'With the Heaviest of Hearts'

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."

Weeks later, it happened again, only this time to Fennerty: a bomb exploded under his vehicle during a patrol in Karmah near Fallujah. Three months after their deployment to Iraq, all three roommates were dead.

But their letters remain. Three months ago, NEWSWEEK began gathering letters and e-mails written home by troops killed in Iraq, hoping to learn something about the war that can't be gleaned from the daily press accounts and news analyses. Nearly a thousand families were contacted. Many wanted to know their letters would not be used to make a political statement for or against the war. Once reassured, they poured out to our reporters, forwarding e-mails, faxing handwritten letters, mailing in recordings with the voices of their loved ones.  "With less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serving in the military, this project will put a name on a number," wrote Karen Meredith, whose son, First Lt. Kenneth Ballard was killed in May 2004.

The result is a special issue of NEWSWEEK next week, on newsstands Monday, almost entirely devoted to the writings of service members who lost their lives, and complementary material on our Web site, Newsweek.com, which will continue to publish soldiers' messages home in an ongoing series during the coming weeks. Strung together, the letters draw the arc of the four-year-old conflict, from the initial invasion, through the rise of the insurgency, the stabs at democracy and the spasms of civil war.

Separately, the letters tell us something more intimate about people at war. Fennerty, both in the run-up to the deployment and in Iraq itself, talked about anticipation and fear. "This sitting around and waiting so close to our goal gets old," he wrote his family from Kuwait, where his unit spent more than two weeks waiting to enter Iraq. "All joking aside, there's some stupid stuff going on up north and I'm anxious/nervous/excited/scared to go." In Iraq, his job was to comb Baghdad neighborhoods for roadside bombs ("improvised explosive devices"). "We hunt for IEDs on a main highway and set up checkpoints. Taking small arms fire and patrolling is the easy stuff. The hard stuff is finding these damn IEDs and keeping focused." Later, he tells a few family members (but not his mother, so as not to alarm her) about the first of three attacks on his convoy. "The night of Thanksgiving ... my truck was blown up. No one in my team was hurt, it just scared the bejesus out of all of us and did some serious damage to the truck. None of us saw this thing coming." Almost always, he signed his letters GO BEAVERS, a reference to the football team of his alma mater, Oregon State University.

Fennerty, who grew up in Portland, Ore., enlisted after getting a degree in history. His father had been a doctor in the Navy, and the memories of military life were sweet for everyone in the family. "It was the best period of our lives," says Sean's mother, Maureen. She said Fennerty tried to hide his comfortable upbringing from friends in the military, but his constant reading set him apart. After long days of training, other soldiers would get mad at Fennerty for keeping the light on in the barracks to read his tomes, like Tolstoy's "War and Peace." "They'd yell at him to turn the bleeping light off," Maureen says. As a sergeant in Anchorage, he began hunting for an apartment off base.