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One less countryman

Denmark, El Salvador, Hungary and Latvia: Their soldiers' deaths in Iraq are easily numbered, but the effects are harder to measure.

By KELLEY BENHAM
Published January 16, 2005

[AP photos]

Herminia Ramos grieves over the casket of her son, Salvadoran soldier Natividad Mendez Ramos, who was killed in Iraq on April 4. He was the first Central American soldier to be killed in the fighting.

	El Salvador Pvt. Natividad Mendez Ramos, 19
	Denmark Lance Cpl. Preben Pedersen, 34
	Latvia 1st Lt. Olafs Baumanis, 35
	Hungary Cpl. Richard Nagy, 27

The numbers keep changing, and so do the faces. Soldiers die in Iraq in ones and twos and threes. Some you hear about. Some you remember for a while.

The number has climbed over 1,300 since March 2003, every one of them missed and memorialized in a hometown somewhere in America. Some right here.

In Denmark, El Salvador, Hungary and Latvia, the loss is easier to calculate, if not to explain. Each country has buried just one.

In the scattered dispatches from the Middle East, maybe you missed Olafs Baumanis, the Latvian soldier who died in a mortar attack. Or Natividad Mendez Ramos, the Salvadoran who had a grenade stuffed in his mouth.

Preben Pedersen is missing from farm country in Denmark. Richard Nagy from the great plains of Hungary.

They are four more soldiers you've never heard of.

Natividad Mendez Ramos earned $240 a month fighting in Iraq, enough to support his five siblings and his widowed mother.

They live in the small town of San Andres, about 55 miles west of San Salvador, in an adobe house with a concrete floor, built with Mendez's paycheck. They grow beans and corn and have a few hens and a couple of pigs.

His father died when Mendez was young. Two of his siblings are disabled. He joined the military when he was 14 or 15 and left for Iraq last February. He wrote his mother not long after he got there. He said he was praying to God to keep him safe.

"I'm sending you this letter to tell you not to worry for me," he wrote. "I'll see you soon, Madrecita. These days will pass."

He was a sharpshooter and paratrooper, stationed at a Spanish garrison in Kufa, outside the holy city of Najaf. On April 4, thousands of protesters supporting the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr gathered there. It was peaceful at first, but gunfire erupted and escalated and then raged for hours, with rocket-propelled grenades, an Apache helicopter and U.S. warplanes. According to the U.S. Defense Department, 16 Salvadoran soldiers fought until they ran out of ammunition, then fought with knives until other coalition soldiers arrived to help.

The Washington Post reported the deaths of about 30 demonstrators, one U.S. soldier and one Salvadoran. Witnesses told the Post that militia members grabbed Mendez, stuffed a grenade into his mouth and let it explode.

The Salvadoran government has denied this account. His mother, Herminia, does not know whether to believe it.

El Salvador has 380 troops in Iraq, a small but symbolic force. Mendez was the first Central American soldier killed in the fighting. El Salvador is the only Western Hemisphere country left in the coalition, although the war is unpopular there. Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic have withdrawn their troops.

After Mendez's death, Salvadorans protested for the troops' withdrawal, but it hasn't happened. They are due to return home in February, but Salvadoran President Tony Saca said recently he might extend their deployment.

Mendez's mother told reporters the troops should come home.

"My Natividad, so far that he went to die," she said.

The war, she said, "no es justa." Is not fair.

Preben Pedersen was quiet, and after he died, his family was quiet too.

The priest at his funeral talked about how people from his part of northern Denmark keep to themselves, a trait he called vendelbosind.

So even though Pedersen gained some notoriety as the only Danish soldier to die in Iraq, his family and the Danish government released few details about him. They didn't want his photo in the newspaper or his life in the headlines.

When his body arrived in Denmark, Col. Kurt Mosgaard called him one of the best soldiers in his regiment. He'd served in seven missions since he joined the army in 1991, a long record for a Danish soldier. The colonel noted that he called home often and shared his family's cake recipes with the other troops.

He had no wife or children. He lived with his older brother in a small house in the village of Syvsten. His mother lived in the area, and his father, who died in 1995, was buried nearby.

It's farm country. They grow wheat, barley and sugar beets. Pedersen had planned to retire and become a farmer himself, but he delayed that plan to volunteer in Iraq. It was supposed to be his last mission.

Denmark sent more than 400 soldiers to southern Iraq, where they serve under British command. Pedersen manned the machine gun atop a Danish tank. His patrol of seven soldiers worked near Basra in an area plagued by power outages. Looters were stealing electrical lines and selling the copper on the black market. The power outages hurt the region's oil output and sparked riots that had injured coalition soldiers.

Pedersen's unit stopped a truck full of suspected looters on Aug. 16, 2003. Gunfire broke out, killing two Iraqis and injuring one. Pedersen was shot by one of his own men, who mistook him for a thief. He died in a British field hospital.

