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Unto death, platoon fulfills a mission in Iraq
By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff | December 4, 2006
It was a routine patrol, in the third week of June -- if, in fact, there is such a thing as a routine patrol in Fallujah, in the Anbar Province of Iraq.
Chris Walsh, a Navy medic assigned to a US Marines weapons company, was riding in a Humvee with three Marines, when a hidden bomb exploded in the dirt road just in front of them.
Even before the thick dust had settled, the Marines, and Walsh, were out of the vehicle, looking for the insurgents who had planted the remote-control device. The triggerman, as several who joined the pursuit vividly recall, was spotted first on a rooftop, then on the ground making his escape through the maze of ramshackle houses that line the road.
When Walsh and the Marines came to one doorway, M-4 rifles up and ready, a woman emerged from a room, holding an infant and saying, over and over again, "Baby. Baby sick."
Walsh put his gun down and the woman put the baby down.
Walsh had seen bad things -- as an EMT back home in
St. Louis
, and at war. But he told his comrades he had never seen anything like this: The child, just a few months old, looked as though her insides had been turned inside out.
Her name was Mariam, and she looked up at Walsh with dead eyes.
Suddenly, finding the bad guys became secondary. Walsh, the Marines recall, examined the child, pulled out a digital camera and took pictures to show the doctors back at base camp. As soon as Captain Sean Donovan , a doctor assigned to the First Battalion 25th Marine Regiment out of
Fort
Devens
in Ayer, saw them, he knew the baby had a rare condition in which the bladder develops outside the body. Donovan said she wouldn't live long without surgery of a kind she couldn't get in .
"Then," Donovan recalls Walsh saying, "we've got to get her out of here, sir."
It seemed a noble sentiment, if, in the middle of a war, a bit naive. But Walsh meant it. Saving Baby Mariam became his mission. At chow one night, he stood up and explained to the Marines in his platoon what he wanted to do. He said he'd need help. And one by one, the Marines put up their hands.
Mike Henderson , a Marine major from Maine, told Walsh and Donovan that his nephew<
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