Fatal Inaction

Bedford mourned John's loss along with his parents and two younger sisters. The first snow of the season had blanketed the town commons, where hundreds of residents gathered for a candlelight vigil in John's memory. A former classmate of John's made a huge magenta wreath, festooned it with a photograph of John in his uniform and laid it against a granite boulder on the commons. A few days later, at a more formal memorial service, Gibbons read a poem by Archibald MacLeish:

"The young dead soldiers do not speak. Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses . . . They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours, they will mean what you make them."

John's body was en route from Iraq to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Brian and Alma spent all week unsure exactly where their dead son was.

Brian felt lost, too. It was almost impossible to believe that a young man so tenderhearted that he once tried to save a sick skunk -- and ended up getting 10 weeks of rabies shots for his troubles -- died so violently. One week after John's death, Brian walked alone to the town commons. It was nearly midnight. The only motion in the square was a stoplight flashing yellow. Brian sat on a bench next to John's photo, smiling at him from the magenta wreath -- so sweet and handsome -- and sobbed.

On October 31, 2003, the Harts went to West Point for Bernstein's funeral. After the service, Brian says, he asked the sergeant who had escorted Bernstein's body back from Iraq if it was true that the lieutenant and his son had been riding in an unarmored Humvee. The sergeant said yes and that he thought there were only five fully factory-armored M114 Humvees in all of northeastern Iraq. What else, Brian wanted to know, did our soldiers in Iraq need but not have. The sergeant introduced Brian to an Army officer, and they talked for an hour. "I learned that these boys didn't even have the right bandages," Brian recalls.

It is on the battlefield that some men find their moment of truth. They shoot or duck, kill or hesitate, save or sacrifice themselves. Brian Hart, who never donned a uniform or raised a gun at any enemy, experienced his moment of truth in a graveyard for soldiers.

ONCE BRIAN STARTED asking questions, he couldn't stop.

He flew to Washington two days before John's funeral at Arlington to question the soldier escorting his son's body home -- Chris Williams, who'd been riding next to John during the fatal ambush. Williams told him that the bullet that killed Bernstein went right through the thin metal skin of the unarmored Humvee and that the vehicle had not even a simple gun shield for John to take cover behind when he returned fire.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) was planning to attend John's November 4 funeral. Brian contacted his office and asked if he and Kennedy could meet before the service to talk. Some of Brian's relatives were aghast. Brian grew up in a family of fundamentalist Christians who vote Republican. At the University of Texas, Brian was president of the campus Republicans. Now some of his Texas relatives warned Brian not to be seen with Kennedy, he recalls. Brian didn't care. To get answers, he needed allies. He even called John Kerry's presidential campaign; but nobody called back, he says. Kerry did send an aide to John's funeral.

Standing in an administrative office at Arlington, John Hart's grieving parents and Kennedy talked so long that they delayed the funeral 30 minutes. Kennedy promised that he would try to get the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold a hearing on equipment shortages.

During the service, taps sounded in the distance seven or eight times for other soldiers being laid to rest. The Harts flew home, where Brian, a business executive, began spending hours at his computer and on the phone, searching for an explanation of how the world's greatest military could have let his son and Bernstein die the way they did.

"I needed to know," he says. "I just needed to know what was going on. John asked me to do something, then he was dead.''