War Victims

Shin Jin-tae says he lives in the unluckiest town on Earth. During World War II, when the Japanese occupied Korea, thousands of residents of this small farming community were shipped to Japan to work in munitions factories. Their destination: Hiroshima. Shin and his family were there on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the U.S. military dropped the atomic bomb, leveling the city center and vaporizing many of those within a mile of the blast.

It was a voice of anguish that pierced a nation. Israeli TV broadcast a father's heartbreak Friday night when a Palestinian doctor living in Gaza made a frantic phone call to a newscaster saying an Israeli tank had shelled his home, killing three of his daughters and injuring other family members. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who speaks Hebrew, worked as a gynecologist in an Israeli hospital.

Cpl. Anthony Alegre's unit knew the Humvees they drove through the streets of Ramadi, Iraq, were woefully under-armored. They stuffed sandbags in the doors, but when roadside bombs turned the sand into shrapnel, they began wedging pieces of metal and wood around their seats. No use. The car bomb that hit Alegre's patrol on May 29, 2004, killed three of his fellow Marines and left four pieces of metal in his brain. No one expected the 20-year-old infantryman to survive.

She was a girl with cuts on her face, lying in a hospital bed near her mother. Hours earlier, before dawn in the Gaza Strip town of Khoza, the Israeli soldiers came and the firefights and shelling rattled and shook the darkness. Everyone without a gun scattered. Ambulances moved out to collect the wounded. Fourteen-year-old Alaa Khalid ran with her mother and brother to hide. There was a boom and she remembered nothing until she woke up in a bed at the Nasser Hospital.

Even in a country that has endured so much suffering, few images could more tragically convey the senseless violence gripping Somalia today than the expressionless stare of a 5-year-old boy named Omar. As he slept next to his mother one recent morning, a stray bullet from a nearby gun battle struck him in the back of the head. He made no movement or sound, so his family members didn't even notice at first. Later they saw blood oozing from a small hole in his head and thought it was a snakebite.

During a solemn 10 a.m. Mass at St. John's Cathedral on Sunday, Deacon Lester Mackenzie recited the names and ages of six Americans who had lost their lives in Iraq the previous week. Pray for them, he told the congregation, and for prisoners of war and those missing in action. Then Mackenzie, who is being ordained today as an Episcopal priest, called on parishioners "to pray for the Iraqi people who have died, whose names we do not know." St.

When Mohammed Malek left home to collect firewood, his mother warned him never to stray from the road. He promised he wouldn't. But as the 15-year-old wandered through Kabul, Afghanistan, he spied some dried brush, ideal kindling, in a field. He gingerly stepped off the road and headed for it. There was an explosion, then another.

A pot of coffee brews inside the one-story home on Seth Dvorin Lane, as the father of a dead American soldier salutes his son's picture, and sets out to keep his memory alive another day. His one-level weathered home sits on a street named after Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, killed by a roadside bomb near Iskandariyah, Iraq, on Feb. 3, 2004.

They squat in abandoned buildings, crash in rickety schoolhouses or sleep under bushes and trees. They stumble into the city wooden-faced and traumatized, children in tow, with little or nothing but the clothes they were wearing when they fled their houses. Tens of thousands of Georgians have been forced from their homes by days of fighting and Russian occupation, leaving this small country suddenly swamped in a major humanitarian crisis.

For those at Loma Linda University who still haven't met the cheerful amputee tooling about campus in his wheelchair, he's made up business cards: "Visitor from Afghanistan Mohammad Malek," they say, followed by a Kabul phone number. Not that he really needs them. In recent months, Malek, who was first profiled in January by The Times, has been transformed from a frightened teenager in a broken body into a popular, confident young man, attending school, learning English and living independently.