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Fort Hood Searchers Find Dead Soldier

Associated Press

June 13, 2007

FORT HOOD, Texas - Searchers found the body late Tuesday of a sergeant who was missing for four days after he disappeared during a training exercise, an Army spokeswoman said.
Sgt. Lawrence G. Sprader, 25, went missing Friday during a solo exercise testing basic map-reading and navigation skills.

Col. Diane Battaglia, III Corps spokeswoman at Fort Hood, said the body was found on the rugged Central Texas Army post. The body had been sent for an autopsy and the cause of death had not been determined, she said.

Sprader was one of nearly 320 noncommissioned officers being trained as part of a two-week leadership course.

He wasn't the only Soldier who got lost during the three-hour exercise, but nine others who were disoriented got back to the rally point safely by following the sound of a siren that blasts when time is up, Battaglia said.

Reached on his cell phone two hours after the exercise was over, Sprader told commanders he wanted to finish the drill.

Hundreds of Soldiers scoured the rugged hills of the 15,000-acre training range; 800 were walking in marked grid areas Tuesday. Post officials said no other Soldier had ever been lost on the heavily used range long enough to prompt such a huge search.

Motorists reported seeing a Soldier matching Sprader's description near a road Friday evening. One sighting was on the eastern edge of the post and another on the far northern edge, making it difficult to concentrate the search in one area, Battaglia said.

The sightings, and his score card from the exercise, were the last signs of him, although Battaglia wasn't certain where the card was found.

Sprader returned from an Iraq deployment in September and worked in the criminal investigation division of Fort Hood. The Prince George, Va., Soldier had no orders for redeployment to the war zone.

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