Time to Reflect As Iraq Toll Hits 3,000

A man who identified himself only as Dave sits among the gravestones of U.S. military who died in Iraq at Arlington National Cemetery, Sunday, Oct. 29, 2006 in Arlington, Va. October, it was a particularly bloody month for U.S. troops in Iraq with 105 American deaths. (AP Photo/Chris Greenberg) (Chris Greenberg - AP)

Despite excruciating pain, Dreasky did not cry out. Instead, he was obsessed with finding his rifle, so it wouldn't be left behind for the enemy.

Dreasky was evacuated with the other wounded. That night, Staff Sgt. Mark "Doc" Russak, the unit's chief medic, prayed in the camp's makeshift chapel, then returned to his bunk, where he captured the torment of the moment in his journal.

"I don't think the men of Bravo could take another death right now," he wrote, "and I know it would crush me."

But the deaths would keep coming: Sgt. Spencer Akers in December; Sgt. Joshua Youmans, who never got to hold the daughter born during his deployment, in March; Webber in April.

Dreasky, who was not told of the others' deaths, battled to recover at San Antonio's Brooke Army Medical Center.

When President Bush visited there in January, Dreasky moved to salute. Bush lightly touched Dreasky's bandaged right arm and said: "You don't need to salute. I need to salute you."

Finally, on July 10, the IED of months before claimed its final victim.

The day before he deployed, Easter Sunday, the boy who once got in trouble for wearing camouflage to elementary school, asked his mother to promise him something.

"Mom, this is war. Anything can happen," Cheryl Dreasky recalls him saying. "If something happens to me, you don't rest until I'm buried in Arlington."

After the funeral, when the bugle's echo had faded and the brass shell casings from the rifle salute were collected, Mandy Dreasky gathered her husband's comrades around her.

"You all need to continue to be soldiers," she said. "Because that's what Duane would have wanted. And that's what he would have done."

But some of Dreasky's comrades wonder if Iraqis truly appreciate the sacrifices being made on their behalf.

"These people, you just see the apathy in them and you're like, `Why am I here?' You know?" says Staff Sgt. Jeremy Plaxton, who served with Dreasky. "If they don't want it, I can't make them accept freedom and fight for it.

"Personally," he says, "I wouldn't give up one Dreasky for the entire country of Iraq."

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With his round, wire-rimmed spectacles and boyish face, Matthew Schneider was more Radar O'Reilly than Sgt. York.

But the modern Army needs brains as well as brawn. And when the confessed "computer geek" arrived in Iraq last January, the team chiefs were all fighting over who would get him.

Teachers at Gorham (N.H.) High School said there wasn't much they could teach Schneider about computers. Though a brilliant student, he was "a bit of a devil," locking up other students' machines and making disc drives open and close, seemingly on their own.

Schneider attended a technical college for a couple of years but lacked direction. Thinking the Army would be a good place to get his focus, he enlisted in February 2004.

In a way, Schneider had already cheated death.

He was born six weeks prematurely, and doctors diagnosed idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis, or IHSS _ a thickening or enlargement of a portion of the heart that chokes off blood flow and can lead to sudden death. It's the kind of thing that fells seemingly healthy high school athletes without warning. But by age 2, Matthew appeared to have outgrown the condition.

By the time he reached the Army, doctors gave him a clean bill of health, and he was soon bragging to his father, Andrew, that he was running three miles a day and doing 100 sit-ups and push-ups.

Schneider was assigned to Alpha Co., 141st Signal Battalion, part of the 1st Armored Division, based in Wiesbaden, Germany. He complained to his father about a local Internet service provider that charged soldiers $80 a month for access.

When he got to Ramadi, Schneider approached his superiors about setting up a satellite-based Internet system on base. His comrades quickly dubbed the service the "Schneidernet."

For troops stuck in the desert for months at a time, it was a huge morale booster.

In frequent calls and online chats, Schneider assured family members that he was in probably the most secure building on base. But it wasn't an enemy attack that killed Schneider; it was a heart attack.

He was just 23.

On a recent Sunday, Andrew Schneider visited Arlington with his daughter, son-in-law and their three children. As a clock at the Tomb of the Unknowns tolled on the ridge above, 4-year-old Joseph Gray collected pebbles from the freshly turned earth of a neighboring grave and piled them around the temporary tin marker on Uncle Matthew's grave.

"He died with his uniform on," his father says proudly. "What other place should he be buried?"

A white marble stone has since replaced the pile of pebbles. It doesn't say that Schneider joined up to get an education, or that he died in his bunk.

All it says is that he served his country honorably and that, like the others here, he passed too soon.