'I'm Not Going to Come Home': One Marine's Third Iraq Tour

But by Christmas, Alpha Company knew it was headed back to Iraq. "You're thinking, we've had two pretty rough times. Is he going to have to go back?" Ruth Mortenson recalled. "And he said 'yes.' "

Mortenson spent his pre-deployment time off at home in January, snowboarding the mountains outside Flagstaff in a T-shirt. He wanted to soak up all the cold he could before going back to Iraq, his family said. He baby-sat his nephews and built them forts in their living room. He took his "dream girl," a former classmate he knew would never agree to a real date with him, to lunch. He said he wanted a grilled steak, so his father, Ken, put up a tarp in the back yard and shoveled the snow out of the barbecue pit.

"We realized we had to make the most we could of when he was home," Ruth Mortenson said.

By March, Mortenson and the rest of his unit were in Ramadi -- just kind of doing a lot of patrols looking for the enemies, and guarding iraqi political centers, Mortenson wrote his parents on March 13.

He asked his parents to send phone cards and batteries, and he tried to calm their fears.

the ieds or . . . road side bombs, they happen all the time and arent very effective, the enemey only uses them because they can detonate them from far away from the safety of us . . . i am fine dont worry, Mortenson wrote on March 27.

In Flagstaff, the Mortensons immersed themselves in their work and in their prayer and Bible study groups. "We went on with our lives, trusting we would hear from him eventually and he would be all right," his mother said.

In April, Mortenson began writing home about life after the Marines, and by the middle of the month he knew his third tour was to end in mid-October. He wrote that he was interested in joining the National Guard, working as a firefighter or attending community college to learn auto body work .

i am trying to put out ideas because on may 19th I only have a year left. that only leaves me with 6-7 months when I get back . . . not a lot of time, Mortenson wrote on April 18.

Early on the afternoon of April 20, Mortenson and Cpl. Kelly M. Cannan, another third-timer in Iraq, were on their way to catch reported terrorists at a cafe in Ramadi when a roadside bomb went off beside their Humvee. Cannan was killed instantly. Mortenson sustained a massive head wound and died hours later at a military medical facility in Baghdad.

In Arizona, two Marines arrived early on the evening of April 20 at the Mortensons' blue-and-white tract home in Flagstaff. They asked for Ruth, the beneficiary listed on her son's $250,000 military life insurance policy.

Five hundred mourners packed Flagstaff Christian Fellowship for Mortenson's funeral on April 27. The family's scrapbook is six inches thick, with hundreds of sympathy cards and e-mails from friends and public officials such as Flagstaff's mayor and City Council members, President Bush, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Ruth Mortenson recalled those days before Christmas when she first heard that her son might have to go back a third time and her worries were renewed.

"If they go back, can they put him someplace easy?" she remembered thinking. "But Marines don't go to easy places."

Researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.