"I'm more afraid of these road bombs," said Zangara, 21, a three-year Army veteran from Northeast Philadelphia who had married only a year ago.

The next morning Zangara was dead, killed by a roadside bomb in Tikrit.

"He almost, like, predicted it," his stepfather, Ed Burgstahler, said. Nick made the remark in a conversation with his biological father, Richard Zangara, who is divorced from Nick's mother, Barbara. She married Burgstahler, who helped raised Nick from a baby.

Nick Zangara's best Army buddy, with whom he had gone to boot camp, was with him when the bomb went off, Burgstahler said. Nick's buddy lived for a day, but died Sunday.

The Defense Department said Zangara was assigned to the First Battalion, Seventh Field Artillery Regiment, First Infantry Division.

Zangara was sent to Iraq in February, and his stepfather said he was scheduled for a "stress leave" in August.

Burgstahler said his stepson "wasn't a big person in stature, but he's our hero. Not because he died, that's not being a hero, but because he had his convictions.

"He never complained. He never thought about not doing his duty and not going there. He had no second thoughts.

"He said to his mother, 'I'm sure we're there doing the right thing.' "

"All the time," Burgstahler told his mother, Barbara, "I'm OK. Don't worry about me."

Still, the war had taken its toll.

Burgstahler described his stepson as "full of life. I can't picture him as anything but full of life," he said.

Yet, "the last couple weeks, we saw pictures of him there, and he just aged. He looked serious and sad."

Burgstahler said his stepson told the family in e-mails home, "There was nothing that could surprise him now, anymore, in life. He had seen everything.

"They send the good guys [to war]. It's the little people who are there. The guys and girls that are doing their job.

"They must live under such stress it must be like living in hell."

A graduate of George Washington High School in the Northeast, Zangara "wasn't too much on schoolwork, but he was into computers. He was with field artillery, doing something with computers," Burgstahler said.

"He could figure anything out with two glances at the instructions, the most technical of things.

"Everybody in this neighborhood loved him," Burgstahler said.

"They knew he was a character, he was a rascal at times. When people are getting the news about Nick, they're just breaking down.

"I don't know what good came of this," Burstahler said of his stepson's death.

"I know our land has to be protected. I know they'll [the enemy] come here. I just think that the American people need more information as to what is the strategy. Why are they staying over there?

"They're picking us off, one by one."

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