Staff Sergeant Nino Livaudais, 23, from Ogden, Utah, was a Squad Leader with Company A, 3d Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Georgia. He was killed April 3, 2003, near Haditha Dam in western Iraq when his unit approached a vehicle in an attempt to help a screaming pregnant woman. In an apparent suicide attack, a bomb in the vehicle detonated, killing the two female occupants along with Nino and two other fellow servicemen.

SSG Livaudais, who also served in Afghanistan twice, planned to make the military his career. He graduated from Washington High School in Ogden in 1997, joined the Army in 1998 and completed Ranger school in 1999. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Valor and the Purple Heart.

His family remembered SSG Livaudais as a humble man who cared for the less fortunate. “He was always looking out for others,” Jackie Livaudais said. “He’d pile needy men into the back of his pickup and take them to McDonald’s where he’d buy food for them.”

The couple had two sons, Destre and Carson with a third child on the way at the time of his death.