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Helvenston's father committed suicide when he was young, and he had vowed to do better by his own son and daughter, who were 14 and 12. But he had recently divorced, and he needed money.

The three men with him March 31 were former Army Rangers.

Teague, 38, of Clarksville, Tenn., was a burly softball player and motorcycle enthusiast. He had left a low-paying security guard job in Tennessee. He was a decorated 12-year Army veteran who had served in Afghanistan, Panama and Grenada and with a Special Operations helicopter unit nicknamed "Night Stalkers."

Zovko, 32, a 6-foot 3-inch, heavily muscled Croatian-American, was secretive about his background but so outgoing that it seemed as though he knew every westerner in Baghdad. He spoke good Arabic -- and several other languages -- and chatted often with the staff in the small hotel where he lived.

Zovko had met Batalona, 48, during a brief stint in 2003 when they trained Iraqi soldiers with another private military contractor. Though Zovko was 16 years younger, they hit it off.

Batalona, a thin, white-haired native of the rural, rainy side of Hawaii's Big Island, had been a tough Ranger sergeant. But he had a soft spot for kids, perhaps because as one of the youngest in a pack of nine, he had sometimes been overlooked. He jokingly called Zovko his son.

Batalona was known for quietly sizing up people, then using pranks to befriend them. Like Teague, he had quit a security guard job to come to Iraq, in part to save his father's house from foreclosure.

Little knowledge

The families of the four men understood only vaguely what they were doing in Iraq. After the men's years of service, it was hard not to think of them as part of the U.S. military.

On the afternoon of March 31, Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel was sitting at her desk in Leesburg, a small, moss-draped town in central Florida, doing paperwork for a low-income housing project her employer was planning.

It was night in Iraq. The television images were reaching into homes around the globe, including Helvenston-Wettengel's. She heard something about contractors but ignored it. Her son, Scott, wasn't building anything. He was carrying a gun.

She heard more of the news. And more. About 6 p.m., the newscaster said something about security contractors from North Carolina. She started to panic.

On the windward side of Hawaii's Big Island, it was morning. June Batalona puttered around the tiny box of a house that she and her husband, Wesley, shared with her mother. The television images from Iraq were difficult to comprehend.

That afternoon, June Batalona drove in the family's Ford Expedition with its Army Ranger sticker to the touristy side of the island and her hotel job. It was the same commute her husband had made when he was home, heading for his night shift at another hotel.

Batalona still was known among former Rangers as one of the Army's toughest sergeants. In Hawaii, he had tried to keep his edge, volunteering for foot patrols on the miles of pathways at the sprawling Hilton Waikoloa Village. He padded through the soft tropical darkness, making sure that wealthy tourists behaved themselves.

It wasn't enough of a challenge.

(News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)

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