FALLUJAH, Iraq -- The mob had tired of thrashing the two scorched torsos. The body on the south side of the skeletal steel bridge was tied to the girders with electrical cord about five feet above the ground, dismembered and decapitated. The second body hung on the other side of the roadway, feet up, its limbs slack, its head little more than a blackened skull. A few blocks away, another crowd was beating two more burned bodies.

On the bridge, an Arab reporter would raise a camera and a man or boy would climb to pose beside a corpse. Some in the crowd would turn and flash a "V" for victory with their fingers.

Beneath the bridge, the patches of tall reeds along the Euphrates were motionless in the still midmorning air of March 31. On the far side, a water buffalo grazed at the river's edge. U.S.-trained Iraqi security troops loitered around their headquarters and ignored the crowd.

The four dead men were Americans, armed civilians working for a private contractor.

The Marines, in charge of the area, hadn't known the four were traveling that day into the cauldron of Fallujah. They wouldn't risk a riot by trying to stop the macabre show. Finding the killers later might be their problem, but for now, the corpses would just have to stay there.

Later that day, the radio played oldies inside the Zovko family's body shop in a gritty corner of Cleveland. The music stopped for news: four U.S. contractors had been killed in some city in Iraq.

Danica Zovko, doing the shop's accounts, thought of another ugly televised scene a decade earlier. She sent two e-mail messages to her son Jerry, in Iraq:

"They're killing people in Iraq just like Somalia."

"... remember tomorrow is April Fools Day. Please be careful ..."

It didn't occur to Danica Zovko, or the families of the other men, that those torn, scorched bodies -- the "contractors" -- could be their kin. They knew little, just that Jerko "Jerry" Zovko, Wesley Batalona, Michael Teague and Stephen "Scott" Helvenston were in Iraq. In the families' eyes, they were soldiers, not contractors.

So in Ohio, Tennessee, Florida, California and, as the sun climbed, on Hawaii's Big Island, the families heard the reports. They went on with their normal business.

Working for Blackwater

The four men had been brought together in Iraq to work for Blackwater USA, based in Moyock, in North Carolina's northeast corner. The company, and others like it, made money by doing work the military once handled on its own.

Blackwater had several jobs for the U.S. government in Iraq, including a $21 million contract to protect L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian who ran the country until June 28.

The company's owner -- a 35-year-old former Navy SEAL named Erik Prince -- had strong connections. His father, Edgar, owner of an auto parts manufacturer that sold for $1.35 billion, had donated tens of millions of dollars to conservative Christian organizations. Erik Prince interned in Congress and for the first President Bush, campaigned for presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan and gave heavily to conservative candidates.

Zovko, Batalona, Teague and Helvenston had signed short-term contracts with Prince's company, earning about $600 a day. They knew little about Prince, but they knew that the company was run mainly by former SEALs, people like them in many ways, men highly trained in military operations.

Helvenston, 38, of Oceanside, Calif., had been not just a SEAL but an instructor, teaching underwater techniques and advanced parachuting -- SEAL stands for the attack routes of sea, air and land. He had parlayed his 12 years with the commando unit into acting and consulting on Hollywood movies, selling a line of fitness videos and working as a fitness trainer and climbing guide.

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.)