| | A combat captain, Lyerly was based at the sprawling Camp Anaconda, a major way station for the helicopter flights that crisscross Iraq now that the roads are so unsafe. Soldiers had nicknamed the place Mortaritaville because of frequent enemy attacks. Lyerly kept that kind of detail to himself when he called home to Pflugerville, a quiet suburb of Austin, each night at around 9 o'clock. Instead, he tried to re-create some semblance of home life by reading his toddler son, Zack, a favorite bedtime story—usually "Thomas the Tank Engine"—over a Webcam. A couple of days after Csilla was told that her husband had died, she tried to explain to her son what had happened. She told him about heaven, and described how beautiful it was. "Daddy went to heaven to meet God," she said gently. "We can talk to him, but we're not going to be able to see him anymore. He's always going to be able to hear us, but he's not going to come home." Zack looked back at her blankly. "Yes, he is," he said with all the worldly confidence of a 3-year-old. "He's in Iraq. When he's finished, he's going to come home."
Cpl. Victor Langarica did not share Sean Lyerly's optimism about the mission in Iraq. From the moment he received his deployment orders last April, he seemed convinced that he would not leave the war zone alive. Worse, he believed that he was going to die for no good reason. A twice-divorced single father of a young son and daughter, he had joined the Army hoping to gain the skills that would lead to higher pay than he made at Home Depot. His mother and ex-wives looked after the kids while he was overseas. He was proud of the nine months he served in combat in Afghanistan after 9/11, but the experience left the lighthearted 29-year-old sullen and fearful. Once he was surprised by an Afghan soldier who put a gun to his head. Just as the soldier was about to fire, a fellow American shot the Afghan dead. He never found out who had saved his life, but thought of him as an angel.
Unlike most of the others who died in the crash, Langarica was regular Army. But when he got his deployment papers to Iraq, he didn't want to go. The invasion made no sense to him. " 'I don't understand why Bush is doing this to us'," his mother, Pearl Lucas, recalled his saying. " 'If I die, I won't know why I died, if it was for oil or for revenge'."
Langarica arrived in Iraq last September. His fears about the dangers were justified. Stationed in southern Baghdad, he worked as a heavy-equipment mechanic and shouldn't have been in the thick of combat. But his job required him to repair Humvees and other vehicles that had broken down in the streets, amid gunfire and missile attacks. One day, as he lay under a vehicle performing a repair, a bullet grazed the top of his scalp.
In November, Langarica was granted a two-week leave. He returned to the United States to visit his mother and daughter in Decatur, Ga., and his son in Brunswick, Md. He told relatives that he dreaded returning. His aunt urged him to desert the Army and seek refuge in Nicaragua, where she and his mother were born. But Langarica was determined to finish out his tour, and returned to Iraq. Before he left, he told friends he didn't think he was going to see them again. He had already convinced himself he was "an angel of God—no matter what happens I will always be around." In a letter to his mother in 2003, he had confided, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really believe I am [an angel]."
The night before the helicopter flight, he called home for the last time, certain that he would die the next day. "You better make it," his mother told him. "Your kids are waiting here for you." She put his 6-year-old daughter, Devina, on the phone to talk with him. When he got back on the line with his mother, he was crying.
"I will remember you every second," he said.
Some of the time Jane Allgood was perfectly content not to know what her husband, Col. Brian Allgood, was doing over in Iraq. A West Point grad and orthopedic surgeon, Brian Allgood was the top medical officer for all Coalition forces in Iraq. He also used his position to help train Iraqi doctors. At 46, he was considered to be on the fast track to earning his first general's star. He routinely made hazardous trips around the country; his wife, Jane, a retired colonel who had served in the Army's Medical Service Corps, knew that his life was in danger. "I understood that it was an occupational hazard," she says. "I did not want to know when he was traveling in Iraq." The two had an arrangement. He would call home once a week, and e-mail as often as possible.
Allgood never doubted his path in life. He met his future wife at 17, and had already planned to earn a medical degree and launch a military career. Expert in flight and combat surgery, he also trained as an Army Ranger so that he could better treat jumpers' injuries. He rose quickly, served as the top U.S. military doctor in South Korea and was next scheduled to command a medical brigade in Germany, where his wife and 11-year-old son, Wyatt, live.
