Iraqi theater: testing M240 machine gun in Kuwaiti desertPhoto: Thomas Clapham

Lynch's base camp was near Ramadi, sixty miles west of Baghdad. He had started out that day getting a haircut from his best friend there--a bad haircut, to which Lynch called attention with mock annoyance. From there he joined what was presumed to be a routine road sweep, a mission of searching out improvised explosive devices. Lynch and five other Marines were traveling in a Humvee--Lynch sitting in the passenger seat next to the driver--when a bomb hit the vehicle. Four of the Marines were injured; Lynch, fatally.

"The ironic thing about it was that Matt was the farthest from the blast," recalls William Lynch, a consultant with the FBI after more than three decades with the agency. "This is what kind of keeps me awake nights. He was wearing a neck protector, but whatever got him--a piece of shrapnel from the bomb or something shredded from the Humvee--just came over the top of that neck protector and clipped his carotid artery. A centimeter up, down, left, right, and probably he would have had nothing more than an interesting scar."

One of William Lynch's duties with the Marines, in the mid-Sixties, was handling casualty calls, the term for notifying the families of military personnel who have been killed or seriously wounded. After one particularly awkward encounter, when a woman fainted on her front lawn, he was assigned to develop a standard operating procedure. Last October 31, he and his wife had just come back from the beach. "It was a beautiful day. We were just talking about how lucky we were to have these two terrific sons. And when we got back, they were waiting for us, the two Marines. My own standard operating procedure was used on me."

"If I had to pick anybody who could survive in that environment, I would have picked Matt," he says. "He just always landed on his feet."

The consequences of random events is a theme that underlies life--and death--in Iraq. Had he not volunteered for an additional tour, had he not aligned himself on that tour with his original unit, had he not been sitting precisely where he was at that moment in the Humvee, Matt Lynch might be alive. Then again, fortune treated Jonathan Kuniholm quite differently.

Kuniholm, a Duke graduate student in biomedical engineering, was sent to Iraq last summer as a reservist in the Marine Corps. (His father, Bruce Kuniholm, is a professor of public policy and history at Duke.) He found himself part of a platoon that ran security patrols, built barriers for force protection, swept for mines, and destroyed more than 400,000 pounds of high explosives in the form of artillery shells and mortars. Much of the time, he says, "there was not a whole lot happening. We probably had on the order of three significant events a day. That could include a Marine firing a warning shot at a car that failed to stop at a checkpoint, small-arms fire received from the enemy, the discovery of a mine. So it was relatively quiet compared to, say, Fallujah or Ramadi. But that doesn't mean that we weren't constantly considering the possibility. In some ways, waiting for it to happen all the time is worse than actually having it happen and having to deal with it."

Kuniholm had become interested in applying his engineering know-how to protecting U.S. troops from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Working with another

Marine under his command, he had begun testing a device called "Bubba"--a remote-controlled, battery-powered vehicle that he housed in his footlocker. It would be equipped with a miniature wireless camera and would be capable of delivering a plastic-explosive charge to destroy an IED or mine. Bubba was deployed to his platoon in Iraq. But it was used in the field just a couple of times--mainly for its remote video capability. It was not used on the mission that almost cost him his life.

On New Year's Day, he was on foot patrol near Haditha Dam on the Euphrates River. An explosion, from a rocket-propelled grenade or a hidden mine, killed one of his comrades, injured another, and shredded Kunhiholm's right arm below the elbow.

"My first thought was a practical one," he recalled recently, sitting in the living room of his house just off East Campus. His injured arm rests against a red-and-blue beanbag cushion. His four-year-old son, Sam, plays nearby. "The explosion blew me off my feet. I leaned forward and immediately saw what had happened to my arm. My hand was basically hanging from a piece of skin, and I could see that it was useless." He yelled for help. "Then it became apparent to me that we were involved in a firefight. Everybody had something to do besides worry about me. My rifle had been blown in half by the explosion. So after I realized that I wasn't going to accomplish anything where I was, I got up and ran out of the clearing and back behind the pump house. I think some of the Marines yelled at me to get down."

