For a U.S. Platoon in Iraq, Merciless Missions

Prefacing the entry with an obscenity, he wrote: "I'm still shaking. Boom! My humvee just got hit by an IED about two minutes ago. I am sick of getting hit w/ this crap. Aw man that was a big bomb that they blew up right underneath us. Thank God for keeping everyone OK in my humvee. Now that's a direct hit."

The First Losses

Tragedy hit the platoon on Feb. 13. While patrolling the outskirts of Balad around 4:30 a.m., one of the four Humvees overshot a right turn and tumbled upside down into a freezing, seven-foot-deep canal, and three soldiers drowned, along with an Air Force firefighter who fell in during the rescue effort.

Memories of the three popular men -- Sgt. Rene Knox Jr., 22, of New Orleans; Sgt. Chad Lake, 26, of Ocala, Fla., and Sgt. Dakotah Gooding, 21, of Des Moines -- hovered over soldiers "like a mist," said Tickal,

Tickal soon began to narrate what he was seeing, first in jottings in an all-weather field book he kept behind his Humvee's sun visor, then in the thick diary that his ex-girlfriend, Spec. Jessica Williams, a reservist, sent him from the United States.

"I am currently in Iraq, my tour is half way over," he wrote in June. "When we first got to Iraq I lost three friends in the first month: Gooding, Knox and Lake. Gooding and I were pretty chill. He told me how he met his wife and mostly how much he loved her. He was also the funniest guy I have ever met. He would always say, 'foreeeal.' "

Even as the scorching summer heated up, Tickal, a bespectacled 23-year-old who studied biology at the University of Central Florida before joining the Army, frequently began his entries: "Today is a beautiful day." A self-described "dreamer," he punctuated passages with smiley faces or frowning faces; on one page he sketched a picture of Garfield, the cartoon cat, firing an M-4 assault rifle from the turret of a Humvee.

Tickal described himself as apolitical: "Truthfully, I don't care who the president is. I would have signed up to come over here anyway." But he criticized the apathy of Americans who, he wrote, failed to understand the stakes in Iraq: "I hope people back home understand what we are doing, keeping our country free. Truthfully I think our country needs a kick in the ass. Most people believe it doesn't affect them. Who cares? Well, I CARE."

Tickal worried that he "could die any day." On July 4, he described a phone conversation in which Williams "asked me what my biggest fears are. I never told her but I imagine a car bomb going off all the time. People screaming in my dreams."

"If I was a cat I would be down to maybe 2 lives left, I hope," he wrote six days later. "There is no way I am going to die in a place like this."

Growing Frustration

By July, Blue Platoon was increasingly under attack.

The frequency of indirect fire -- mortars and rockets fired at Camp Paliwoda -- had diminished significantly. But the number of roadside bombs, which have accounted for about 26 percent of the nearly 1,900 deaths of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, had more than doubled, to nearly two a day, within the battalion's 20-by-15-mile area of operation.

Many of the attacks were concentrated in al-Ruashid, a Sunni tribal neighborhood northwest of Balad. The insurgents seemed to operate invisibly amid the orchards. The locus was a one-lane road known as the Isaki Highway, its asphalt surface pocked with an obstacle course of bomb craters.