Md. Family Mourns Casualty of Iraq War

One by one the mourners emerged, marching through the open field, taking their seats in the forest green velvet-draped chairs and staring at the gaping hole in the ground before them. It was a soldierly scene marked by ritual and pageantry, one already embedded deep in the nation's psyche.

The fact that it was a scene that had been played out thousands of times at Arlington National Cemetery had little meaning for the Prince family. Yesterday, under the searing sun and creamy clouds, they laid to rest one of their own, Army Sgt. 1st Class Neil A. Prince, a son, a husband, a father, a soldier.

"You hear about soldiers dying every day and you feel bad, but you're so far removed until it hits you yourself," said Prince's youngest sister, Shane Prince, 32.

Neil Prince, 35, of Baltimore, was killed June 11 by a roadside bomb in Iraq, leaving behind a wife of nearly 10 years and a 4-year-old son, Jordan.

A few hours before Prince's burial, Sgt. David J. Murray was laid to rest, just one grave to the left, in Section 60 at Arlington. Murray, a 23-year-old sheriff's deputy from Clinton, La., had been in Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard and died June 9 when a bomb exploded under his armored vehicle in Baghdad.

Murray and Prince were the 147th and 148th people killed in the Iraq war to be buried at Arlington.

Prince, who was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, was a month away from the end of his tour in Iraq when he died, and he had already shipped two large trunks of clothing home to his wife in Maryland, his family said.

A field artillery tactical data systems specialist, Prince had spent most of his time in Iraq cushioned from danger in the protected operations center, said his wife, Suzette McLeod Prince. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion of the 17th Field Artillery Regiment in the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division. He made an unusual trip out of the safe zone June 11, hitching a ride with an Iowa National Guard convoy along a supply route from Ramadi to nearby Habbaniya in western Iraq, Lt. Col. Greg Hapgood, a spokesman for the Guard, told The Washington Post last week.

As the convoy passed the town of Al Taqaddum, a roadside bomb exploded, halting the convoy but not injuring anyone. But as the soldiers scanned the road, three more bombs detonated, and the third went off directly beneath Prince's armored Humvee, instantly killing him and Spec. Casey Byers, 22, of Schleswig, Iowa, Hapgood said.

"Neil Prince was a guy who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time," Hapgood said in an interview Monday.

The nature of Prince's death has been especially traumatic for his wife.

"I'm angry. It's the fact that he was almost home and normally he doesn't go out," Suzette Prince said. "He went out and that was all that it took."