From Parties to a Purple Heart

Beltran imagines her mother half a world away, starting her day in Woodbridge. She wonders if she is driving her yellow school bus on the familiar streets around their home or tending to Beltran's little sister, who is in kindergarten.

It surprises Beltran how much she misses her family.

Before she left, she said, her mother was often mad at her. The teenager had a part-time job at McDonald's and had managed to graduate from Gar-Field High School, but otherwise, she said, she concentrated on "what I was going to do the next day, what party I was going to."

"You never have time for your family," she recalled her mother complaining. "Why can't you ever stay in the house?"

"I don't want to hear it," Beltran would answer.

She enlisted in the National Guard as a high school senior largely because her mother nagged her to think about college and the Guard would help pay tuition.

Her daily life in Balad was a procession of gun trucks and 18-wheelers that hauled supplies and equipment. The threat of hidden bombs was always there, and the unit often traveled in the dark -- veering to avoid potholes, dead animals and mounds of garbage that might conceal explosives.

Beltran, at the time 19, was the youngest member of her 46-soldier platoon. One soldier told her that she -- a female, a private first class -- would not respond quickly enough to an ambush. Others did not trust her driving. On a few bad days, she wondered to herself: "What am I doing here?"

Over the months, she developed as a gunner and driver, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Kohrt recalled.

Then, on Oct. 26, 2005, she was riding in a Humvee turret near Ashraf, her hands on the .50-caliber machine gun, when she heard a boom. She saw a cloud of acrid, black smoke and heard another boom. It was a "daisy chain" of bombs, one setting off the next, and was followed by a hail of gunfire

They were under attack.

She remembers the next few minutes with unfading clarity.