The Times-Picayune -- KROTZ SPRINGS -- Webster Reed woke up Saturday morning, found a friend on his doorstep with a small American flag in hand, and walked out into the fog lifting off the Atchafalaya River.

In days gone by, his middle son, Jonathan Reed, 25, had played in that river. Bryan Reed, the youngest of the boys, said he could remember swimming from bank to bank with his brother, the rock-solid former high school football star who wore No. 16 with pride.

 Jonathan Reed was a competitor, his father said, giving his all whether it was playing pickup football games with his brothers or helping to lead the Port Barre Red Devils deep into the 1997 state football playoffs. That's why Webster Reed knew his son would succeed as a staff sergeant with the 1088th Engineering Battalion of the Louisiana National Guard. But that didn't mean he wasn't afraid for him.

In recent weeks, he had seen it all too often: another roadside bomb in Iraq, a few more Louisiana boys dead, names scrolling across his television screen, here and gone.

And so by the time he got the news Friday that his son had been killed in Iraq along with Sgt. Christopher Ramsey, 20, of Batchelor, and Sgt. Michael Evans, whose age and hometown have not been released, Webster Reed said his worst fears had become reality. His son was now one of 11 Louisiana Guardsmen killed in Iraq this month.

Reed said he took the small American flag from his friend and walked down to the end of his driveway.

"Always, in the back of my mind, I knew it could happen to him," Webster Reed said later Saturday, surrounded by family outside his son's home in Port Barre where Jonathan Reed had lived with his wife and 11-month-old son.

"We're going to mourn him until we get him home. Then we're going to celebrate his life. Twenty-five years. He had a lot of miles behind him, and they were all happy."

Dreams of service

The Reeds weren't the only ones in mourning Saturday. About 30 miles northeast, in the town of Batchelor, Jeff and Angie Ramsey tried to find words to describe their son, Christopher, who, like Reed, had long dreamed of being a military man.

Last year, not long after he had left for training at Fort Hood in Texas, Angie Ramsey posted a message on AmericanHeroes.cc, a Web site set up to honor soldiers and other service men and women. In it, she wrote about his youth and his pride and her hopes. "Please pray," she said, "for all of our soldiers, to go and do their job and return to us safely."

Jeff Ramsey said Saturday that joining the service had been a longtime dream for his son. "He had been wanting to do that ever since he was old enough, wanted to join some type of service," Ramsey said. "This is just what he wanted to do, and it didn't work out."

The National Guard said the men were on patrol in western Baghdad late Friday afternoon when a roadside bomb exploded, killing them and making them the latest casualties of the 256th Brigade Combat Team. The brigade, which left for Baghdad in November and includes the 1088th, accounts for 2 percent of the U.S. troops in Iraq. As of Friday, it had suffered 11 of 49, or 22 percent, of combat casualties this month.

Happier times

Maj. Ed Bush, a spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard, said he could not speculate as to why that is. What they're working with here, he said, is only "a snapshot in time." But he said he made Guard officials aware of the statistic Saturday while the relatives of Jonathan Reed tried to forget this troubling snapshot and recall others instead.

There was Jonathan Reed, they said, meeting his wife, Desi, at the lockers of Port Barre High School. There they were -- like "one of those fairy tales," his father said -- getting married almost three years ago. And there was the young couple's son toddling about their home while Reed worked at the local Wal-Mart distribution center.

In the town of Krotz Springs, population 1,200, he was known as "good people." Even those who didn't know him knew of him. "Almost everyone here is related," said Claudette Cox, the cashier at Dreyfus's Grocery on Main Street. "Did you know Jonathan Reed?" she said to the very next customer. James Plaisance, 19, nodded his head yes.

Meanwhile, down U.S. 190 where Reed lived with his wife, Webster Reed's cell phone rang again and again. "We're still in shock," he told one caller. "It's tough," he told another. "This scene went through my mind hundreds of times a month."

Unfinished talk

All the same, Webster Reed said, he never expected it to happen now, just days after Reed's 25th birthday on Monday, which they celebrated by sending him beef jerky, hot sauce and clippings from the sports page. On the phone, relatives said, he sounded good, not overwhelmed like he had been months ago or worried about the roadside bombs that had grazed his vehicles in the past.

"He told me, he said, the last time I talked to him, 'I've got a lot to tell you,' " his father recalled. But the next person he heard from was a military chaplain, then friends and family members and people Reed said he didn't even know he knew.

Finally, when the phone stopped ringing for a moment Saturday, he paused and remembered the small American flag his friend had brought to him that morning, how he had planted it in the damp ground at the end of the driveway, left it there and walked back home to take care of one more thing.

He was concerned not about the small flag in the ground, but about the large American flag flapping in the wind on the flagpole near his house. He lowered it to half-staff out of respect for all the soldiers and left it there, visible in the lifting fog from more than a half-mile away.