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In the grueling, relentless 110-degree heat, the troops set up fortifications around their camp at Balad Air Base, a former Saddam facility. They created a bomb shelter for themselves by placing a huge shipping container topped with sand bags into a vast hole that took them days to dig. The only concession to the soaring temperatures were the rolled-up sleeves of their desert camouflage uniforms. "We were always on guard," says Seelaus, "and in full battle dress at all times. We carried M-16 rifles and ammunition with us everywhere we went because we never had any idea when we would be attacked or how."Kevlar body armor and gas masks were added when they pulled guard duty. At night, patrolling the perimeter, Seelaus no longer noticed the constellations. "I could see the mortars being fired at us and could see entire cities burning in the distance," he remembers. "Huge conflagrations burning out of control. They still burn in my brain." The soldiers were trained to fire flares at anything suspicious; they went off all the time. One night, a flare accidentally set a nearby field on fire. When the farmer and his sons ran to put out the blaze, U.S. troops killed them, thinking they were being attacked. "Tragedies like that happened," Seelaus says. "Many of them."
Fear never went away. Flying out to the desert for routine rifle-range practice in a Chinook helicopter was anything but routine. "A lot of our aircraft were getting hit -- and getting hit often -- so once you were up in the air," says Seelaus, "you were a target for anyone with weapons on the ground."
Seelaus began to pray hard. "I had no choice," he says. "I wanted to survive to see my children grow up -- and here I was where that dream could be shattered at any moment." Calls home were often traumatic. "There you are with people trying to kill you and you're away from your family who need you and depend on you ..."
When a chapel tent was set up, Seelaus became a regular at Sunday services. Raised a Roman Catholic, he had joined his wife's Mennonite church following their marriage. In Kuwait, he had also befriended a Jewish Army doctor and, now that both were in Iraq, joined him on Friday nights to celebrate Shabbat, learning words of Hebrew in the process.
Walking through the rubble of the camp one afternoon, Seelaus, who often picked up volcanic pumice stones, spotted a special one. It became his prayer stone. "I rubbed it so much that it came to look like my thumbprint was indented," he says. "That's how hard I was praying."
As the weeks slowly passed, Seelaus became increasingly aware that he was not only in a savage war zone but in the holy lands spoken of in the Bible. The Tigris River, only a mile from the camp, was one of the four rivers that flowed out of the biblical Garden of Eden. Another, the Euphrates, was many miles away. Despite the relentless violence, the camp began to take on a different face. "Here we were," says Seelaus, "in this desolate place with sandstorms and mud flying sideways. Yet we were walking the same ground that ancient people in the Bible walked on. The city of Ur was not far off. The ancient city of Babylon ..."
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