Burton Kephart asks me for 10 minutes to see if he can save my soul. Opening his Bible to Matthew and Romans he tells me that I was born a sinner, God gave his only son for my sins and if I accepted Jesus into my heart I could be saved.
I ask him what will happen if I don't. "Eternal judgment," he says. "Hell."
Mr Kephart gave his first-born son, Jonathan, to the American army. In late March the 21-year-old went to Iraq to serve with the 230th Military Police Company. Ten days later he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad.
He was the first person in Venango county, where Oil City nestles on the banks of the Allegheny river, to die in combat since Vietnam. The way his platoon sergeant, Edwin Rossman, tells it, his was a heroic death as he continued to spray insurgents with gunfire even after he had been hit twice in the shoulder during an ambush. "I know at one point when I looked at him, watching as he poured fire into the enemy troops, I knew we had a chance to make it out of there," wrote Mr Rossman in a letter to the Kepharts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1323316,00.html