Why else would a boy from Fountain City, population 900, dream of becoming an architect?
Star Tribune -- FOUNTAIN CITY, WIS. -- Maybe it was the solid phalanx of sheer bluffs that rise far above the simple one- and two-story houses that make up this thin strip of a town hard on the Mississippi River.
Why else would a boy from Fountain City, population 900, dream of becoming an architect?
"Even in junior high school, he talked about the design and structure of big buildings," Diane Bossert said of Andy, the youngest of her three children. "He wondered how they were put together, what kept them up."
Sgt. Andrew Bossert, 24, a five-year Army veteran who planned to leave the service next year to study architecture in college, was killed in Iraq on Monday when a car exploded near a military checkpoint.
He was assigned to an engineering company, building bridges and detecting and clearing mines.
The family has been told little more about his death, except that his body will be brought home to Fountain City within a week.
Bossert was the 35th Wisconsin soldier to die in the Iraq war.
"He stayed in the Army to earn money for school and because he felt there were things that needed to be done yet," his mother said Wednesday. "He believed in what he was doing. He believed there was honor in it."
Her last telephone conversation with him was on Saturday.
"He never talked much about specifics [of] what was happening over there when he called," she said. "Mostly he would call to let us know that he was OK and to hear the news from home. We had a baptism here, I told him. He has a nephew he's never seen.
"The sacrifices he's made in the last five years -- he's missed out on so much, and he did it without question."
Before he was deployed to Iraq, Sgt. Bossert was stationed in South Korea, where he met his wife, Olya, who is Russian. She has been staying with the Bosserts in Fountain City, which is about 130 miles from the Twin Cities and 8 miles from Winona, Minn.
"She's in a foreign country, away from her family," Diane Bossert said. "He was her world, and now he's gone."
Andrew Bossert was a 1999 graduate of Cochrane-Fountain City High School, and the flag outside the school was at half-staff Wednesday. All classes observed a moment of silence at the start of the school day.
"Every one of us is a special part of each other's life, and forever," the Class of '99 declared in the school annual, the Pirateer. "The end of the millennium has brought about many exciting changes, and our class will be forced to face those changes first."
Bossert was "one of those students who stood out -- a ballplayer, a basketball player, a fine young man," said Superintendent Steven Mieden. "But isn't that how it goes? It's those kids who sign up to do what they're doing over there.
"It's personal now," he said. "You see all the stuff on TV and it doesn't seem real, but the loss of Andy is very personal. There's a face we know that goes with it now.
"What makes it even tougher is that the National Guard unit out of Arcadia [about 18 miles northeast of Fountain City] shipped out right after Christmas. They're in Iraq now, and we've got probably five or six kids in that unit who graduated from here in the past few years. The way those bombings are happening, the risk is that one or more of those kids could be hurt, too, and that's scary."
Mark Brone, 36, was Andy Bossert's high school basketball coach. Despite the age difference -- and a rocky start -- they became good friends after Bossert graduated.
"Andy was our most talented senior, our most valuable player," Brone said. "But we had struggled a bit, he and I, at the beginning. Andy was extremely bright and had a lot to give, but he made you earn it. We really worked at a relationship.
"The thing I know in my heart is that Andy was the type of friend who, when you saw him at any point in life, you could pick up right where you left off. There was no fakeness, no airs. Unfortunately, that's never going to happen again until I die."
Brone said that two other young men he coached are in Iraq, and that Bossert's death has made him more concerned for their safety.
"The situation we're in there -- something needs to change so this doesn't keep happening," he said. "They don't need to come home in body bags. Isn't losing Andy enough?"
Bossert's death hit Brone especially hard because he lost a brother about Andy's age in a workplace accident years ago.
"The death of young people is so sad," he said. "They haven't written their chapters yet. The speculation of what might have been is so haunting."