Perspective: The letters the soldiers left behind

Micah Gifford, Henry Linck and Sean Fennerty

Of the dozens of e-mails Army Sgt. Sean Fennerty wrote home during his three months in Iraq, the most wrenching dispatch reached his parents on Dec 12, 2006. "I write this with the heaviest of hearts," Fennerty typed into a military computer at his base in Baghdad, after attending a memorial service for two members of his airborne brigade killed in a roadside bombing. "They were two of my best friends and that was the squad I moved to, and then moved back from," he wrote. Fennerty, a 25-year-old college graduate, had a bond with the two dead soldiers, Spc. Micah Gifford and S/Sgt. Henry Linck. The three were older than most members of their unit. While stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, they rented an apartment together off base, decorated the walls with flags and memorabilia from previous postings, and lived more like grad students than grunts. All three left Anchorage for Iraq in October 2006, but kept the apartment and planned to return to it. "My two roommates dead, it's kind of hard to swallow and keep working, but that's what I'm doing. This is war and I knew full well what would happen."

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