From Parties to a Purple Heart

Va. Soldier, Tested in Combat in Iraq, Shifts Focus to Future, Family

Before she was a soldier in Iraq, Monica Beltran was a party girl in Woodbridge.

She was always out with her friends -- always, she says -- and if it seemed that she barely talked to her mother or seldom slept in her bed, well, that was how she thought life as a teenager should be. There was always another club, another party, another pack of cigarettes.

Then she went to Iraq.

There, she worked the rutted roads of the war zone, sometimes behind the wheel of a Humvee, often at the machine gun in the turret. It was a year removed from life as a suburban teenager, a year riven with doubt, discomfort, loneliness and, on one fateful day, an ambush that tested her courage and skill as nothing ever had.

At 21, Beltran has now remade her life in the United States with a war hero's medals and a combat veteran's sense of life's gravity -- her experience in many ways a coming-of-age story, the kind that men have told for centuries.

"Now she knows the party is not everything," her mother, Luz Washington, said recently, noting Beltran's full-time job and college classes. "Now," she said, "I worry she works too much."

In the words of her platoon sergeant, Michael Kohrt: "She probably matured five years in one year's time."

For American women, the life-altering experience of combat has never been so widespread. In Iraq and Afghanistan, women have deployed in numbers previously unknown -- more than 155,000 in the past five years.

Those who serve are often young, with 47 percent of enlisted soldiers younger than 25. For many, war becomes the defining force in life -- framing the path ahead, its choices, its sense of purpose, its bonds.

"Ever since I got back, I'm like, 'I got to get serious,' " Beltran said, reflecting on the year that has passed since her Virginia National Guard unit returned. "Life is really too short. You never know what is going to happen to you."

'What Am I Doing Here?'

A snapshot: Monica Beltran in uniform, sitting in a camp chair just outside the tiny trailer where she slept in Balad, Iraq. Night has fallen, and she is staring into the enveloping blackness, lit by stars that feel remarkably close.

This is the most beautiful thing in Iraq, she recalls thinking.