A Small-Town Soldier on Trial

Freda Sivits, Jeremy Sivits's mother, works on the outskirts of town at the Dollar General store, where cashiers delight in the gossip that entertains many of Hyndman's 1,500 residents.

Aside from the swimming hole near Gooseberry Park or the mall in Cumberland, Md., 15 miles to the south, there is little to keep the high school kids in Hyndman entertained.

"There's not much to do out here in the hills," said Jim Williams, 25, a lifelong resident who made Jeremy Sivits godfather to his 8-year-old daughter.

The focal point of the town is Hyndman Senior High School, which at about 200 students isn't big enough to field a football team. So soccer and baseball are the big sports. Jeremy Sivits played both and wrestled, too.

"He was a little bit on the backwards side," Biller said. "A shy, typical boy."

The mayor and others here could not believe that the person who as a teenager carried a flag in the annual Memorial Day parade would be involved in such abuse. On the contrary, his shy stoicism engendered trust, they said. His high school soccer coach remembered that a friend came to Sivits crying after a dispute with her boyfriend, and Sivits consoled her and talked to the boyfriend as well.

Sivits faces a special court-martial, similar to a misdemeanor trial. The maximum jail time he would serve is one year. Others in the unit face general courts-martial with the potential for more severe penalties. By the account he gave investigators, Sivits had little to do with the abuse aside from taking pictures and allowing it to happen without reporting it.

It was Graner, he said, who "punched [a] detainee with a closed fist so hard in the temple that it knocked the detainee unconscious."

It was Frederick, Sivits said, who punched another detainee "for no reason." And it was Sgt. Javal S. Davis, he said, who "lunged in the air" and landed on a pile of captives, and also stomped on their fingers or toes. Davis told ABC's "Good Morning America" yesterday that "no one was injured from what I did." Frederick's relatives and an attorney for Graner have also denied they did anything illegal.

Sivits said he was told by Graner not to say anything about the abuse. He also didn't want to upset anyone. "I try to be friends with everyone," he told investigators.

When he shipped off to Iraq last year, friends and family said, he was ready for war and the hardships that came with it. He had joined the service eagerly, and even wore his dress uniform when he took a date to her high school prom. Lots of kids from Hyndman, where jobs can be hard to come by, join the service, Biller, the mayor, said. And so when Sivits, whose father fought in Vietnam and whose uncle died in that war, enlisted, no one was surprised.

"He wanted to be like us," Daniel Sivits said late last month. "And look what it got him."

While in Iraq, Jeremy Sivits asked for news from friends but said little in his e-mails about the war. "He wanted to come home. That was the main thing," Williams said.

Williams's wife, Lisa, said: "If he talked about Iraq, it was only to say: 'You can't imagine what it's like here. It's a totally different world.' "

Then they received a cryptic e-mail, and they knew something was wrong. "He said: 'Some things are going on here.' But he wouldn't go into details," Lisa Williams said.

The e-mail came in January, three months before the photos became public, and Jeremy Sivits was keeping his secret.

Davenport reported from Washington. Researcher Bobbye Pratt in Washington contributed to this report.