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thedrifter
01-02-07, 08:46 AM
THE MEN BEHIND THE NUMBERS
Stories of a war's dead

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

January 2, 2007

ARLINGTON, Va. - Perhaps no place illustrates the toll of the Iraq war more vividly than Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. In this "garden of stone," in ruler-straight rows, rest one-tenth of the Iraq war's American dead, whose number has eclipsed 3,000.

Privates lie beside officers. Soldiers beside Marines. Muslim troops beside Christians and those of other faiths.

Many were seasoned veterans, but most - 60 percent - never reached age 25. Like Marine Sgt. Adam L. Cann of Davie, Fla., killed when he tried to prevent a suicide bombing three weeks shy of his 24th birthday.

Some died in fierce battles, trading bullets and rockets with a flesh-and-blood foe. But as the insurgency gained momentum in the past year, almost half of them fell to a faceless enemy, victims of remote-detonated IEDs, improvised explosive devices. Like Army National Guard Sgt. Duane Dreasky of Novi, Mich.

Twenty percent of the casualties are classified as non-hostile. Like Spc. Matthew E. Schneider, a communications whiz who was found dead in his bunk.

Arlington honors each of its dead with a glistening 232-pound marble headstone marked with the most basic information, and a number.

Cann occupies grave No. 8310.

Dreasky lies down the row in space No. 8407.

Schneider has marker 8422.

Here are the stories behind those numbers.

Adam Cann's grandfather was a Navy corpsman in World War II, and the boy spent hours listening to stories in the family's "war room" - a den festooned with weapons and flags. Looking for a "real challenge" after graduation from South Plantation (Fla. ) High School in 2000, Adam followed his brother into the Marines.

Cann went to the service's elite K-9 training center, where he met his canine teammate, Bruno, at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in December 2002.

The German shepherd's bomb-sniffing abilities were unquestioned, but Bruno was skittish around people. He had none of the attack instincts required of a military dog.

"That's a dog that can't be fixed," thought Jason Cannon, a friend.

But by the time they were ready for deployment to Iraq in spring 2004, Bruno was as fierce a warrior as his handler.

"He transformed that dog from nothing to a great police K-9," Cannon says.

In 2005, Cann volunteered for a second tour in Iraq. He and Bruno were sent to Ramadi with the 2nd Marine Division.

On Jan. 5, Cann and two other handlers were at the Ramadi Glass and Ceramic Works, where 1,000 Iraqi police recruits were awaiting screening.

Suddenly, Bruno began barking ferociously at one man in line. Cann rushed over to confront him. Then came the explosion. The man had been wearing a vest packed with 40 pounds of explosives and ball bearings, and Cann's intervention made him detonate the vest prematurely. Bruno, critically wounded, rested protectively on Cann's chest.

Years of football and jiujitsu had taken a toll on Duane Dreasky's knees. But when recruiters told him he was ineligible to serve, he bombarded local officials with letters until they let him enlist in the Michigan Army National Guard.

When the beefy martial-arts instructor was told his weight didn't present "a good image for an NCO," he went on a crash diet, ran with a 40-pound rucksack and lost about 50 pounds. Dreasky, 31, badgered his superiors into sending him to Iraq.

On the morning of Nov. 21, 2005, a group of eight Humvees was heading out into al-Habbaniyah. Dreasky was supposed to be off duty, but he managed to pester his weightlifting buddy, Sgt. Matthew Webber, into giving another guy the day off.

The day's mission was to bait insurgents, who'd been sowing the streets with improvised explosive devices, into making a move. They already had.

The Humvees were returning to base when two bombs, buried about a foot beneath the road's surface, exploded. With a muffled whump-whump, Dreasky's vehicle burst into flames.

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. He died July 10 at a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas.

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, 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.

Thinking the Army would be a good place to get his focus, Schneider enlisted in February 2004. He was assigned to Germany, then to Ramadi. There, Schneider approached his superiors about setting up a satellite-based Internet system on base. His comrades quickly dubbed the service the "Schneidernet. "

In frequent calls and online chats, Schneider assured family members 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.

Ellie