My thoughts and prayers go out to PVT Murdock's family.  May they always know that he died a hero.  We can never say it enough, "Our nation is blessed with so many brave and selfless men and women such as PVT Murdock".  Rest in peace brave Soldier.

From Stars and Stripes (photos, video and remainder of story by clicking on the link)

Fateful Day Brings Post Back to War's Reality

By Michael Gisick, Stars and Stripes

Mideast edition, Thursday Sept 25, 2008

NURISTAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan — Fire had swept through the pine forests blanketing the mountains around Combat Outpost Lybert a few years ago, before the Americans arrived.

According to the stories they’ve heard, the fire was set by loggers from Pakistan trying to eliminate their competition. If so, it worked. Broad swaths of scrub, blackened stumps and skeleton trees remain.

The Americans move slowly up through this ghost of a forest in the gray dawn, struggling against the altitude and the incline and their packs and weapons. One of the first things the Marine Corps lieutenant who works with the Afghan soldiers here taught the newly-arrived Army lieutenant was how to tell the Afghans to slow down.

The bullets that rained on Lybert four days earlier came from up this way, at least some of them. But the only presence the patrol finds amid the scattering of abandoned huts and clapboard goat corrals on the mountain is one lone wanderer, wearing brown "man-jammies" and faded yellow shoes decorated with colorful, washed-out polka dots.

This man says he is from Pakistan and has come in search of his lost herd. The U.S. interpreter struggles to understand his dialect, but the Afghan commander, a stubble-faced man with a tattoo of a snake coiled around a dagger on his forearm, doesn’t believe the story.

First this man says he’s a Pashtun, the commander, Taj Mohammed, says. And then he says he is a nomad.

"Next he will say he is British," Mohammed concludes.

Click here to read the rest of the story and to view the video.