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But late Sunday afternoon local time in Afghanistan, as a company of about 120 members of his 4th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment prepared for an assault against the Taliban, Lance Corporal Marks became the latest victim of an increasingly bloody war.

In the lead platoon, the 27-year-old was killed in a ferocious gun battle when the militants, it appears, ambushed the Australians as they prepared to attack.

"They were preparing for a deliberate assault against a target and they were out in the open when this engagement took place, and that is as far as I`ll go," the Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said yesterday.

Lance Corporal Marks - the fifth Australian to die in the Afghanistan campaign and the fourth since October - had been in Afghanistan for only a matter of weeks.

The ADF yesterday drew a protective cloak around his shattered wife, Cassandra, and their two children, a four-year-old boy and a baby girl.

When The Australian knocked on the door of the Marks house in southwest Sydney, Special Operations Task Group Chaplain Rob Sutherland answered and said the family would not engage in media interviews.

By a curious twist of fate, the Marks house, understood to be owned by the army, was previously occupied by the family of Private Jake Kovco, the soldier killed by his own gun almost exactly two years ago in Iraq.

In the afternoon, Mrs Marks issued a statement through the ADF website. "All Jason ever wanted to do was join the army," she said.

"Becoming a commando was a dream of Jason`s, he was proud of who he was and proud of what he did. Our family is devastated at the tragic loss."

"There was a heavy exchange of fire," Air Chief Marshal Houston said. A number of different groups of insurgents had targeted the Australian soldiers with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Australian company called in Coalition Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter-bombers for close-air support, to attack insurgent positions and evacuate the body of Corporal Marks and four wounded Australian soldiers.

Air Chief Marshal Houston said there was no initial indication of Taliban casualties, but in such contacts they invariably came out worst off.

"We haven`t done battlefield clearance and, obviously, we were concerned with taking the fight to the enemy and then getting our wounded and deceased member out of there."

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