1st Battalion

The Marlboro man is angry: He has a war to fight and he's running out of smokes. "If you want to write something," he tells an intruding reporter, "tell Marlboro I'm down to four packs and I'm here in Fallouja till who knows when. Maybe they can send some. And they can bring down the price a bit. " Such are the unvarnished sentiments of Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, 20, a country boy from Kentucky who has been thrust unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly into the role of poster boy for a war on the other side of the world from his home on the farm.

Army Spc. Tracy L. Laramore, 30, of Okaloosa, Fla., died Wednesday in Baji, Iraq, of injuries suffered when a Bradley fighting vehicle went over an embankment and flipped into a river, the Pentagon announced Thursday. Laramore was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, in Schweinfurt, Germany. His death brought to 570 the number of U.S. troops and civilian coalition employees killed in Iraq.

For almost a third of his life, Jason Frei served his country as a Marine. But just four days into the war, the 31-year-old captain was caught in an Iraqi ambush outside Nasiriyah. He survived the rocket-propelled grenade that struck his Humvee, but his military career may not. The explosion blew off his right hand. "I looked down and saw my hand was gone," Frei recalled from his Oceanside home, where he is recovering. "I thought, 'There's nothing you can do now.' ...

Jerry Austin never thought about becoming a firefighter until one day about 20 years ago when a high school clerk said he would make a good one. "I thought to myself, 'I can't be a fireman,' " Austin said, recalling that day at Valley High School in Santa Ana. "I've never seen a black fireman." And through 19 years of working his way up the Anaheim Fire Department's ranks, he had never seen a black battalion chief from Orange County--until he looked in the mirror Friday morning.