Perspective: From parties to a Purple Heart

James Witkowski

"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."


WASHINGTON - 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.

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