http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mourning1nov01,0,94664.story?coll=la-home-headlinesFour were teenagers. Thirty were 21 or younger. The oldest was 53. They left homes in big cities and small prairie towns and Southern hamlets to answer the call of duty in Iraq, where 103 soldiers, Marines, airmen and seamen died in October — the war's fourth-deadliest month and the worst since January 2005.
On the final day of October, Sgt. 1st Class Tony L. Knier, who needed his mother's permission to join the Army at 16, returned in a casket to the coarse green hills of central Pennsylvania. His mother was there, and his widow, and dozens of relatives and friends, and stooped veterans who whispered words of comfort in his widow's ear.
The casket was closed. Knier, 31, was killed Oct. 21 by a roadside bomb that fractured his skull. On a day when the American death toll in Iraq stood at 2,813, a few of the mourners came right out and said it: They weren't sure he died for a good cause. But all agreed on what serving in Iraq meant to Tony.
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In Rancho Cucamonga, the death of Army Capt. Mark C. Paine left his mother deeply conflicted. Paine, 32, died when a roadside bomb was detonated next to his Humvee on Oct. 15 near Taji, north of Baghdad.
"Am I proud?" Kairyn Paine, 56, asked with a weary sigh. "Yes, of course, but what does this say about our strategy over there?" Once a staunch supporter of President Bush, Paine said she had undergone "a complete change of heart as I've watched the failed strategy unfold."
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