From Parties to a Purple Heart

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From Parties to a Purple Heart
Va. Soldier, Tested in Combat in Iraq, Shifts Focus to Future, Family
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 23, 2006; A01

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.

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.

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Ed. Note: the rest of the article is too long; follow this link to the rest of the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/22/AR2006122201660.html
 
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