Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
	Sgt. Nick Tomko's father, Jack Tomko, surrounds himself in his apartment with pictures of his son.

By Chico Harlan
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

THIS IS A STORY that happened once and keeps happening. Sgt. Nick Tomko, 24 and one month from going home, took a bullet right under his armpit. They were on patrol one night, Sgt. Tomko and about a dozen other guys. Sgt. Tomko occupied the gunner's spot. His thick upper body rose from the turret of the Humvee and he gripped an automatic weapon, looking unbeatable, as a soldier should.

	1st Lt. Stephanie Edinger, 307th Military Police Company
	Nick Tomko in Iraq.
	A squad photo taken at Camp Dogwood; top row, from left, Larynn Stephens, Michael Hilty and Frank Tibbs. Front row, from left, Raymond Yakesh, Nick Tomko, Josh Boylan, Stephanie Edinger, Mark Chalmers, Scott Ryan.
	Col. Teddy Spain, the commander of all military police forces in Iraq, created a record of his thoughts on combat after the death of Sgt. Tomko, though the two had never met.
	Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
	The family of Sgt. Nick Tomko reacts to the sound of the 21-gun salute during his burial at Allegheny County Memorial Park. Jack Tomko, Nick's father, is to the left. To the right of him is Nick's fiancee, Jess Baillie.
	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
	Relatives of Army Reserve Sgt. Nicholas Tomko gathered at his grave at Allegheny County Memorial Park in Hampton on Nov. 9, 2004, to commemorate the first anniversary of his death in Iraq.
	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
	Frances Pfab hasn't seen her great-grandson Ethan, Nick's son, since the start of the year.
	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
	In his small Evans City apartment, Jack Tomko surrounds himself with pictures of his son. Once or twice a week he unhooks his phone line, draws the curtains shut and reads the letters his son sent from Iraq.

When he heard the gunfire from off in the darkness, he started firing like mad. Then the sniper's bullet got him, and ricocheted through his lungs.

Sgt. Tomko and the others, members of the 307th Military Police Company, had been called out around 11:30 p.m. to check the camp's perimeter for explosive devices. It was a standard night patrol, with four vehicles. But after they hit the ambush, everybody peeled away and rushed back to Camp Dogwood's med station. Sgt. Tomko was bleeding. Nonresponsive, as the soldiers said. Then, minutes later, as the soldiers said, gone.

Gone, dead at 24. Gone, in a soldier's way. Gone, meaning some days, nearly three years later, his grandmother gathers the old photos and funeral pamphlets and promises to make a scrapbook, only to break down and push everything away. Gone, meaning Sgt. Tomko's father, once or twice every week, unhooks his phone line, draws his apartment curtains shut and reads the letters his son sent from Iraq.

But gone, in a soldier's way. Gone, meaning, some days, he's alive unlike anybody else. He's 24, in the desert, done, finally, with the worst of the 140-degree summer days and the mosquitoes, ready to come home and plan a wedding. And he's listening to a warning about some suspicious mounds along Checkpoint 2, about 10 miles outside camp. And he's gathering his night vision goggles. And he's playing rock-paper-scissors with Spc. Mark Chalmers, determining who sits atop the Humvee with the automatic weapon.

Two years and 10 months after Sgt. Tomko's death, you can trace the lines of consequence up and down the map.

There, on Route 8, up near the hilly part, Sgt. Tomko's aunt, Gail Blaker, hits the gas pedal without even thinking, only later realizing why: Because she could still hear her nephew in the back seat, his arms thrown up, shouting as if on a roller coaster.

There, on a Maryland winter morning, Sgt. Tomko's cousin, Fashion Pfab, calls her two friends and tells them, OK, fine, I will go snowboarding. I'll try it out because Nick would have strapped on the board without taking a lesson and found the fastest way down.

There, on the bench press machine in a Kittanning gym, Levi Kline, one of the MPs who made it back OK, follows the exact same lifting routine Sgt. Tomko taught him, even though it turns his forearms to rubber. Four sets, more weight each time.

