The campaign in Iraq has claimed a soldier believed to be the second American Jewish military casualty. David Bernstein, 24, of Phoenixville, Pa., a first lieutenant with the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade based in Camp Ederle, Italy, was killed in Taza, Iraq, when enemy forces ambushed his patrol with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Bernstein’s father, Richard, called his son “an athlete and a scholar” who graduated fifth in the class of 2001 at the U.S. Military Academy, the New York Daily News said. “He was an exceptional man and a wonderful person,” the elder Bernstein, now a Knoxville, Tenn., resident, told the Pottstown Mercury, a local newspaper covering Phoenixville.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2003 and is filed under news.