Gina Cavallaro had drifted away from the soldier escorting her, wanting to take a picture of the Iraqi children trailing them as they patrolled Ramadi. She heard a lone gunshot and turned around, disoriented, trying to see where the shot had come from and where it had landed, when she saw him–Specialist Francisco Martinez–lying on the ground, his limbs spread as if he were making an angel in the sand. Cavallaro screamed. Martinez had been her escort on patrol a few days earlier and again that day. They had become fast friends, trading stories about the neighborhoods of San Juan and the never-ending Christmas celebrations of his native Puerto Rico, where Cavallaro, too, had grown up and begun her career in journalism.

She helped drag Martinez into the Humvee that had brought her and soldiers from Alpha Company, First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment, to Ramadi. While a mate tended to his wound, Cavallaro told Martinez in Spanish to not fall asleep, to look at me, and to breathe, holding his hand and stroking his arm.

Back at the base, she followed behind his stretcher, watching drops of blood fall through the mesh that cradled his body, leaving a long trail of dark clumps in the sand. Though the bullet had found its way into the gap between the body armor that protected his front and back, Cavallaro was told that Martinez would survive. As she walked back across the base to where she had been staying, she mentally made plans to see Martinez back at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

That was the last day of her fourth embed in Iraq, and she needed to prepare for the departure for home. Soon she became aware of the eyes of other soldiers on her. They had...

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