Certain memories pulse with color, every detail still preserved. The platoon sergeant, gathering the group on the night of Sgt. Tomko's death, and explaining the news. The sergeant major, the next night, rolling into camp with his bagpipes, playing for almost 30 minutes without saying a word. The ceremony a week after his death, when the entire company, some 180 people, gathered into a dilapidated Iraq gym.

A chaplain spoke. Same with Spc. Chalmers and Spc. Stephanie Edinger. A good prank-loving country boy, they said, survived by his father, Jack, and his fiancee, Jess, and his son, Ethan. Roll call finished the ceremony. Every soldier in the company responded to his or her name, until the woman reading the list arrived at the final one.

"Sgt. Tomko?

"Sgt. Tomko?

"Sgt. Nicholas Allen Tomko? "

Those in the old gym blinked straight ahead. A collection of Sgt. Tomko's belongings were pieced together upfront. Boots, a helmet, two medals, Kevlar, empty space, silence. These were the things that remained of Sgt. Tomko.

HERE'S ONE STORY that happened after Sgt. Tomko died. "I remember standing there at the casket on the day of [his visitation]," said Ms. Blaker, one of his aunts. "I had my hand on Nick's chest, smoothing out his uniform. I kept thinking I needed to keep his medals shiny, for whatever reason. I was still not certain at that point of the circumstances of his death. Then, in talking to other people in his company, I found out he'd been wearing a flak jacket, but his injuries had, basically, just ripped him open. So when I found out that was the extent of things, that that was what killed him, I still can't get past the idea that I wasn't touching him that day. There was nothing of him there I was touching. That part of him was completely gone. I was touching some prosthetic they had put on him to fill out his uniform. Plastic or cardboard or whatever the heck it is they use to do that. And that, to me, is so totally unfathomable. I wasn't touching him."

ONE LONG STORY keeps repeating itself. A few days ago, Sgt. Tomko's father, Jack, told this one. It begins in 1966, the year Jack graduated from Moniteau High School in West Sunbury. Some tall guy from the neighborhood, a wideout on the football team and a year older than Jack, had been killed in Vietnam two months before his planned return home. So Jack, his twin brother and a friend, feeling vengeful, drove up to a Butler federal building, signed up for the Marine Corps and hopped a plane to boot camp in South Carolina. Six days out of high school, Jack learned to fight.

He never made it to Vietnam, but he wanted to. Still wishes he had. Risk measures a man's worth. How about this risk, then? He met a brunette named Sherry, just out of another relationship, and the two started seeing each other. Not long after, Sherry became pregnant, only doctors warned her not to go through with it. She had diabetes, at a time when pregnancy for a diabetic put a woman's health and, sometimes, life, in danger.

Nick was born Feb. 16, 1979. But Sherry's body began to fail, a result of the stress through which she'd put it. Blood vessels burst in her eyes, impairing her vision. She struggled to walk, needed constant supervision and moved in with her sister and grandmother. Their care couldn't slow her decline. Suddenly, there was Nick, at age 2, with one of his parents already dead.

Jack wanted to raise Nick by himself, but that didn't happen, not after a disc in his back ruptured like a hand grenade. Problems plagued him after that. Some relatives on Sherry's side asked him to curb his drinking. During the fourth or fifth of his nine back operations, he contracted a staph infection and needed a body cast to keep him immobilized. His body decayed like an old hull, and doctors told him to refrain from manual labor. Unable to return to work as a garbage man, he hit a forced retirement at 36.

Through most of Nick's elementary school years, relatives on Sherry's side, his great-grandmother and grandmother, especially, took care of him. He visited Jack on weekends, drawing closer to him in his later teenage years when attending Hampton High School. They fished and watched Steelers games. Nick became a pillar for his frail father, shaped by the natural need to compensate. The boy began lifting weights and taking protein shakes and growing into the man friends would later call "Monster," able to bench press more than 350 pounds.

It was a protective thing, their relationship. Nick loved to protect. Because he had to, he dunked chicken into the fryer at KFC and took some criminology classes at Community College of Allegheny County. But, really, he wanted to become a policeman. Starting with the military police could open the path. And that hope, at 19, led him into the Army Reserve, which led him into Iraq, which led him into that ambush Nov. 9, 2003. Suddenly, there was Nick's son, Ethan, at age 2, with one of his parents already dead.

