BATAVIA, OHIO — In this small town, where support for the Iraq war remains strong, residents held to the belief that Staff Sgt. Keith "Matt" Maupin was alive and would return home. It was something they spoke of, nearly four years after he was captured, with matter-of-fact assurance.
They planned homecoming parties -- backyard barbecues and baseball games and weekend fishing trips -- for the handsome young man who loved the outdoors.
They routinely tied fresh yellow ribbons around mailboxes and telephone poles, staking them across the rolling hills of Clermont County, where they fluttered like daffodils. After all, when Matt came home, it wouldn't do for him to see tattered ribbons.
Then on Sunday, after 1,451 days, word came that Maupin's remains had been identified.
The loss of this soldier, and of a powerful faith, has cut deep into this southern Ohio town of nearly 1,600 people.
As residents plan for a funeral no one had expected to attend, they have started to ask questions they find difficult to voice.
"Did Matt suffer? When did he die?" wondered June Izzi-Bailey, 69, who volunteers at the Yellow Ribbon Support Center, a nonprofit group founded by the Maupin family that packages boxes of donated snacks and toiletries for shipment to troops in Iraq. "How did he die? And why?"
There was a time when Maupin was the only U.S. soldier serving in Iraq or Afghanistan whose fate remained unknown. Now three men are unaccounted for.
One, Sgt. Ahmed K. Altaie, was abducted in October 2006. Pfc. Byron W. Fouty and Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez have been missing since May.
(A fourth service member, Navy Capt. Michael "Scott" Speicher, disappeared when his plane was shot down over Iraq in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.)
The war's human toll is fueling a nationwide debate over whether to pull troops out of Iraq. But such talk has little place here.
"I see these protesters in California and elsewhere on TV, talking about pulling out of Iraq, and it makes me furious," said Barb Bruner, co-owner of the Batavia Heights Christian Child Care center. "I hear these politicians come here to Ohio, wanting our votes and talking about how Iraq was such a mistake. We've sacrificed too much to protect our country for you to tell me this was a mistake."
On April 9, 2004, while on a security detail protecting a civilian convoy west of Baghdad, Maupin's Army unit was attacked and the young soldier abducted.
