Hometown stunned over Berg beheading

By Jon Leyne BBC, West Chester, Pennsylvania

Berg's neighbours are struggling to come to terms with the killing

The home of Nick Berg, the US civilian beheaded in Iraq, is here in a comfortable suburb outside a prosperous country town.

In the quiet streets of his neighbourhood, local residents taking their children to school squeezed their cars past the line of television trucks parked outside his house.

Others were out mowing the lawn on this early summer's day, while the Berg family mourned their loss behind shuttered windows.

The pleasant surroundings make it all the more difficult to comprehend the brutal nature of his death.

A neighbour of the Berg family, Bruce Hauser, summed up reaction in the town.

"I think there's bitterness. The community is very surprised," he said.

"You know, you look in a newspaper, you read about the soldiers who have perished in the war. But you never believe what's going to happen to anyone in West Chester, not alone on our street or your next-door neighbour."

No support

Friends describe Nick Berg as adventurous and independent-minded.

It was that spirit that sent him to Iraq looking for business rebuilding communications towers.

Unlike most foreign workers there, he had no interpreter and no bodyguards.

That may be the reason why he was detained for 13 days by the authorities in Iraq and missed his flight home - all that around a month before his death.

Nick's father, Michael, blames the US government for that detention and his son's death.

The US-led coalition said Nick was actually held by the local Iraqi police. As the United States runs Iraq, the difference may be a little academic.

What is clear is that Nick Berg had none of the support network most foreigners enjoy in Iraq - all so different from his background here in quiet West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Widening divide

For the people in West Chester this is, first and foremost a personal tragedy. But it is hard to avoid doing the political calculus.

He was killed because of being an American Mindy Cooper West Chester resident

To put it bluntly, in purely political terms, the tragedy for the Berg family could have some benefits for the Bush administration.

While no-one within the administration will be crass enough to say it, many in America will draw a simple lesson. Surely the prison abuses in Iraq bear no comparison with this barbarity ?

That might be the logic, but in well-to-do West Chester, the only people we found voicing anything like that opinion were a couple of scaffolders taking a break from their work.

Most resident had views more like these:

"We are not welcome there (in Iraq), but we insist on being there," said Greg Hunt. "That's why he died, I am sure."

"We should never have been there in the first place," said Mindy Cooper "He was killed because of being an American. He should not have been there, we should not have been there and we should be getting out."

Not a typical cross-section of America, to be sure. But it was another illustration of the way this war increasingly divides this country.