Rebuilding their lives

In conducting their prehiring investigation of Raudenbush, representatives from the Justice Department had gone to see Brandon Miller, a former Alpha sergeant and a Purple Heart recipient who works as the community services manager at an apartment complex in Chadds Ford.

As Miller later told it, they asked him whether he had ever heard Raudenbush say anything negative about the United States.

Miller sat ominously silent for a moment.

"You do realize," he finally told the men, "that you're talking about a soldier here?"

Everyone - that's everyone - in the military complains.

The agents laughed; they understood.

Life gave Dan South a second chance, and in May 2006 he was taking it.

In Alpha Company his survival was a source of wonder. He'd been thrown clear from the humvee in which four other men had been killed by an enormous mine explosion Aug. 9, 2005.

"I still don't remember anything," he said the following winter at a bar in Wrightsville, on the Susquehanna River in York County. "I remember driving down Smugglers Road. The next thing I remember, I was sitting in the field with no weapon, no helmet, no body armor."

After he got home, he had planned to go live with a friend in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia. But he realized that wasn't his real dream. His real dream was to go to Texas and live with his girlfriend.

So he moved.

He had planned, after he got home, to enroll at West Chester University and finish a degree in business or education.

But his real dream was to train to become a pilot. So that's what he was going to do. A month after arriving in Killeen, Texas, he was starting in a commercial-pilot training program at Central Texas College.

Maybe, he said, he could even become a fighter jockey in the Air Force. He was eager to serve again - if he could fly.

He might as well go for it, he said. At 25, he might not get another chance.

Tomorrow: Haunting images.