Allgood considered himself a doctor first, and stuck his neck out to get troops the equipment he thought they needed. This fall, an infantry unit requested fire-retardant uniforms, which were typically worn only by flight crews. Allgood believed all the men should have them. Within days, he authorized $20 million for the new uniforms. Officers with their eyes on promotion don't often make high-dollar demands of their superiors. "It would have been very easy to say no, or just give them to one unit," says Col. Donald Jenkins, who worked with Allgood in Baghdad. "There was a lot of questioning about the money. He didn't flinch." The mission that took his life was important to him. Allgood had spent hundreds of hours working to improve care for Iraqi civilians injured by insurgent attacks. He was returning to Baghdad that Saturday from Taji, where he had presented the Iraqi people with a new, American-built hospital.
Stories about soldiers fighting in Iraq do not immediately evoke images of grandparents in uniform. But many guard troops, plucked from their everyday civilian lives, are well into their 40s or even 50s. Lt. Col. David C. Canegata III of the Virgin Islands National Guard was the father of four and left behind a 15-month-old grandson. Command Sgt. Maj. Marilyn Gabbard of the Iowa Army National Guard and her husband, Ed, had seven children and 11 grandchildren between them. She was the only woman aboard. At 46, she had been in the military 28 years and was the first woman in the Iowa Guard to reach her rank.
Like Langarica, who eased his fears by believing himself an angel, many of the fallen took great comfort in faith. Canegata played keyboard and sang gospel in church with his wife, Shenneth. Thirty-seven-year-old Staff Sgt. Darryl Booker of the Virginia Army National Guard believed it was more than luck that saved him the day a rocket missed him by inches. "He would always tell me, 'I'm covered, Dad'," his father, Earnest Hardy, recalls. "Let me tell you, when he said he was covered, he meant Jesus was looking out for him. He was not talking about the U.S. government."
Others relied on their devotion to the cause itself. Roger Haller, a 49-year-old command sergeant major with the Maryland Army National Guard, was the top-ranking enlisted man in the guard's HQ 70th Regiment. Inspired by 9/11, Haller went to Afghanistan, and later to Iraq, for what would be his final mission. His son, Sgt. Daniel Haller, also served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Daniel is back home, and his father's tour was coming to a close soon. He had hoped to make it in time for his daughter Kathryn's high-school graduation. Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Kathleen Hurley, Haller's longtime friend, reminisced about his optimism under fire and his unshakable belief that he was doing the right thing by serving. She echoed the sentiments of many friends and family members when she said she did not want his service to be forgotten. "I don't want him to be just another casualty statistic. He was so much more."
Last Wednesday, about 1,200 soldiers gathered for a memorial service at Camp Anaconda. The base is home to the 36th Combat Aviation Brigade, the Army National Guard's first helicopter brigade. Four of the men who died in the crash had been assigned to the 36th CAB, whose service of moving men and material around Iraq is known as Catfish Air. The troops stationed there took the crash hard. On that Saturday afternoonthe men knew something serious had happened. Internet and phone service were shut down across the base, a tactic the military uses to prevent information leaks when soldiers are killed. When the lead helicopter on the fateful flight returned, its crew was led off to be debriefed immediately, before they'd even finished shutting down their bird completely. Another 24 hours passed before soldiers on the base were even told that a Black Hawk had gone down.
At the service, helmets and rifles were set up in honor of the dead. The brigade commander and chaplain rose to speak, then close friends of the fallen made short speeches. Together, the assembled soldiers had seen plenty of bloodshed, and many could not hold back their tears. "It was a pretty emotional scene," says Master Sgt. Charles Wheeler, a public-affairs officer. "People were not just trying to stand back and be stoic."
With reporting by Arian Campo-Flores in Decatur, Gretel C. Kovach in Pflugerville, Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad, Stefan Theil in Heidelberg, Dan Ephron, Eve Conant, Richard Wolffe, Daren Briscoe, Jonathan Mummolo and Steve Tuttle in Washington and Andrew Murr, Sarah Childress and Karen Breslau.
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