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

Lautenhiser, the soldier who had jumped up to take Lynch's place when he fell, joined the line with a simple message: "My name is Pfc. Kyle Lautenhiser," he said, "and I am here to tell you about a great person, and a real person. His name was Jason Lynch."

Lynch's beige combat boots were standing empty on display. The flak helmet he was wearing when he died was perched on his M-16 rifle, and his Purple Heart and Bronze Star were laid out for all to see. When the speechmaking was over, when taps was played, after the rifles were fired in a final tribute, officers and men filed past one by one to salute his photograph.

In the silence, several soldiers wept.

'Everything Just Froze'

Cpl. Evrod Folkes, 22, a native of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, who enlisted after moving to New York, said he and Lynch used to sit back, turn up the volume on their reggae CDs and dream of returning to their islands. Roommates and close friends, they talked of their families, their music, their hopes for a leave, but rarely about Iraq, he said. Like many enlisted soldiers here, Folkes said, Lynch regarded the pros and cons of the U.S. occupation as a subject above his pay grade.

"We didn't really talk about it," Folkes said. "We just talked about the leave coming up, about going home to see the family."

Lynch enlisted in the Army almost a year ago, Folkes said, but never explained why. "I guess he was bored of the islands," Folkes said, only a trace of Jamaican lilt remaining in his speech. "He wanted to travel."

Lynch left a memory with Folkes and his other friends of a man who kept quiet most of the time. He mostly spoke only when spoken to, they said, and tended to keep his answers short. The loping rhythm of reggae was what he wanted to hear, they recalled.

"He would just sit there and listen to it for hours," said a colleague and friend, Sgt. Steven Sherrod, 34, of Philadelphia.

Lynch's death took Folkes and his other friends by surprise. They had heard in radio traffic at the battle tracking station that he was hit, but their initial information, they recalled, was that he was alert and responding to medics. So they assumed he would be on the wounded list, nothing more, and maybe get transported back to the division's home in Germany for treatment.

"When they did the medevac, he wasn't bleeding or anything, so I thought he was going to be okay," Folkes said.

Then, after midnight, the real news came down. Lynch was dead. He did not get out of the field hospital at Warhorse.

"You couldn't hear nothing after that," Folkes said. "Everything just froze. . . . Everybody knows that can happen, but when it does, everybody wishes it could just rewind."

Folkes shared his memories of Lynch just outside the battle tracking station here, sitting in a plastic chair and looking straight ahead. He emphasized repeatedly how Lynch was looking forward to leaving soon to visit his mother. Just above his head was posted a list of those waiting in line for the two-week escape. Lynch's name was at the top of the list. He would have been the next to go.