A Soldiers Blog

From: Patti Bader

My heart goes out to this family.

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Family Confirms Soldier Killed in Iraq
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By Associated Press

May 9, 2003, 5:36 PM EDT

HAMILTON, Ohio -- One of the two U.S. Army soldiers gunned down in Baghdad this week had been expected to return home to within a few weeks, his wife said Friday.

Davonna Rockhold said her husband, Pfc. Marlin Rockhold, 23, was shot in the back of the head in Baghdad on Thursday. She said the Army notified her of his death that night.

"He was on a bridge in Baghdad directing traffic. He got killed by an enemy sniper attack," Davonna Rockhold, 28, said in a telephone interview Friday from her home at Fort Stewart, Ga.

She said she was awaiting word on whether the sniper had been captured.

Pfc. Rockhold was with the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart and was a 1998 graduate of Hamilton High School. He and his wife, also from Hamilton, were married March 2, 2002, two days before he joined the Army. Marlin Rockhold was the stepfather of her 8-year-old child, she said.

He left Fort Stewart for Kuwait on Jan. 20. Davonna Rockhold said her husband called her Sunday.

"We talked about how much we missed each other and how much we loved each other," she said. "He was expecting to come home at the end of the month, right before my birthday."

His grandmother, Eileen Henderson, said she had received a letter from Rockhold on Thursday, just the second from him since he left.

"It sounded like he was prepared to do what he had to do," she said. "He said, 'You don't want to fight a war, but sometimes you do what you have to do.'

In Thursday's other shooting, an Iraqi walked up to a soldier on a bridge and opened fire with a pistol at close range, according to senior U.S. Army officers in Baghdad who had heard reports of the shooting.

The officers said the slain soldier, whom they did not identify, belonged to the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment from Fort Polk, La.

Copyright (c) 2003, The Associated Press

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This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-iraq-soldiers-slain,0,519025.story

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