AMERICAN FORK — Four-year-old Kai Alleman didn't cry when his mother sat him down Monday and told him his father, a specialist for the Army, wouldn't be coming home from Iraq. He didn't kick and scream. He didn't throw a fit.

He looked his mother in the eye and told her matter-of-factly, "I'm going to go to Diraq (how he and his father jokingly referred to the Middle Eastern country) and I'm going to bring Dada home," said his grandmother, Susan Alleman, as she reminisced Tuesday night over photos of Kai and his brother, Kennet, 6, laughing with their father, Micheal, who died Monday in combat near Balad.

In a Department of Defense announcement, Alleman was identified as one of three U.S. soldiers killed Feb. 3 when insurgents attacked their unit using small-arms fire. Alleman was assigned to the 5th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division out of Fort Wainwright, Alaska.

The photos, taken in a professional studio, revealed a piece of the man behind the uniform, his wife, Amy, said. In one picture, which Amy Alleman tearfully identified as the photo the couple sent with Christmas cards in December, Micheal Alleman, 31, was in the middle of a sneeze. His wife was just about to blink, and both sons were making faces.

"He was the most hilarious person I've ever known," Amy Alleman said. "He would just crack zinger after zinger after zinger — and he didn't even have to think about it."

No matter how bad her mood, Micheal Alleman could get his wife giggling. All he had to do, she said, was pull the "troublesome truck face," a crooked half smile, half sneer named for the couple's sons' favorite book series, "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends."

Monday — the day the bad news came — wasn't any different.

Amy Alleman knew the instant she opened the door Monday afternoon what the Army personnel standing on her mother-in-law's porch had come to tell her. She was — justifiably — overwhelmed.

"I almost threw up," she said. "I thought I was in a nightmare. I wanted to tell them they had the wrong house."

All it took, though, was a glance at a photo of that "goofball face" and Amy Alleman was no longer crying but reminiscing. Thoughts of her husband, she said, could never be anything but happy.

The couple, which Micheal's mother described as "incredibly tight-knit," kept in almost constant touch over the year he has spent in Iraq. Since he enlisted in January 2008, the couple talked every day — sometimes twice a day — and chatted online.

"His family was his life," Susan Alleman said.