Like most Iraq War vets, Sgt. Sheldon Plummer, 28, was trained to kill, but not necessarily to murder. So it wasn’t much of a crime for Thurston County detectives to solve after they found the body of Plummer’s wife, Winter, 27, in April. It had been stuffed into a garage storage container at the family home near Lacey for almost three months. In the meantime, Plummer had called a Fort Lewis buddy and asked how one goes about disposing a body. The buddy called the cops. Yesterday Plummer pleaded guilty to murdering Winter, mother of their infant daughter. Winter, too, was a veteran of Iraq. She survived only to be killed in the war at home.Since the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, there have been at least a dozen slayings on Western Washington soil alone involving active troops or veterans of Iraq. The body count includes seven wives, a girlfriend, and one child; six other children have lost one or both parents to death or imprisonment. Most gruesome was the double slaying by an attractive Fort Lewis soldier, Spc. Ivette Davila, 22, who shot, killed and then poured acid on the faces of Timothy Miller, 27, and Randi Miller, 25, a military couple stationed at the fort, then kidnapped their child.Plummer admitted to strangling his wife after a Feb. 19 dispute. He originally claimed she packed up and left, though her car was still parked outside and he had pawned some of her jewelry. The sergeant, a communications officer with three Iraq deployments, hadn’t made any claims that the slaying was related to his Army experiences. But a woman who knew him before he joined the service told

The Olympian “He is the last person in the world that I would ever think capable of murder.”

Carlos Goseyun, Winter’s father and a former cop, said he visited the couple at Chirstmastime, and heard them frequently arguing. “I had a feeling he was going to snap sooner or later,” he said. His daughter “wanted to have a better life,” he added, “so she joined the Army,”