St. Anne, Ill. ? It is a postage stamp of a town, a place where on Memorial Day they just go ahead and read the names of every resident who ever served in wartime — from the Civil War on — whether they died in battle or years later.

And it is the kind of place the military has often come to inform a family that a loved one was killed in Iraq.

“We’ve got a lot of heroes in small towns,” said Mark Beaupre, whose son, Marine pilot Ryan Beaupre, was one of the first U.S. casualties in the war with Iraq.

Beaupre, 30, was one of seven Illinois residents to die in the war and its aftermath — and one of five from towns that are dots on the Illinois map.

Taken together, the populations of St. Anne, La Harpe, Malden, Roscoe and Odin wouldn’t add up to a decent crowd at Wrigley Field.

A look at the list of those killed in the war reveals the heavy price rural areas around the country have paid. While cities such as Los Angeles and Cleveland are represented, they are far outnumbered by spots like Apollo, Pa.; Ossian, Iowa; and Holtville, Calif.

The soldiers all enlisted for their own reasons — but time after time those reasons come back to their hometowns.

“Kids in these small towns feel that they can make a difference,” said Jeffrey Huxley, whose 19-year-old nephew, Army Pfc. Gregory Huxley Jr. of Forestport, N.Y., was killed April 6 in Iraq. “When the (World Trade Center) towers came down, he wanted to go find the people who did it.”

The grave of Ryan Beaupre is next to his grandparents' graves in Catholic Cemetery in St. Anne, Ill. Today, St. Anne residents will remember Beaupre, one of the first U.S. soldiers killed in the war with Iraq this spring.

“Many of these towns were essentially built by World War I or World War II veterans, and kids, myself included, spent a lot of time at the Legion hall or the VFW,” said Ken Klipp, Ryan Beaupre’s high school track coach who gave the eulogy at his memorial service.

The Defense Department says the number of soldiers from rural areas are not available. But at least one branch of the service — the Army — has found that rural areas are sending slightly more than their share of soldiers into the Army while urban and suburban areas are sending slightly fewer than their share.

To grow up in these towns meant knowing not only that residents had served in the military, but knowing who they were and what they did.

Like his father before him, Ryan Beaupre learned about the old man down at the lumber yard who fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. He learned, said his father, which of the men in town returned from Vietnam and the two whose names are etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C.

“It’s something just sort of characteristic of small-town USA,” said Jim Laurenti, the principal at the high school in nearby Kankakee. “The idea of patriotism and fighting for one’s country is something that would have been embedded into his personality.”