'Am I Next?'

Their faces dusty and streaked with sweat, the soldiers huddle to talk through the incident, raising more questions than answers. Why had the engineers been operating in daylight, when insurgents could easily "template" their position? Why had the infantry left them vulnerable? Why hadn't they caught the sniper who killed Miller?

"What sucks the most," says Miller's platoon leader, Lt. Tom Lafave, of Escanaba, Mich., "is we sweep an area and five hours later an IED goes off in the same spot."

Miller's squad leader, Staff Sgt. Steve "Shaggy" Hagedorn, is more blunt. "We spent three days clearing a route and I guarantee it's worse now than when we started," he says. "So everyone's asking, 'What are we doing it for?' Everyone's asking, 'Am I next?' "

Dusk envelops the camp, and soldiers brace for mortars. Miller's best friend, Spec. Greg Feagans, and his bunkmate, Spec. Shawn Conrad, withdraw into their barracks and begin packing up the remnants of his life.

Into a black plastic trunk they lay his uniform and sewing kit, his "Book of Dragons" and lucky red pack of Magic game cards. They carefully arrange his Xbox, Wal-Mart ID badge, and the volleyball he bought for others even though he didn't play.

"He can't be replaced," says Conrad, recalling how Miller would keep him awake with stories about fantasy space stations and underwater military bases. "We'll miss him."

"J-Dub," as platoon mates called Miller, was an unlikely hero. His mother died when he was a teen, and his father was in and out of jail, they said. After high school he found a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart on the graveyard shift, which he liked because it let him devote his days to his real passion -- video games. Miller had a one-bedroom apartment on Prairie Street in West Burlington and a mean pet ferret. Other than that, they said, the lanky young man didn't have much going on in his life. So one day in March 2002, more for friendship than anything else, Miller signed up for the Iowa National Guard.

"At first he seemed sort of annoying, but then he became the best friend I ever had," says Feagans, 22, of Burlington. "We did everything together. It was just me and John Wayne."

In Iraq, Miller pulled pranks, like stealing Holschlag's cans of Pepsi. His platoon mates loved him for his generosity -- the pizzas he bought when they were home, how he was always ready to help. On chilly nights, when Conrad and other soldiers stood guard at a detention center nicknamed the dog pound, Miller would talk with them to help pass the time.

But he almost never got mail. And every night, he climbed into a narrow space created by a blanket draped over his top bunk, and watched movies like "Dragonball Z" and "Resident Evil" or played video games alone. "He loved the dark," says Feagans. "It was his way of getting away from the war."

A cat-whisker moon rises over the base, quiet but for the hum of generators. In the gravel outside their barracks, soldiers from Miller's platoon pull up chairs around a "campfire" of three green light sticks. Shirtless in the heat, they talk and swig nonalcoholic beer.

Miller has made his final escape from the war, his body refrigerated and readied for the flight out. But his death will replay in the minds of his platoon mates for a very long time. The shock is compounded by the loss just weeks earlier of the platoon's commander, 2nd Lt. Richard B. Gienau, 29, of Peoria, Ill., and Sgt. Seth K. Garceau, 27, of Oelwein, Iowa, when their Humvee was hit by a large road bomb. For some, it was already too much to bear.