WASHINGTON -- The number of U.S. troops who have died in the Iraq war hit 2,000 yesterday, a toll felt deeply at big military bases across America that active-duty soldiers and families call home, as well as in hundreds of communities where the National Guard and reservists work, live and train.

Gregorio Borgia, Associated Press

The 14th of Ramadan Mosque is seen in the background as US soldiers survey the scene of Monday's suicide car bombs attack, in Baghdad, Iraq, yesterday. A U.S. Army sergeant died of wounds suffered in Iraq, the Pentagon announced yesterday. That death brought to 2,000 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the start of the Iraq conflict in 2003. MORE COVERAGE Constitution in Iraq won by a 4-1 vote Associated Press interactive on U.S. losses in Iraq. Associated Press interactive on Iraq's constitutional referendum.

The threshold was crossed with the Pentagon's announcement that Staff Sgt. George Alexander Jr., 34, of Killeen, Texas, had died at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas on Saturday of injuries suffered in Iraq earlier this month, when a bomb planted by insurgents exploded near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Since the March 2003 invasion and quick march to take Baghdad, U.S. forces have been dying at a rate of about 800 a year, with most killed in action by crude but powerful roadside bombs and in firefights against an unrelenting insurgency. More than 90 percent of the deaths have come after President Bush declared an end to "major combat operations" on May 1, 2003.

Death has come quicker to second 1,000 dead in Iraq than the first 1,000, a sign of the insurgency's increasing efficiency, the New York Times reported. While it took 18 months to reach 1,000 dead, it has taken just 14 months to reach 2,000, according to Pentagon data.

More than 420 service members, the majority of them Marines and soldiers, have died while on repeat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Times reported. That number is expected to climb steadily as the Pentagon continues to rotate its main front-line combat battalions into Iraq.

The National Guard and reserves paying a higher price than in previous wars because of their unprecedented involvement overseas. While accounting for about a quarter of those killed, citizen-soldier units have been taking especially heavy losses in recent months, sending the shock of death throughout cities and towns in most every state, sometimes in devastating clusters.

"This is exponentially beyond anything we've seen since World War II," Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview. "The casualties are felt not only in the immediate family but in the community ... so the loss is shared and felt even beyond the lives of the normal tragedy. When you call up the Guard, you call up America. It's significantly why the American people continue to support the soldiers even though they may not support the way the war is executed or even [that] we went to war."

The daily casualty tolls are not usually big enough to jar the American public as a whole, apart from events such as helicopter crashes, a suicide bombing at a chow hall or rare heavy losses in battle. Yet flag-draped coffins arriving from Iraq at the rate of two or three each day visit grief upon one town after another -- posing in intimate terms stark questions about the war.

The past two months have been particularly cruel to Pennsylvania, which has lost 15 National Guard soldiers in a series of catastrophic incidents. In one 60-mile stretch of the rural northeastern part of the state, towns lost several men from one platoon of the local Guard unit -- Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 109th Infantry Regiment -- in 10 days of fighting in Ramadi.

The death of Spc. William "Bil" Evans, 22, on Sept. 19 in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, ripped through Hallstead, Pa., early the next morning. Immediately, the town of about 2,000 rallied behind his parents, Judy and Bill, as everyone struggled to comprehend it.

Spc. Evans joined the National Guard as a way to pay for college. An aspiring photographer, he had his eye on a school in Ohio and strove for a job at National Geographic, his parents said. Evans never figured he would get sent off to combat because the unit had recently served a tour in Bosnia, and he found great camaraderie in the Guard.

"None of them ever thought that they would actually go to war," said Bill Evans, an Air Force veteran, glancing at his son's array of posthumous medals and the flag that draped his casket. "None of them ever dreamed that some of them wouldn't come home."

As the Evans family prepared to put on a viewing for their oldest son on Sept. 29, tragedy hit the region again, the news spreading from house to house in towns such as Carbondale to the south, Athens and Montrose to the west, and in tiny Great Bend, which neighbors Hallstead across the north-flowing waters of the Susquehanna River.

Five more soldiers from Charlie Company had died the day before.

Jessica Wiegand, 21, of Great Bend was about to leave her home for the Evans viewing when a car pulled up and a uniformed officer got out. She knew immediately that her husband, Spc. Lee A. Wiegand, 20, wasn't coming home.

In the days after Spc. Evans' death, Jessica Wiegand had noticed a change in the tone of her husband's Internet messages; he had gone from excited about what he was doing to increasingly scared about what might happen.

"He just kept telling me that he loved me and that he would be coming home," Ms. Wiegand said, her 5-month-old daughter, Jordan, cooing in the next room. Lee Wiegand saw his daughter only briefly after he was mobilized to deploy. "No one expected anything like this to happen, even with what happened to Bil. It wasn't going to happen to this town again."

The news that five more soldiers had died spread through the viewing line at Spc. Evans' church, and more than 2,000 people streamed in over more than eight hours. Those who attended said they were stunned. Many people say, even a month later, that they are still numb.

Donald Littleton, pastor of the United Community Methodist Church in Great Bend, said people have been grappling to describe how the town has changed. He said he believes people have been deeply emotionally affected by the deaths, in part because the war is no longer an abstract concept in the news, but "it's now on our doorstep, it's here, and we have to realize that the war is real."

Sgt. 1st Class James B. Ditchey has felt the losses intensely because he recruited into the Guard all but one of the six soldiers, and he considered all of them family. He said the community has in some ways lost its naivete.

"I never ever thought that I'd have to bury any of my privates. Never," Sgt. Ditchey said. "My biggest fear was having to face a family like this."

The 2,000 mark was recorded yesterday in counts kept by The Washington Post and other news organizations based on information released by the military. The Defense Department's official casualty number, however, generally lags -- it stood yesterday at 1,993 -- because it includes only troops who have been officially identified and whose families have been notified.