Desiree Smith had urged Jared Kubasak to send her some photos of him as a soldier in Iraq to help ease her mind about his military duty there.

"I begged him to take some pictures," Smith said Tuesday morning. "I wanted to see what he slept in. And where he went to eat."

Kubasak, whom she had known since she and her twin sister, Darci, moved next door to him in Franklin County 10 years ago, she said, told her he was fighting a war and didn't have time for such things.

"I can't just go around taking pictures like I'm on vacation," she remembers him telling her. "But for me, I didn't know what he was doing, and I wanted to know that he was OK."

On Monday, Smith learned that Kubasak, 25, an Army corporal with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based in Fort Carson, Colo., had died earlier that day after the Bradley fighting vehicle he was riding in ran over a land mine near Baghdad.

It appears that Kubasak is the first serviceman from Franklin County to die in combat in the war, and the first Franklin County combat casualty since Vietnam.

Military officials told Smith and the Kubasak family Tuesday that it would be about 72 hours before more information about the incident comes out of the war-torn country, Smith said.

Funeral arrangements are still pending.

What Smith, 25, does know is that the friendship that she and her sister had with Kubasak that began when they were teenagers was much more than just neighborhood kids hanging out.

"We considered him a brother, not a neighbor," Smith said.

Smith said Kubasak had completed his first tour of duty in Iraq last year. His job then involved fixing tanks, but Smith said he wanted to do something more interesting, so when Kubasak re-enlisted in the Army six months ago, he volunteered for a more frontline position with an armored cavalry unit.

"He wanted more of a challenge, I'd have to say," Smith said.

Kubasak had re-enlisted in part because he was hoping to return to Germany after his tour of duty in Iraq ended in February. Germany was where he had been stationed for much of his five-year Army career, Smith said.

"He loved Germany, and that's why he enlisted in the Army to begin with. Because he wanted to travel," she said.

But Smith said Kubasak also told her that his latest deployment in Iraq was becoming increasingly more dangerous.

"He had a lot of close encounters this time," she said Kubasak told her when he was home on leave in November, leaving on Thanksgiving day to return to Iraq. "He had a lot more gory details that he didn't want to go into."

Kubasak's squadron has suffered a number of recent casualties. In November alone, five soldiers died in Baghdad, four of them on Nov. 11, when an explosive detonated near their patrol. The other death happened on Nov. 24 when a tank rolled into a canal by accident.

Prior to Kubasak, the latest person with ties to the region to die in Iraq was a Lynchburg soldier, Jason Sheuerman, who died July 30, 2005, from non-combat related injuries.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.