The suspected looters turned out to be unarmed Iraqi fishermen. The Danish Defense Ministry agreed to compensate their families.

More than 200 people attended Pedersen's funeral, including the Danish defense minister. His casket was decorated with five medals and his black beret.

Pedersen was buried in the Lutheran church in the village of Taars, close to his father's grave. Little was written about him after that.

When Olafs Baumanis called home from Iraq, he told his wife he was fine. He said he could even rest.

You'd better rest, Vita said, because when you get back I'm not letting you out of my sight.

He had served in Bosnia, but he was single then, and Iraq was his first mission since he had been married. He had completed one tour and wanted to go back. Vita did not try to stop him.

"I respect and honor my husband's decision," she said in an interview in April, two months before his second deployment. "He knew where he was going and what it was all about."

She gave an interview to the Latvian military magazine Tevijas Sargs about how much she missed him and how proud she was. Latvia, which became independent in 1991, sent 120 troops to Iraq. It's the largest foreign military operation in the country's history.

Baumanis was deputy commander of a bomb clearing squad. When he talked to his wife, he didn't give her many details about his days, and in return she tried not to worry him with the problems of raising their two sons without him.

The boys took photos of their father to school and bragged to their friends about him. Vita scanned the Ministry of Defense Web site for information and watched TV, even though it usually made her feel worse. Latvian soldiers had been fired at several times, but none had been killed. When the phone rang and she heard her husband's voice, it made her feel better, but only until the next day.

Baumanis and his unit were working at a munitions dump in Suwariyah on June 8, preparing about 400 artillery shells for destruction. It was almost 9 a.m. when they heard a whistling sound overhead.

Mortar shells fell out of the sky and exploded, and the artillery shells they were working on exploded too. The explosions went on for 15 minutes. Baumanis and two Polish and three Slovakian troops died. Six others were hurt.

Hundreds of people attended his funeral in Riga, the capital, including the Latvian president, head of Parliament and minister of defense.

They took his casket to his hometown of Valmiera to bury him, after a procession down Freedom Street.

Ever since he was a boy, Richard Nagy talked about wearing a uniform.

He came from a village of 3,500 in the Hungarian great plains, the kind of place where people ride bicycles and keep pigs. The nearest town of any size, Szolnok, is known for kayaking and its goulash festival. He wanted to see other places.

He studied to be a confectioner, making cookies and cakes, but told his family he would be a soldier. To get in shape, he would fill a backpack with bricks and run up and down the main street and across the flat countryside.

Everyone in the little village of Zagyvarekas remembers him running around like that, with more than 100 pounds on his back. They called him Riki. They told the Hungarian tabloids he would rather train than go to the disco.

"He wanted to prove himself," said his cousin Bea.

He was conscripted into the army like all Hungarian young men, then re-enlisted in 2002. At one point, he went to France to join the Foreign Legion. When he returned to Hungary, he applied for duty in Iraq against his mother's wishes.

Hungary sent 300 troops to Iraq in August 2003, part of a multinational force under Polish command. All the troops were volunteers. Hungary has since ended its 136-year-old draft.

The morning of June 17, Nagy's unit was carrying drinking water to Ukrainian forces in central Iraq, about 40 miles northeast of Hillah.

Nagy was in the second of 47 vehicles, a big, boat-shaped armored troop carrier with a machine gun and grenade launchers on top. Nagy was watching for insurgents, and he either leaned out of the vehicle or sat on top of it so he could see better.

A team had searched the road for bombs, but they missed one buried in the sand. When it exploded, shrapnel hit Nagy under the arm in a place his vest did not protect. He was taken by an American helicopter to Baghdad, where he died with shrapnel in his lung.

The Hungarian president, defense minister and speaker of Parliament attended his funeral. His comrades gave his mother a Hungarian flag.

In 31 years, Hungary has lost about five soldiers. The country pulled its troops out of Iraq at the end of December. The government wanted to extend their service through the elections but didn't have a strong enough majority in Parliament. Polls indicated that the Hungarian people wanted the soldiers home.

Nagy's death did not cause major protests, but it shook the little village where he had lived. Bea saved the last text message he'd sent, from Kuwait. It was the kind of message that would not have mattered if he'd made it home. He just said that the heat over there was amazing, and the sand was hot.

-- Times researchers Caryn Baird, Kitty Bennett and Carolyn Edds contributed to this report, which used information from international news services.

Mads Stenstrup, a reporter with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, attended Preben Pedersen's funeral and contributed his notes.

Information about the death of Olafs Baumanis is from a multinational military investigation. Other information was translated from Latvian language newspapers and from the military magazine Tevijas Sargs.

Information about Richard Nagy came from the Hungarian embassy in Washington and from the Hungarian defense ministry, as well as the Hungarian tabloids Blikk and Szines Mai Lap.

Kelley Benham can be reached at 727 893-8848 or benham@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 13, 2005, 14:32:06]