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WASHINGTON - Just before Christmas, an Army captain named Brian Freeman cornered Sens. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., and John Kerry, D-Mass., at a Baghdad helicopter landing zone. The war was going badly, he told them. Troops were stretched so thin they were doing tasks they never dreamed of, let alone trained for.
Freeman, 31, took a short holiday leave to see his 14-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, returned to his base in Karbala, Iraq, and less than two weeks ago died in a hail of bullets and grenades. Insurgents, dressed in U.S. military uniforms, speaking English and driving black American SUVs, got through a checkpoint and attacked, kidnapped four soldiers and later shot them. Freeman died in the assault, the fifth casualty of the brazen attack.
Freeman's mother, Kathy Snyder, and stepfather, Al, live in Mendon, about eight miles west of Logan.
The death of the West Point graduate - a star athlete from Temecula, Calif., who ran bobsleds and skeletons with Winter Olympians - has radicalized Dodd, energized Kerry and girded the ever-more confrontational stance of Democrats in the Senate. Freeman's death has reverberated on the Senate floor, in committee deliberations and on television talk shows.
''This was the kind of person you don't forget,'' Dodd said Monday. ''You mention the number dead, 3,000, the 22,000 wounded, and you almost see the eyes glaze over. But you talk about an individual like this, who was doing his job, a hell of a job, but was also willing to talk about what was wrong, it's a way to really bring it to life, to connect.''
''When I returned from war, almost 40 years ago now, I stood up and spoke from my heart and my gut about what I thought was wrong,'' Kerry said on the Senate floor last week as he recounted his meeting with Freeman. ''I asked the question in 1971: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? . . . I never thought that I would be reliving the need to ask that question again.''
Today Freeman will be memorialized at his home in California, just days before the Senate takes up a resolution formally stating Congress's opposition to the president's plan to add 21,500 additional troops to the war in Iraq. Late last year, Freeman approached the senators at Landing Zone Washington, in Baghdad's Green Zone, ''almost out of the shadows,'' Dodd recalled.
Even though he felt nervous, he told his wife later, he delivered his message with urgency. Soldiers were being deployed to do missions that they were utterly untrained to do; Freeman, for example, an armor officer, had been sent to help foster democracy and rebuild an Iraqi civil society. State Department personnel who could do those jobs were restricted in their travel off military bases by regional security officers who said it was unsafe for them to venture out.
''Senator, it's nuts over here,'' Dodd quoted Freeman as saying.
On Jan. 20, the day of Freeman's death, his wife, Charlotte, was visiting his mother in Utah when a neighbor called to say that a military vehicle had stopped by the Freeman home. Frantic for news, Charlotte Freeman contacted Dodd's staff. The senator's aides learned of Brian Freeman's fate from the Defense Department and helped get military officials dispatched to his wife.
Kerry took the news personally, aides said. In Freeman, he saw something of himself - a promising young officer, articulate and politically minded. But Kerry made it back from Vietnam.
''All that loss, for what?'' Dodd asked.