Fresh Start Goes Awry

For most of her short life, Michelle Ring was chasing a fresh start.

After seeing her boyfriend killed in an Anchorage parking-lot fight, she moved to Tennessee. Five years later, with a crumbled marriage and two young boys, her job in a sweltering small-town factory could barely keep the lights on.

On her lunch break two years ago, she looked up and saw a highway sign: The Army.

Ring was a single parent and the country was at war, but she needed to start again. She enlisted and went to boot camp. Late last year, she shipped out from Fort Benning, Ga., to Baghdad. Her family said she'd finally found her place in the world. The Army brought structure and purpose, but in recent months she told her family that the violence around her seemed to be getting worse. She said she worried she wouldn't make it back to her children.

Then last week two soldiers drove up the rocky driveway of her sister's house in Wasilla. Ring, 26, had been killed July 5 by mortar fire while taking a break from a patrol, they said. Spc. Ring was the second female soldier with Alaska ties killed in a week's time. Fort Richardson Sgt. Trista L. Moretti, 27, of South Plainfield, N.J., died June 28 when she was hit by a mortar shell while sleeping in a trailer.

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http://www.adn.com/news/military/iraq/story/9123553p-9038907c.html