One Last Message

By MICHAEL DUFFY, Brian Bennett, Mark Kukis

Age 25. Private first class, U.S. Army. 1st Battalion, 18th Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division

IED blast, Baghdad

Civilian life just didn't suit Lucas Starcevich. He tried it in 2004 when he returned from his first tour in Iraq. He left the Army, worked different warehouse jobs, took some classes at the local junior college and spent afternoons skateboarding with friends on a homemade ramp at his father's house in St. Charles, Ill. But he had trouble sleeping and was restless.

Most of all, he couldn't focus on living there while his buddies were dying in Iraq. His mother Ava Tomson says, "He felt like the things he was doing in his job were insignificant compared to protecting his guys."

Starcevich was one of those kids who seem born into uniform. As a youth, he had a set of junior fatigues he wore as often as his mother would let him. "I used to have to wait until Lucas went to sleep to get it off him to wash it," says Tomson.

He tore around the yard climbing trees and building G.I. Joe forts. He carried a Cabbage Patch doll named Sylvester, dressed in matching camo, under his arm. In school, teachers had trouble channeling his enthusiasm into classwork. "He could look at something and fix it. He didn't need a book," says Tomson. "In the military, it's hands on. He was in his element."

When Starcevich went back to the Army in 2005, he specifically requested to be posted with an infantry unit. "I want the nitty-gritty," he told his father. But when he arrived in Baghdad, it was worse than he'd expected. "Hell has an address after all," he wrote to his mom in an e-mail at the time.

The oldest in his squad, Starcevich looked after the younger soldiers and had his parents send supplies for his group. They needed metal dental picks to get the sand out of their weapons. (His mom and dad bought dozens on eBay.) And rosaries to pray on. (A church group in Tolono, Ill. hand-beaded 400 and shipped them to Baghdad.)

What little he told his parents, who are divorced, was harrowing. He was part of a small "killer group" of six, conducting patrols and house-to-house searches, and ferreting out snipers. In e-mail to his father, he articulated his fears. In the last message he sent his dad, dated April 3, Starcevich describes surviving three IED blasts and an ambush in a single day. "Man I tell U what," he wrote. "Somebody wants me alive. I just wonder how many more times I can roll the dice b4 I get a shitty #." Thirteen days later, a roadside bomb killed Starcevich in Baghdad.