On the evening after the Badiat mission, a mortar landed and threw out a mushroom cloud of dust, but I only saw this later, after the concussion. I was standing, slightly puzzled in the moment after it landed, near the basketball court for the Khadimiya base. An American soldier ran up to me, all panicked and out of breath and asked me, "Tal Inglisi?" which is rough Arabic for "Do you speak English?" I said I was a reporter from California. "Sir, really sorry. We're looking for the individual calling in the mortar strikes. He's around here somewhere." The soldier ran off, and his buddies were doing the same thing, hoping to catch an Iraqi on a cellphone who was directing the mortar barrage from the base itself.

However they managed it, the insurgents have a perfect fix on their command post. Firing from across the river in A'adamiya, several kilometers away, the shells were landing within feet of the building, throwing shrapnel in every direction. Mortars have even dropped through into the courtyard. After the soldier went off to find his suspect, another mortar exploded close by so we sprinted into the basement of a nearby building. In fact, this was a fairly ordinary day at the base. At Charlie company farther down the road, they didn't even look up when the shells landed. In this particular barrage, there were no casualties, but soldiers from the base have been seriously injured in recent attacks and medevac'd to the combat support hospital.

Back at the aid station, I asked why the Special Forces didn't go out and find the insurgents behind the mortar attacks. The answer came back that the zone across the river belonged to another unit. "That's not us," the soldier told me. "At one time, we had all eight mortar positions mapped out, but we couldn't do anything about it." The man shrugged helplessly. It's the depressing accuracy of the mortar attacks that makes everyone on the base think there's a rat on the inside.

Angry sermons from the mosques across the river in A'adamiya came through the soft evening air. The wind mixed up the sound. Night was falling, and the temperature drifted out of the triple digits. Melendrez was hanging out talking to a few of the medics in front of the aid station when he caught sight of a soldier walking down the road in full battle dress. Melendrez couldn't stop laughing. "Shit. Look, it's Bose!" Bose had put on his flak jacket, goggles and helmet to walk back from the Internet cafe when everyone else was wearing shorts and T-shirts in the heat. Bose looked like an astronaut and I didn't recognize him until I could read his nametag. He was in full battle dress because he was worried about mortars that kept landing near the command post he had to skirt on the way to the aid station.

"It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye," he said when he walked up. Melendrez looked at him like he was insane. But instead of laughing, all the medics nodded, because they knew it wasn't a joke. There has been an epidemic of blindings in Iraq. Roadside bombs blow in the windows of the vehicles, destroying soldiers' eyes. Mortars send out shrapnel that has the same effect. It happens all the time. Bose has a horror of death and he was careful; he was the smart one. The medics who worked with him were fine with Bose all dressed up for his walk across the base. It made sense that he was careful. They needed him.

Melendrez told me about Bose's soldiering before the Badiat mission. "He's really smart, but he's so dumb about the Army." The platoon commander explained to me that everyone is supposed to qualify on at least one weapons system. "I think he went out with the M16 and finally qualified after seven attempts. They might have said, 'OK, he passed.'"

I told Bose that I heard he couldn't shoot. He thought it was incredibly funny, and he laughed. "Yeah, you know, if I have to start fighting, we're going to be in a lot of trouble." If it bugged Melendrez, who loves the Army, it didn't bother anyone else.

Later, I asked Bose what upset him the most about practicing medicine in a war zone. "Pronouncing people dead is the most disturbing because they came here just like I did, waved goodbye to someone, expected to be back and then they don't come back. The blood and guts is OK, I can deal with that, but there is a level of attachment with a patient that is not there in the States. It hits closer to home here. My patients are people in this unit, the people I ate breakfast with that morning and now they're injured. That has happened. But you just detach and do your job, just detach and do your job."

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