Soldier's Family Gets Confirmation on Body
By LYNN BREZOSKY, Associated Press Writer
50 minutes ago


In this undated photo released Monday, June 19, 2006, ...
BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Relatives of a Texas soldier caught in an insurgent attack in Iraq said Thursday the military had confirmed one of two brutalized bodies found there was his.

Army Pfc. Kristian Menchaca's family had gathered at his mother's Brownsville home, hoping that DNA tests would determine the young newlywed wasn't one of the victims found Tuesday.

"They have confirmed that it is Kristian," his aunt, Hermelinda Gomez, said Thursday before returning inside the single-story brick house.

Menchaca, a 23-year-old soldier from Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore., disappeared after an insurgent attack at a checkpoint by a Euphrates River canal, 12 miles south of Baghdad, that killed another U.S. soldier.

A U.S. military official said Wednesday that one and possibly both soldiers were tortured and beheaded. The bodies were sent to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Wednesday for DNA testing.

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This is just terrible. Add torture and beheading and it's just unthinkable. What I don't get then is why are they putting our soldiers in jail and having others up for murder charges and facing the death penalty when we are at war with barbarians like this? Where is the public outcry for the unfairness to our service men and women? This isn't a friggin tea party and I've had about enough PC when it comes to war and what is happening to our own.