The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (also the major Wisconsin state newspaper) brings the war in Iraq home to its readers:
Her heart had been set on Army, but now she longed to come home - Letters show spirit of Waupun GI slain in Baghdad mortar attack
Rachel Bosveld, daughter of one Army veteran and sister of another, knew where she was going after she walked across the stage at Waupun High School graduation in 2002.
"One day she came home and said, 'I'm going to join the Army,' " recalled her father, Marvin Bosveld, who served in the Army from 1967 to 1969 in Italy.
Although he worried "because she was a girl," Rachel reassured him, explaining that she was just as good as the boys. And though her mother was "devastated," and sat her down many times to discuss this decision, Rachel stood firm.
"There was no questioning her decision. It was final in her mind," said her mother, Mary Bosveld, who is divorced from Marvin Bosveld and lives in Oshkosh. "All there was left to do was to back her up."
But the young woman who went to Iraq in March, "anxious to get into battle," said her father, had changed in the last six weeks since almost dying in a burning Humvee.
"This is a story I only want to write one time . . . ," she said, describing the armor-piercing grenade attack in a letter to her older brother, Craig Bosveld. "(The grenade) must have struck our fuel line because almost instantly our entire vehicle was in flames. There was fire and smoke everywhere."
After that she was counting the days until March 2004, when she expected to leave Iraq. She wrote home often, addressing the envelopes to "Dad," and signing them, "Sweet Pea," his pet name for her.
One day following an anti-American riot, she wrote: "More and more people want us to go home. Believe me, we want to go home."
Monday morning, Marvin Bosveld learned that an Army official had been to the house looking for him, and he knew. His daughter was dead.
Pfc. Rachel Bosveld, a member of the 527th Military Police, was killed Sunday in a mortar attack on a police station in Baghdad. On Nov. 7, she would have turned 20. ...
(http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/oct03/180907.asp)