On a Hot and Dusty Road, A Young Soldier's Last Battle

FORWARD OPERATING BASE GABE, Iraq, June 22 -- Army Pfc. Jason N. Lynch was taking his one-hour shift behind a Humvee-mounted .50-caliber machine gun when the AK-47s started crackling again, just before dusk. As he responded by raking the source of enemy fire, sticking his head and torso out the roof to aim, a single 7.62mm round found a mortal opening just below Lynch's body armor and ripped into his right side.

Lynch, 21, a 6-foot-2 St. Croix islander who reveled in reggae music and yearned to return to his Caribbean home, immediately slumped down into the Humvee, his comrades in Charlie Battery recalled, and he shouted out to no one in particular: "Ah! I'm hit." Those words -- uttered Friday at 6:50 p.m. in Buhriz, a rebellious, date-growing village about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad -- were the last they heard him say.

Although medics struggled to save his life, the internal bleeding was massive, they said, and Lynch swiftly went into shock. Within an hour, the young soldier had joined the slowly but relentlessly growing list of American troops killed in the occupation of Iraq.

Of the 842 U.S. service members who have died in Iraq since the invasion 15 months ago, 622 were killed by hostile fire, according to a Pentagon tally. The largest part of that combat death toll, 513, has come since President Bush's declaration on May 1 last year that major combat was over. These troops died at the hands of Iraqis and a sprinkling of foreign Arabs fighting the U.S. occupation and seeking to derail the Bush administration's plan to transform the country.

Most of the 513 have died one or two at a time in roadside bombings or skirmishes too small to make headlines back in the States. But for those involved -- the soldiers who fell, the men and women who lived through the battle, the families left behind -- each casualty has been a large-scale tragedy, filled with their sweat, their rage, their courage, their blood and, ultimately, their tears.

When Lynch sank mortally wounded from his machine-gun perch, Pfc. Kyle Lautenhiser, 20, of Fort Wayne, Ind., had just trotted up to the Humvee to relieve him. Along with those in the vehicle, Lautenhiser recalled, he pulled Lynch out a back door, laid him on the ground and called for medics. Then, Lautenhiser said, he jumped into the Humvee, grabbed the machine-gun handles and sprayed several hundred .50-caliber bullets toward the two-story building across the road where the AK-47 assault-rifle fire had come from.

By then the medics, including Spec. Michael Miranda, 21, of Roma, Tex., and Pfc. Stu Eubanks, 22, of Lakeland, Fla., had arrived with emergency first-aid equipment and a litter. Hunching down to avoid the rifle fire, which still had not been suppressed, they ran their hands around Lynch's torso to assess his wounds. What they found, they recalled, was one bullet hole and signs of heavy internal bleeding.

Sliding Lynch onto the litter, they carried him back to the command center and casualty collection point that had been set up nearby in a building their unit had been ordered to capture. There, Miranda said, they ripped off Lynch's body armor and other gear. Fighting to find a vein, they stuck a needle into his arm to give him intravenous fluids, seeking to compensate for the blood loss. As they worked feverishly, trying all the tricks of their training, Lynch's pulse came and went.

"About a minute into it, he started going into shock," Eubanks recalled three days later, sucking on a cigarette in Iraq's stifling evening heat. "We were cutting clothes off him left and right. And when he went into shock, his breathing started closing off. So we had to bag him" -- fit him with a respirator.

Although Lynch's condition was still not stable, Miranda said, the medics decided he had to be moved to a field hospital. About six minutes had elapsed since he was hit, and he did not look good. So the medics loaded him into a Bradley Fighting Vehicle -- armored to withstand the persistent gunfire -- and transported him to a pickup point for transfer to a Humvee ambulance and a 20-minute drive to the Army's regional headquarters at Forward Operating Base Warhorse.

As they were opening the Bradley's back hatch and moving Lynch to the waiting ambulance, a rocket-propelled grenade hit nearby, Eubanks said. A roadside bomb exploded near the ambulance as it approached, forcing it to run on flattened tires designed to function with or without air, the unit commander recalled.

Sgt. Maria Kammerer, 21, of Houston, was in the back of the ambulance. As they drove toward Warhorse at about 45 mph, she said later, Lynch seemed to respond to stimuli. He swatted at the uncomfortable breathing bag in his mouth and complained he could not breathe. He nodded his head when she asked if he was still with them. And, in a triumph of military bureaucracy, Lynch was able to give Kammerer the last four digits of his Social Security number to get the paperwork started for his medical care on arrival.

Within a half-hour of his delivery to the hospital, however, Lynch died, Kammerer said. The paperwork from then on would be about his death, a death far from St. Croix, on a dusty road near a dilapidated two-story house surrounded by date palms, a death on a fertile agricultural plain of east-central Iraq where some men are determined to kill as many U.S. soldiers as they can.

Holding the 'Strong Point'

"Our mission was to go in, take the strong point, and hold it," said Capt. Matt Davenport, who commands Charlie Battery, part of the 1st Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, and who led the young gunner into battle.