An Army captain from Mechanicsville, Va., is the fifth Schofield Barracks soldier to be killed in or near Hawija, a farming city in northern Iraq that has long been a hotbed of Sunni resistance to U.S. forces.

A grenade landed in Capt. Shane T. Adcock's Humvee on Wednesday, killing the 27-year-old married man, family said yesterday. Another soldier received a concussion, and a third received shrapnel injuries and is in Germany.

"It's hard," said Vera Adcock, the soldier's mother. "It's something that you don't ever think that you are going to go through with your child — that you are going to see your child go off to war and not have him come back."

One of the comforts the family takes, as hard as the loss is, is that Shane Adcock was a Christian, his mother said. "He knew the Lord, and it had to be his time," she said from Virginia. "The grenade went into the Humvee, but he was the one that died. The others were able to walk away."

A sixth American killed in Hawija was a DynCorp International contractor from Maine, who was struck by a sniper's bullet on Sept. 17. Darrell Wetherbee, 46, was an Iraqi police liaison officer and part of a State Department team working with Hawai'i troops.

More than 7,000 Schofield Barracks soldiers have been serving in a Pennsylvania-sized swath of northern Iraq for about two months now, but all of their losses have been in or near Hawija.

Two other soldiers killed elsewhere were from Mainland units, but were attached to Schofield's 25th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Schofield's 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Wolfhounds fought the 25th Infantry Division's biggest firefight in 2004 in Hawija, a city of about 80,000 some 30 miles southwest of Kirkuk. In a daylong firefight, about 40 enemy fighters were killed and 60 were wounded. There were no Hawai'i fatalities.

The region, which the battalion commander for the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry there now says is "98 percent Sunni," has been plagued by sniper and other hit-and-run attacks on U.S. forces since 2004.

Sunnis dominated Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party, and were forced out of their jobs after the U.S.-led invasion in March of 2003.

A REGION IN TURMOIL

A recent Marine security report painted a bleak picture of the insurgency in the adjacent and heavily Sunni Anbar province, with the classified assessment finding prospects dim for securing the western region of the country, the Washington Post reported.

"We're in a recruiting war with the insurgency," Brig. Gen. Robert Neller, the deputy commander in western Iraq, said in August.

Wetherbee, the police trainer, had called his wife from Iraq and said he might not come home alive, she had told the Sun Journal newspaper in Maine.

He had been a contract peacekeeper in Kosovo, but in the Hawija area found turmoil, violence and snipers, Sheila Wetherbee had said.

Lt. Col. Drew Meyerowich, the Hawai'i-based battalion commander for about 1,000 U.S. troops — most of whom are from Schofield — acknowledges that Hawija "is probably one of the rougher neighborhoods" in his operating area at the tip of the Sunni Triangle.

While Sunnis were part of the Baath Party, "there is reconciliation going on in this area," Meyerowich said recently by phone. "They are sitting at the table (with us) trying to solve their own problems."

Since Schofield soldiers arrived, the three major tribal leaders in the region have met with U.S. forces to chart a new way ahead, he said.

"All three grand sheiks sat down together at a table with me to discuss how they are going to restructure and get things done so that they are governing themselves and they are protecting themselves," he said.

Soldiers from previous units lamented the lack of motivation and allegiance in the fledgling Iraqi army in the Hawija area. But Meyerowich said the army's ranks are now being drawn locally, noting that fear that Kurds from the north — a group at odds with the Arabs — might somehow replace them is one of the motivators.

"I think there have been significant results," Meyerowich said, "but I think it's a slow process where you are dealing with a culture that's thousands of years old."

NEWLY WED TO HILO GAL

Shane Adcock, a fire support officer who was with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, didn't tell his mother where he was, and said only he was north of Baghdad, she said. Previously, he had deployed to Afghanistan with the 25th Division and seemed more willing to talk about that, she said.

His grandfather had served 30 years in the Navy and Adcock grew up in Norfolk knowing all the military aircraft in the area. He was commissioned in 2003.

"At the time that he decided to go into the Army, the Army was not doing the yearlong deployments," his mother said. "We talked about doing the Navy or other branches of the service, and he said, 'Well, they deploy for over six months at a time,' and with the Army, we weren't involved in the war on terror like we are now."

Shane loved the outdoors, surfing in Hawai'i, and in June married his girlfriend Jennifer Skeele, who is from Hilo, but whom he met in Virginia, Vera Adcock said.

As neighbors and friends streamed to her home yesterday to offer support and condolences, Vera Adcock said she has mixed emotions about Iraq. Her son will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full honors.

"At the beginning of all of this, I understood what we were doing (in Iraq). I knew why we were there," she said. "I'm not so sure anymore I understand that."

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.