From Parties to a Purple Heart

She walked toward the Humvee that had been ahead of hers. James Witkowski -- a well-liked sergeant filling in with the Virginia unit -- had been in the turret. The vehicle was blackened, dented and covered in blood.

She saw a body bag on the ground.

Beltran broke down in tears.

At the hospital where she was taken for her wound -- relatively minor, she knew -- the doctors said the bone in her thumb had been chipped by a bullet, leaving her with an open fracture.

Kohrt, an old-school leader who was not easily impressed, came up and hugged her.

"I'm very proud of you," the platoon sergeant told her. "You did good."

Back at the base, she returned to her Humvee. In her turret, there were bullet holes in her ammunition can, in her book bag, even in her box of Cheez-Its. She wondered why she hadn't been more severely wounded.

That evening, her unit gathered at the Balad airfield to salute Witkowski's flag-draped coffin. A chaplain said a prayer. Beltran could not believe it: Only hours earlier, she and the soldier were making jokes.

'I Love My Family'

Home in Woodbridge three months later, Monica Beltran lit a candle and said a prayer every night for the soldier lost in the ambush. She framed a collage of photographs of him and kept them beside the candle in her bedroom. It was January. On her wrist, she wore an engraved metal bracelet that bore his name.

Witkowski, she said, was the kind of soldier who made Iraq bearable, whose good spirits and humor lifted those around him. He was the only soldier she knew personally who had signed up because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He "only had 30 days left in Iraq," she said.

In the weeks since she had returned home from war, she had found that the life she inhabited before Iraq was no longer so appealing.