Thought this was a good tribute to those serving:
WP 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.
At 21, Beltran has now remade her life in the United States with a war hero's medals and a combat veteran's sense of life's gravity -- her experience in many ways a coming-of-age story, the kind that men have told for centuries.
