Keating Jr. - Arizona Sen. John McCain, Democrat Alan Cranston of California, Democrat John Glenn of Ohio, Democrat Donald W. Riegel Jr. of Michigan and Democrat Dennis DeConcini of Arizona - were accused of impropriety for appealing to regulators on Keating's behalf in 1987.
He died in 2014 at age 90, after serving prison time for his role in the costliest savings and loan failure of the 1980s.
The scandal left an impact on his grandson who was reportedly made fun of as a young child over the incident.
Keating's death came as Defense Secretary Ash Carter was meeting in Germany with defense leaders from 11 coalition countries.
They heard news that attacks by ISIS have risen sharply as a reaction to territorial losses they have suffered. ISIS have lost 40 per cent of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and has resorted to mass-casualty violence as it desperately tries to restore its authority in the region.
Col Steve Warren, spokesman for the US-led coalition, said he believed the number of ISIS fighters being killed by allied bombing and forces on the ground was now higher than the 'replenishment rate'.
At the Stuttgart meeting, Carter agreed to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State group.
In a joint statement, he and the European allies reaffirmed support 'to further accelerate and reinforce the success of our partners on the ground and for the deployment of additional enabling capabilities in the near term.'
'We called on all of Iraq's political leaders to commit themselves to the legal and peaceful reconciliation of political differences in order to confront the nation's challenges and to remain united against the common enemy,' they said.
Carter said he regretted Keating's death but stressed that combat risks in Iraq are unavoidable.
'Our overall approach is to enable local forces to do the fighting ... but that doesn't mean we aren't going to do any fighting at all,' Carter said. 'We are putting these people are risk every day,' including the aircrews who are flying strike missions daily over Iraq and Syria, 'and, tragically, losses will occur,' he added.
He added that as the war intensifies, 'these risks will continue.'
There were few specifics about what additional contributions would be offered to accelerate the fight, except plans to support the Iraqi military campaign and give 'various forms' of help to a civilian effort to stabilize and reconstruct areas of Anbar province devastated by war damage.
The peshmerga are Kurdish militia whom have generally fought more effectively against the Islamic State in northern Iraq than the regular Iraqi security forces.
The U.S. has been training, equipping and advising pershmerga forces as well as Iraqi security forces, and the Pentagon recently pledged up to $415 million in aid to the Kurds.
Last week, Vice President Joe Biden visited Baghdad to encourage leaders of the government in Iraq to resolve internal political strife and concentrate on the effort to defeat the terror group.
In April, President Obama announced that the United States will significantly increase the number of military personnel, including Special Forces, in Syria to fight ISIS.
He said he would add 250 military personnel to the 50 on the ground to train and assist local forces.
.
