What Happened to Matt Maupin?

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On June 28, a second video surfaced on al-Jazeera. Dark and grainy, it showed a blindfolded man sitting before a hole in the ground. An off-camera voice speaking in Arabic identified him as Maupin. While the station didn't broadcast the shooting, the next scene showed him being shot in the back of the head. According to the voice-over, he had been executed because the U.S. had not changed its Iraq policy.

Maupin's parents studied still photographs the Army made off the video but elected not to watch the tape itself. The clearest photo "showed a jawline, but it was really fuzzy," Keith says. "Since I've seen that video, I've looked at a lot of jaws, and there's a lot out there that look like Matt's." When the Army told Carolyn that her son might be dead, "I wasn't crying like a mother should be crying," she says. "I had to make myself cry because inside I didn't feel like it was Matt." After further investigation, the Army said the video was inconclusive and that it may have shown bullets being fired into a dummy. So Maupin remains listed as "captured," with his bank account growing with the $2,400 monthly deposit of his salary. "Matt's going to like that," his father says. "He said it's all tax free."

Clermibt County was home to Ulysses S. Grant.  WE TAKE PRIDE IN OUR PEOPLE, says the plaque on the county courthouse. PERHAPS THIS IS WHY WE FLY OUR FLAGS SO HIGH. Overwhelmingly conservative and religious, the county's 186,000 residents, most of them white, tend to believe what their President tells them. They agree with him that the Iraq war had to be fought and has to be won. "I think we need to be there," Keith says. Maupin's capture hasn't blunted the county's support for President Bush: he took 71% of the vote in November, up four points from his 2000 showing. Of course, not everyone salutes the war. "The whole community is aching over this," says Don Rucknagel, a retired University of Cincinnati professor. "But this war is much bigger than this young man. We're bogged down in another quagmire." That's a minority view, though. The soldiers manning the recruiting station where Maupin enlisted say his plight hasn't hurt their efforts. "His name comes up a lot, but people don't blame the military for what happened," says Staff Sergeant Jeff Herrold. "And there are still people here brave enough to serve."

For volunteers drawn in by the Maupins' trials, the Yellow Ribbon Support Center, a nonprofit group Matt's parents started last August, is headquarters. It's housed in a couple of donated storefronts tucked into the back of a shopping center. The center has shipped about 2,000 boxes--an estimated 20 tons--of donated candy and cookies, coffee and hot chocolate, games, toothbrushes, underwear and toiletries, to U.S. troops, largely in Iraq. Each box also contains a plastic bag with 10 small pin-on badges containing a photo of Maupin and a slip of paper: "These are pictures of our captured soldier Spc. Keith 'Matt' Maupin," it says. "Please help us find him ... The Maupin Family."