Hamill (shown in a 1998 photo), a triplet, grew up in Salem, Conn., and joined the military shortly after graduating from the University of Connecticut. He had spent a year in Iraq clearing IEDs like the one that killed him, and he was only a few days away from coming home. "The hard part is finding the bombs," he wrote in an e-mail to his family. "They're very creative at hiding them but we have tons of technology and techniques to find them." Hamill was killed on Nov. 26, 2006, in Baghdad.