Oh, and now for another fight. The fight against what remains. Boot camp in South Carolina never prepared Jack for this. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Evans City, in the same brick complex as a public coin-operated laundry. He's inside most hours of the day. He lives on $1,100 a month, his disability compensation, and he tacks his walls with '70s Steelers memorabilia and photos of his son. At first, he tried a few sessions of VA counseling, but they didn't help.

"Are you thinking about suicide?" the counselor would ask.

"No," he'd say. "Well, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't."

He wanted to think not about what he lost, but about what he had. Photos, for one: There's Nick in a T-ball uniform, from one of the years when he lived with Granny. There's Nick in Iraq, face squared like a soldier's, posing with a Terrible Towel. There's Nick, goofing off, same as always, posing with a bong and pretending to get high.

"He did remember his mom," Jack said, shuffling to a photo of Nick at a younger age. "When I was still in my body cast, he goes, 'Do you know Mommy is up in heaven right now?' I said, 'Yeah, I know.' And so he asked if she was still sick, and I said, 'No, not anymore.' And we talked a little bit. I said, 'Mommy is OK. One of these days, we'll get to go see her.' "

Jack opened another drawer, extracting the bundle of letters his son sent from Iraq. A fly buzzed around his forehead, but he ignored it. His skin, in the dim apartment light, looked almost yellow, and he moved slowly, rereading each letter and then returning it to the pile. Nick's first letters came from Bosnia, where he served for six months in 2001. When in Iraq, Nick wrote to his father once every two or three weeks, depending on how badly he wanted to request the next shipment of Kool-Aid.

"Right now, I have a mattress and a foam pad [for sleeping]," Nick wrote from Iraq. "We pee ... in buckets we burn. ... You can hear gunshots in the distance. It's crazy -- people fight each other all the time. We got shot at once and my gunner said he could hear the bullets whiz over his head."

Jack folded the letters and returned them to the drawer, choking with some split of laughter and crying, a gag reflex of emotion.

Should troops now in Iraq withdraw or persist? Jack, like others in Nick's family, didn't know. In this case, the consequence of one death hasn't led to macroscopic reasoning so much as prevented it. Nick is a loss, but not a lesson.

"Nick came home one night and said, 'Dad, I joined the Army,' " Jack said. "And I was like, 'No, you didn't.' Because he was always joking like that. We're both jokesters. But history repeats itself like that. He joined to be an MP. And I was an MP. I was a sergeant in the Marine Corps. My son was a sergeant in the Army. I was a gunner. My son was a gunner. Nick was born out of wedlock. Nick's son was born out of wedlock. Nick always said, 'Dad, I will never follow your footsteps.' But he did. He did follow my footsteps."

SOME STORIES really don't have much of a point, only they might. By Thanksgiving 2002, Nick knew he'd be far away and fighting soon. Thanksgiving meant two visits for Nick, because his father and the relatives of his mother didn't spend time much together. So, during the midafternoon, he drove his little white four-door, his grandmother, Frances Pfab, sitting next to him. They'd pay a quick visit to his father and move to the next stop. Nick arrived at an intersection. "Do we turn left or right here?" Nick asked his grandmother.

And she didn't know what to say. Nick knew to turn left.

He turned right. And he continued driving, cutting through the open countryside in the wrong direction. He became quiet. He told his grandmother he was nervous about going to fight.

"It was not so much what he said as how he said it," his grandmother said. "You know how your voice falters when you're nervous? He sounded, actually ... he sounded afraid. Anyway, we turned around in somebody's driveway and went back in the other direction. He wanted me to think he was lost. Or he was playing like he was lost. Maybe he was kidding around, or just seeing if I would say anything. I didn't understand it at the time, either."

And so, perhaps, that's the only point of this story: She remembers, because she'll never know.

ONE PART OF THE STORY stands alone. Which is OK. It's Jess' choice. But if you're tracing the lines of consequence from one death, this one will lead you miles from the buddies with the bracelets, miles from the apartment with the old Steelers pennants, miles from the family gatherings at the gravesite.

