What Happened to Matt Maupin?

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After high school, Maupin toyed with the idea of enlisting in the military but instead enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, studying aerospace engineering before switching to nutritional science. He also worked at the local Sam's Club warehouse store, stocking shelves. "He still works here," manager Mitch Cohen says. "He's just on a military leave of absence, and his job will be here for him when he returns." There's a tabletop display about Maupin at the front of the store, one of several in the area. Cohen, who has worked in New York and Florida, says he has never witnessed the kind of community resoluteness that has gathered the Maupins in a protective embrace. "The people here," he says, "just care a lot more than in any other place I've lived.

In August 2002, Maupin's mother recalls, "he just came to me in my bedroom one day and said, 'Mom, I joined the Army Reserve today.' And I said, 'Oh, Matt, you didn't. Why did you do it, especially at this time?' He was old enough so there wasn't anything I could do." Matt told her he signed up to earn money for school. Carolyn, 57, said they could have managed college without his enlisting. "I don't want to manage, Mom," he told her. "I want to get it done." He soon headed off to basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C.

"Neither Carol nor I wanted him to join the military," says Keith, 54, who is divorced from Matt's mother. "I told him, 'Matt, you can do what you want to do, but there's a war going on over there, and I don't care if you're in the reserves or not, you could get activated.'" At that time, U.S. forces were still fighting in Afghanistan, and rumbles of war in Iraq were growing louder. Maupin's brother Micah followed him into the service a year later, joining the active-duty Marines. Keith had served in the Marines for four years in the early 1970s.

Maupin arrived in Iraq last February. Most of his unit was based near Baghdad, attached to various support commands. One of its key missions was to protect the civilian convoys that bring everything from beans to bullets to U.S. forces scattered around Iraq. Because of their vulnerability, the convoys are key targets for insurgents. In the three letters Maupin, who had never traveled by plane before enlisting, wrote his mother, homesickness came through. "Hey Mom--I wouldn't come here on a bet--this place sucks," he wrote. ("He never used that word before," Carolyn says.) "I just want to come back to America." There were also a couple of 2 a.m., Batavia time, phone calls. "He always said, 'I love you,' at the end," she recalls, blinking back tears. Those remain his last words to her, she says, in their final phone conversation about 10 days before he was captured.