After deciding she'd had enough of critics, a war widow from New York state flew to Texas to confront activist Cindy Sheehan, who had launched her third protest near President Bush's residence in Crawford.

Pregnant at the time, Laura Youngblood lost her husband Travis July 21 to wounds from an improvised explosive device outside Fallujah, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported.

Before dying, however, Travis Youngblood sent a letter home asking his wife to take care of his fellow soldiers in Iraq.

Laura Youngblood arrived in Waco from South Hempstead, N.Y., Wednesday.

"I heard that Cindy was coming down again to protest, and I had enough," Youngblood said.

Sheehan, who's son Casey Sheehan died in the conflict in 2004, became a media fixture last year and a hero of the anti-war left for her fierce criticism of the Bush administration.

The Waco paper said Youngblood crashed a Sheehan-led protest Thursday on the steps of the McLennan County Courthouse, holding her husband's photo and yelling to the group to applaud the troops.

"Show their support, that's all I ask," Youngblood said.

Yesterday, she headlined a rally outside a store in Crawford.

"These people are dying every day," Youngblood said of military personnel in Iraq, "and … some of them feel like they're going to come back and it's going to be another like Vietnam where people aren't going to appreciate everything they've done. And that's sad."

"My husband and I both served for this country, my husband died for this country," said Youngblood, according to the Waco paper.

It wasn't the first time Youngblood had clashed with Sheehan.

During an MSNBC TV show in September, Sheehan said Youngblood's baby would be "fatherless for a lie."

Thursday, Youngblood repeated her response to Sheehan, clutching a photo of her husband.

"My children will never be fatherless," she declared.

Youngblood said her husband fought because he believed war was inevitable after the 1991 Desert Storm conflict left Saddam in power, and he didn't want his son to fight it again.

Hunter, 5, said his father "died for America."

Earlier this week, Sheehan lashed back at detractors who decry her lack of a tombstone for her son.

"I am so tired of the Rovian, heartless, and ignorant smear machine attacking me and my family at every turn of my back," Sheehan wrote in an online commentary.

Sheehan was responding to criticism aimed at her for not having a headstone to mark Casey's grave at the Vacaville-Elimira Cemetery in Vacaville, Calif.

On Tuesday, Sheehan turned her attention from Iraq to Iran, insisting the U.S. has no justification for any kind of military response to the emerging nuclear threat from Tehran which declared it successfully has enriched uranium.

Writing in the left-wing Buzzflash.com, Sheehan said that after a war in Iraq, President Bush, the "swaggering imbecile of a 'leaker in chief' has the nerve to be trying to sell all of us on a new war in Iran."

"Do the warped neocons with their puppet president think that we are all stupid? Fool us once, shame on us, fool us, -- well, we just can't be fooled again," she writes.

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Previous stories:

Cindy Sheehan goes to war over no tombstone for son

Cindy Sheehan: Don't attack Iran

Police sorry for arresting Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan: I'll sue over my arrest

Cindy Sheehan 'asleep' on son's grave

AP defends pix of 'lonely' Cindy book-signing

Cindy book-signing a very 'lonely affair'

Sheehan thrashing 'war hawk' Hillary

Cindy Sheehan arrested at White House

Iraq War smackdown: Donahue vs. O'Reilly

Sheehan: Get troops out of 'occupied New Orleans'

Sheehan: Other moms of slain 'brainwashed'

Hawks, doves descend on Texas town

Mom vs. mom in grapplefest?

White supremacists claim Cindy's cause

Casey in heaven 'calls Bush idiot'

Pat Boone shreds Cindy 'peaceniks'

Cindy: Terrorists 'freedom fighters'

eBay yanks 'Cindy baseball'

'Best of left' in Congress writes Bush on Sheehan

Cindy's face 'magically appears on baseball'

IRS: Mum's the word on Peace Mom's taxes

Hold your appaws: Dogs for Cindy

'Sheehan is Nuts'?

Backlash! War moms attack Cindy Sheehan

Bush shown kissing Cindy in family pix

Cindy's husband seeking divorce

Man defends firing shots near Bush protesters

Cindy Sheehan: I won't pay tax

Cindy Sheehan smacked down