Staff Sergeant Raymond Plouhar, 30, died on Monday of wounds suffered while on duty in Anbar province. He had barely a month left of his tour of duty in Iraq, where he was in charge of detecting and detonating makeshift bombs.

Sgt Plouhar had been angered by his depiction in the anti-war movie, where he was shown aggressively pressing young men to enlist, his family told the Detroit Free Press.

The Marine Corps later accused the film's maker, Michael Moore, of duping its recruiting teams into allowing their work to be caught on camera.

In the 2004 film Sgt Plouhar is shown approaching young African American men in the car park of a shopping mall in one of the poorest parts of Flint, and assuring them that joining the Marine Corps could help them become professional basketball players.

He tells his fellow recruiter he chose the location deliberately because it was in a depressed area. "It's better to get them when they're in ones and twos and work on them that way," Sgt Plouhar tells the recruiter.

Sgt Plouhar had turned to recruiting during a four-year break from active duty after he donated one of his kidneys to an uncle.