On Wednesday, the tearful hugs and quiet words of comfort exchanged in his front yard were a testament to his family's worst fear: Logan isn't coming home.

Three weeks before he planned to get married during a furlough, Tinsley was killed when a roadside bomb sent his Humvee tumbling down a ravine south of Baghdad.

Tinsley, 21, was a medic with the U.S. Army's 509th Airborne Regiment based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. The specialist was serving an 18-month stint in Iraq that began in November.

The scene at Tinsley's home on Walnut Street on Wednesday was similar to others playing out across America as the second-deadliest month of the year for U.S. troops in Iraq winds down.

Boxes of fried chicken and bottles of soda sat on a card table in the front living room. Folding chairs waited nearby for the next visitors. A red ribbon on the front porch read, "Logan, Our Hero." Old classmates and relatives showed up all afternoon to console each other.

Through her sobs, Logan's mother, Lori Fairfax Tinsley, welcomed each one with a hug. But unlike many military moms, she is not just mourning the loss of her child. She is also preparing herself for another son, Ryan, to be deployed to Iraq.

"I had a dream a long time ago that the Army would come to my door, but I wouldn't know which son," she said. "I begged them not to come in, not to tell me Logan was dead."

Now it is Ryan's turn to go to war. At 18, he is scheduled to ship out in April with the Army's 82nd Airborne division as a "forward observer," responsible for calling in artillery drops and air strikes on hostile targets.

Friends and relatives are begging him not to do it. But between greeting visitors and answering cell phone calls on Wednesday afternoon, Ryan Tinsley talked stoically about his duty.

"My brother did his part," Ryan said. "I'm doing mine."

U.S. Rep. John Spratt, who met Logan Tinsley when he was a decorated ROTC cadet at Chester High School, called the family Wednesday with condolences and an offer: To help take Ryan off the list of soldiers slated for deployment.

As much as it hurt, Lori Tinsley told Spratt she couldn't accept.

"I said, 'I've got to leave that to my son,'" Lori said. "I don't want my only son to be angry at me for keeping him from doing what he wants to do. He wants to fight even harder to vindicate his brother."

Guitars, tattoos, love for life

Word spreads quickly in a small town like Chester, and as the day wore on, classmates kept showing up at the house. They remembered a teenager who was often mischievous, sometimes even a bit crazy.

Joe Roberts remembers the day in 8th grade that he and Logan got caught writing raunchy song lyrics during band class. Logan played the French horn until he found an instrument he liked better.

"We both got guitars, and the rest is history," Roberts said.

James Lucas, known as "Big L," recalled the day he and Logan drove to Gastonia, N.C., to get matching tattoos saying "Cowboys from Hell" as a tribute to a song by their favorite heavy metal band, Pantera.

Nearly every female classmate who stopped by seemed to have dated Logan Tinsley at one time, saying his magnetic personality and easy smile made him hard to resist.

"I don't know how to explain the bond everybody had," said Casey Snelgrove, who graduated with Tinsley in Chester High's Class of 2004. "There was always a group of people here."

"Logan was the one who kept us all together," Lucas said.

While many friends are in college or working, Tinsley chose a different path. He saw the military as a way out of Chester, a sleepy old textile town in one of the poorest counties in the state. In ROTC at Chester High, Tinsley rose to the level of executive officer.

"He definitely saw it as an opportunity to get out of here," classmate Melissa Robinson said.

"It gave Logan the opportunity to see things that may not have been possible," said Master Sgt. Al Boyd, Chester High's ROTC instructor. "He had traveled already. He was jumping out of airplanes. Living in Alaska. Pretty good jump for us country boys."

Serving in the Army also allowed Tinsley to meet Sarah Nelson, the woman he planned to marry in three weeks. They met in Alaska where Logan was stationed. The wedding would have been there.

His mother had already reserved her plane tickets and booked a hotel room.

Keeping in touch

The night before he left for Iraq, Tinsley called each of his closest friends to say goodbye. Once there, he kept in touch by posting messages on his MySpace and Facebook Web pages.

The last post came the day before he died. It included a picture of a grinning Tinsley kneeling next to a crater that apparently had been created through an explosion. "Nice hole," he wrote.

"If you want to capture Logan, that's the picture," said his mother, who showed off a printed copy to visitors.

Tinsley made his mom promise that she wouldn't watch the news on TV. He said it was because she shouldn't believe half the stories, but Lori Tinsley suspects the real reason was that he didn't want her to get upset over the scenes of carnage.

She kept the promise, but it hasn't stopped her from becoming angry at President Bush. Asked what she would say to him, she was quick with an answer that underscores the difficult choices in Iraq: "Either pull them all out, or send more over because they're picking them off like flies. How many more have got to die?"

'Not my baby'

A wrenching scene unfolded on Walnut Street on Tuesday night. At 8:10 p.m., a dark sedan pulled into the driveway at Paula Chapman's house. An Army chaplain and lieutenant colonel had overshot the Tinsley's' house a block away and were turning around.

"When I saw the dress blues, I knew," Chapman said. "Before I could get to the stop sign, they had knocked on the door. Lori hit the floor and hollered, 'Not my baby.'"

At the very moment Lori was getting the news, her surviving son was at Wal-Mart, buying a prepaid phone card so that she could talk to his brother. Another neighbor, Dana Lightner, hurried to the store to bring him back.

"I said, 'Ryan, you need to come home,'" Lightner recalled. "He said, 'Is Logan on the phone?' I just said, 'Come home.'"

Ryan Tinsley rushed to the house to find his mother sobbing with family members who had begun to arrive. They joined hands to pray.

The next day, Lori Tinsley and relatives were just beginning to think about funeral arrangements, although it was still unclear when Logan's body would be brought home.

In a quiet moment outside the house, months before he puts his own life at risk in the same war, Ryan Tinsley offered a simple tribute to his big brother.

"He died doing what he wanted," Ryan said softly. "And he was a good man."