Access North Georgia -- Elmer "Mo" Youngblood wasn't sure why his sailor son wanted to leave relatively safe duty aboard a ship to be a combat medic in Iraq.

"For some reason or another, he wanted to be a corpsman," Youngblood said of his son, Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis Levy Youngblood.

Travis Youngblood, 26, died Thursday in a military hospital from shrapnel wounds.

He was a medic with a Marine unit in the Iraqi town of Hit when an "improvised explosive device" sent shrapnel into his legs and throat on July 15, according to the Department of Defense.

"I was tickled to death with him being in the Navy," Elmer Youngblood, a former Navy man, said from his home in Surrency, in southeast Georgia. "I wasn't too happy when he basically volunteered to go over there, but it was his choice."

Travis Youngblood grew up mostly in Virginia. He attended Appling County High School after his father moved there in the 1990s. Surrency is listed as his hometown on his Navy enlistment papers and he and his father enjoyed fishing and hunting together there.

His wife, Laura, also served in the Navy. She left the service and lives in Long Beach, N.Y.

The couple has a four-year-old son, Hunter Youngblood, and Laura Youngblood is pregnant with the couple's second child.

Travis Youngblood served with Regimental Combat Team 2, 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) when he was wounded.

He is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 1, his father said.

==For Few, Iraq War Has Changed Everything==

Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq. Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.

Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.

"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.

Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears — though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.

Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.

It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck — though some paid the ultimate price, as well.

Around military bases across America, vacations are planned around deployment schedules. Mini baby booms occur nine months after troops come home. Support groups for widows and injured soldiers have come together.

At small town National Guard armories, the focus has shifted from one weekend a month to filling out life insurance forms and packing a rucksack for war.

"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pa. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.

In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.

It's not a matter of whether you will have to deal with things like irritability and nightmares after you get home, he says: "It's how you deal with it when it does happen."

And how you deal with your fellow Americans who experience Iraq from a distance.

Amanda Jordan, whose Marine husband was killed three days into the war, says she doesn't know what bothers her more — the days that go by when no one speaks of the war, or the punditry. At a local diner she frequents with her 11-year-old son near their home in Enfield, Conn., she's contemplated standing up and leaving so he doesn't hear when people say Iraq was unnecessarily invaded.

"This is like my life. You're saying my spouse, my child's father, is dead for no reason," says Jordan, a 39-year-old former paralegal who is studying to be a therapist specializing in grief. "That's a pretty harsh thing to hear all the time."