Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib

On April 26, 2004, as I stepped out from the military plane into a blast of heat, a first sergeant, dressed in threadbare desert fatigues, saluted. "Welcome to Baghdad, Ma'am," he said. "You have accepted the worst assignment in Iraq." At that moment mortar fire exploded nearby and, like everyone else, I threw myself to the ground. No one seemed to be hit, so I got up and scrambled among hundreds of soldiers and Marines, all trying to find our bags. The mortar fire continued, like dynamite exploding, some sounding quite close. What are the rules here? When do you duck? Clearly, I have things to learn about living in Iraq, I thought as I followed the first sergeant.