Nick met Jess Baillie in high school. They hung out in the same circle. Then Jess became pregnant with Ethan. The couple found a little place in McKees Rocks and decided they'd make it work. They drew plans for marriage. They pushed it back once or twice, family members now say, but they had a commitment. Nick's letters from Iraq, despite gripes about Jess' spending habits, suggested as much.

But then, he was gone. Gone, meaning a family with a little boy, a young mother and a black hole of grief. Those on both sides of Nick's family wonder now why they don't keep in better touch with his fiancee and son. Ethan, now 5, looks much like his father -- same upturned eyes, same defined jaw -- and yet, Jack hasn't seen his grandchild in more than a year. He plans a court case to seek visitation. Frances Pfab, Nick's grandmother, hasn't seen Ethan since the start of the calendar year. For this story, Jess did not respond to three messages on her cell phone and one letter left at her home in Valencia.

"She does have her own family for support," Ms. Blaker said. "But we would just like Ethan to know that he's got this whole side of the family, too."

And what to tell Ethan about his father? Nick's family remains uncertain about how much he already knows. So, maybe, when they get a chance, and when Ethan grows old enough, they can skip the basic stuff and show him the lines with the furthest reach. They can tell him about Col. Teddy Spain, the commander of all military police forces in Iraq. And they can tell him how Nick's death, crowded by hundreds like it, became the one that prompted Col. Spain to do something like he'd never done before. He watched Fox News the night of Nick's death and sat there, his throat lumping, as the anchors talked about Kobe Bryant and Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson.

"Literally, about 15 minutes into the broadcast, it was like, 'Oh, by the way, we lost another soldier,' " said Col. Spain, who did not know Sgt. Tomko.

Directed by anguish, Col. Spain turned on his computer. Americans didn't understand Iraq and those who died there, he thought.

"I thought, if I don't capture this pain and get it down on paper, I'll never do it," he said. "So I started writing down my thoughts on combat and command. I started typing that night, and I came back to it several times. I e-mailed it to 30 or 40 people, and now it's all over the Internet. The final straw was Sgt. Tomko."

Or, wait, Ethan could follow the lines elsewhere. To a movie theater in Bridgeport, W.Va., where Levi Kline, one of the men who served with Nick, watched a film with a bagpipe soundtrack and collapsed into sobs. Or to a quiet home in Kennerdell, Venango County, where Spc. Chalmers takes care of his children but no longer socializes, consumed by the scenario of Nick's death "They say time heals," Spc. Chalmers said. "False. Time does not heal."

Or, wait, Ethan deserves to know the net effect, the uplifting served right next to the depressing. So maybe Nick's story begins halfway through a recent two-mile physical training test, as Spc. Edinger struggles to keep pace. Then, another soldier huffs at her: "What would Nick think about this?" And Spc. Edinger whips her legs into overdrive and finishes with the second-fastest time of her life, 16:44.

But, wait, should Ethan know even more about now-2nd Lt. Edinger, how important she became in Nick's final months? "Put it this way," she said, and this is all she'll say: "Nick and I were very close. Very close. I don't know if it ever would have worked out or anything like that. I just wish Jess would accept that it happened. Yeah, I'd be frustrated if I was her, but Nick didn't do it on purpose. There's nothing you can do about it, so don't hold a grudge. Don't keep a grandson away from his grandfather. That's all."

HERE'S A STORY that Jack hasn't told to many people. Just to a few friends and some people at the laundry. "A day before Nick was killed, it was a Sunday, and I went with a neighbor to Wal-Mart," Jack said. "And I pick up these feelings, OK? Like, feelings off of people, or off of the news, like I know something bad is going to happen. So John and I, we went to Wal-Mart, and we got back and I told him, 'I've got a bad feeling.' All that day, it stayed with me. I took a shower, and I couldn't get to sleep. All night, up and down, up and down, gee, what is going on here? This feeling wouldn't go away. I went to bed, finally got to sleep, and then, there was a knock on the door. I thought it was a customer for the laundromat. The curtain was closed. Maybe 11 p.m. The knock got louder and louder. So, you know, I'm walking over there, 'OK, yes, I'm coming, I'm coming...' "

A uniformed man is at the door.

And that's how the story begins every time.