As soon as the shooting stopped, a Marine ran up to him and began administering first aid. He was airlifted to a nearby field hospital for emergency treatment and stabilized at the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany. Then he was flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington and soon after was transferred to Duke Medical Center, where he underwent six hours of delicate reconstructive surgery on the damaged limb.

Kuniholm credits his surgeon, Scott Levin, with giving him a usable forearm. The demanding microsurgery is performed routinely only at Duke and a handful of other top hospitals. Levin, who served in the Army Reserve for fourteen years and participated in the first Gulf War, says he felt a special bond with his patient. While Kuniholm's Marine training helped make him "a perfect patient" in terms of his resilience and his willingness to carry out doctors' orders, his body armor probably saved his life, Levin says.

"What usually kills soldiers on the battlefield is a devastating injury to vital organs. Body armor can protect them from fatal injury to the heart, lungs, or abdomen. But they are prone to extremity injury and to the amputation of an arm or leg from the force involved," he says. "The other issue is that advances in military medicine have contributed to quick evacuation and frontline care, so things like hemorrhage and shock are treated much more expeditiously."

According to Levin, Kuniholm will require several more operations before he's fitted with an artificial arm--either a myoelectric type, activated by the residual muscles in his forearm, or a conventional prosthesis, activated by shoulder movements. He says he has challenged Kuniholm to apply his biomedical engineering expertise to come up with a better prosthesis. And Kuniholm seems prepared to take up the challenge. He talks about exploring "the interface between patient and prosthesis" and "sensing and actuation" technology. His focus, he says, will be helping people who are more severely affected by amputation than he is. Still, he acknowledges, "I suppose that the opportunity to tinker with a project for which I could be a subject has a certain appeal."

Two years after the American invasion of Iraq, the public remains deeply divided over the justification for the war. Kuniholm, like many of his fellow veterans, is circumspect on that theme, saying, "Whether or not you believe that we should have ever gone into Iraq, and whether or not you believe that we should have gone the way we did, since we are there, I firmly believe that we have an obligation to fix Iraq. We have an obligation to leave it capable of functioning as a sovereign country and without becoming a threat to other countries. I think that any reasonable person in America can and should believe in the current mission, because anything else, for us to withdraw at this point, would be totally irresponsible."

Another graduate student and Iraq veteran, David "Jack" Marshall, sees a divide between how soldiers and civilians perceive Iraq: Getting the job done trumps musing over geopolitics. "I think the average American would look at television and think that the average Iraqi absolutely despised us. The truth is that the average Iraqi was glad that we were there. Even if a soldier were to harbor misgivings about Iraq," he adds, "he's duty-bound to hold those reservations in check and to do what he's trained to do."

Regardless of their views on this particular war, soldiers believe deeply in their duty to country, he says. "It sounds really hokey to a lot of people, but I have this love for a country that took me in and has brought me so much." Marshall grew up in Panama. He joined the military at nineteen, just over a year after immigrating to the U.S., motivated in part by "the desire to find out what I'm made of" and "to gain life experiences." He says, "A lot of people talk about money for college and all these nice little benefits, but I was actually almost horrifyingly naÔve about the benefits that you get from going into the military."

Marshall plans to finish his master's in public policy and his law degree this summer. Right after September 11, Duke instituted a policy that grants any student called up for military service an immediate leave of absence, and also gives the student a full tuition refund. He says that he's grateful for that policy. He also says that he received nothing but support from the faculty and his fellow graduate students. Now a reservist in the North Carolina Air National Guard, he had ten years' active duty with the Army, including time in Afghanistan. He spent the past summer and fall semester in Iraq as a flight medic; he wonders whether Kuniholm was among the wounded he transported.

On one of his medical missions in Iraq, Marshall was flying in a C-17 cargo transport plane on its way to Germany with some fifty injured soldiers. "If you're taking them all the way to Germany, to Landstuhl, that means that they're probably pretty hurting. It was hard just seeing these young kids. There was only a handful of us medical personnel going around administering morphine, changing dressings, putting a valve on a chest tube, starting IVs. So we were busy from the moment that we left Iraq all the way until we got to Germany.

"But every once in a while, I would talk to them, and just to hear their stories was amazing. Their absolute love for their country--I mean, here we have kids who have lost their limbs, and they're talking about how bad they feel because they're leaving their buddies back in Iraq."