"I remember this freshman comes walking out to the first band practice with his sousaphone and all of his philosophies and funny voices and right there, you knew he was something else," says Luke Lorenz, who was a high school junior at the time. "We went away for two weeks of practice and that first night Berg takes some scrap of aluminum foil and a Walkman and constructs an alarm system for our cabin.

"If you triggered it, a taped voice started yelling: GET OUT OF HERE! GET OUT OF HERE!"

"He was funny, outgoing, dramatic, compassionate, intuitive, brilliant." Lorenz, who at first had not wanted to talk because he was exhausted and because it's so painful, cannot stop himself now. "You throw a whole bunch of those adjectives in a blender and you know what you come up with? Berg."

He was a good enough student to get into Cornell University and restless enough to drop out a year short of graduation. He was the young man who climbed cliffs and read deeply in history and mythology and, of late, in Judaism and Islam. He was the talk of his friends, who took a fierce pride in the course he charted.

What's up with Berg?

Did you hear from Berg?

Oh, man, let me tell you about Berg.

"Nick was an explorer," says Peter Lu, a slight, close-shaven high school chum now in his fourth year as a physics PhD student at Harvard. "He went where no one else did. If there was a path, you could bet Berg wouldn't be on it."

School came easy to Nick, whose parents were schoolteachers. By the time he got to high school, he had found a niche among the science kids, joining the National Science Olympiad and the debate team.

There were two trips to Iraq and his e-mails from there read so often like travelogues of a young American abroad. There are stories of bus rides through dusty towns and glimpses of distant green hills -- perfect for exploring! -- and the joy of trying to pick up a little Arabic. He's reading of Judaism and Farsi and history --

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25408-2004May13?language=printer