'Am I Next?'

Others wonder what Miller -- who sought escape by playing video games underneath a blanket -- was doing here in the first place.

Ramadi is a grim destination for U.S. troops. No battalion stationed inside the city has so far escaped a tour without serious casualties. More than 120 troops have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the summer of 2003 -- proportionally more than in Baghdad. And not all the deaths are from combat: One homesick 19-year-old recently shot himself in the head.

Miller's platoon of the 224th Combat Engineer Battalion headed to Ramadi in late February with 31 soldiers. Six weeks later it was down to 25.

Soldiers and Marines give roads here unofficial names like RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), Easy Street and Death Row -- routes so littered by bombs they're too dangerous to drive down. Although small-arms skirmishes with bands of insurgents have decreased sharply in recent months, the threat of snipers keeps troops crouching low on rooftops, ducking into doorways and sprinting across streets.

"It's kind of the heart of darkness," says Lt. Joseph Hallett of the 2nd Infantry Division, as he loads his Humvee for the April 12 mission with Miller's unit. Their task: to clear a neighborhood along Easy Street of road bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

At dawn, Miller and his platoon awaken from a rough slumber cramped inside Humvees or stretched out on the packed dirt of an austere Army base in eastern Ramadi known as Combat Outpost. The base has no running water, only a few wooden latrines, and is regularly pounded by mortars.

As Miller's vehicle commander, Hayes, 31, of Des Moines, is tough on his men in an effort to keep them alive, but he does what he can to lift morale. He notices a row of rose bushes in the otherwise barren compound. He picks a red and a pink rose, puts them in a plastic water bottle, and ropes it to the top of his M-113. Then he pulls on his body armor.

The convoy rolls into the city, zigzagging down alleys to avoid major roads. Almost immediately, soldiers start spotting telltale signs of explosives. "Corner of RPG and Easy, possible IED," calls out Staff Sgt. Kris Rainwater of Nowata, Okla. Rainwater and his infantry squad dismount. Banging on doors and climbing over courtyard walls, they begin searching houses bordering Easy Street, looking for IED-makers and triggermen.

Invisible to the Americans, the insurgents are ready. "We have sniper fire down by the water tower," Rainwater says. "They're starting to come out and play." Meanwhile, Hayes, Dermer and Miller advance south of Easy Street in their M-113 with the engineers' bomb-clearing crew, outpacing the infantry's protection. They find the road ahead oddly deserted. Fruit stalls are open, and skinned sheep and fowl hang from shop fronts -- a car idles without a driver, Dermer later recalls -- but not a single Iraqi is in sight.

The engineers soon discover why: Two 155mm rounds lie ready to explode, buried in a crater on the edge of the street. Using "the Buffalo," a lumbering anti-mine vehicle with a long metal claw, the soldiers try to remove the bomb. But before they can, a white dump truck comes storming down the street. A Bradley gunner fires warning shots, then opens up on the truck, stopping it and killing an Iraqi inside. All the while, Miller is standing guard, giving the sniper time to aim, squeeze the trigger and get away.

Holschlag runs to Miller. When the platoon medic sees that insurgents have taken out another of her "boys," she swears, grabs her medic's bag and walks back to her Humvee, slamming the side of it with her fist. Then she pulls out the gray body bag she has learned to carry at all times, and waits for a vehicle to evacuate Miller's body.

Hayes and Dermer ride back to camp in their M-113, the roses still tied to the back. They've barely cleaned the blood off the vehicle when frustration begins to erupt that afternoon over what seemed to some a flawed, futile mission.