MY NEIGHBOR

Steve lives in the apartment above mine...or to be more accurate, his wife Amy lives there. Steve, like CPT Patti, is in Baghdad.

So is his brother.

"As the 1st Armored Division snaked across Iraq, Sam's humvee was rammed by a five-ton truck (from the same division)," Barbara Winslow wrote in a letter to the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. As Sam and his crew scrambled to fix the humvee, Winslow said, an M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier pulled up to the rescue.

"Sam could see it was from the 16th Engineers," her letter went on. "Stepping around the front, he called up to the soldier in the hatch:

"Do you know Lt. Winslow?"

"The soldier looked down at him and said: 'Sam?'"

Help was already on the way, and the brothers snatched just 10 minutes together before the charge to Baghdad swept them apart again. They have not met since.