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• • Iraq War

Heart of Gold

Chris Walsh didn't want to be thought of as a softy. "He had a very gruff persona, even by Marine standards," says Donovan. Tall and bony, with a glowering expression, Walsh could seem downright misanthropic. Fellow soldiers nicknamed him Doc Grumps.

They also saw right through him. "He had a heart of gold," says John Garran, senior Navy medic for the weapons company. Older than many of his comrades by a decade, Walsh looked after their health like a stern big brother. And he tended to the locals when he could. "We'd go in a house, there'd be someone with a broken leg and he'd say, 'I'm on it,' " recalls S.Sgt. Ed Ewing, the platoon's second in command. "He didn't care if you were American or Iraqi."

Growing up in eastern Kansas, the eldest of five siblings, Walsh was a popular boy with a habit of befriending outcasts. "He felt a need to protect them," recalls his mother, Maureen, a research lab coordinator. A similar instinct led him to declare in first grade that he intended to be an EMT when he grew up. After getting his paramedic's license at age 22, he set about ministering to the wounded in St. Louis's toughest neighborhoods.

Walsh's brother Patrick joined the Marines after 9/11 and wound up in Iraq. Their father, a Defense Department computer analyst who'd served as a Marine in Vietnam, died of leukemia soon after Patrick enlisted. Walsh grew convinced that he had no right to stay out of the line of fire. "He didn't have a wife or family," says his mother. "He thought he could help somebody over there." He enlisted in the Navy Reserves, allowing him to alternate stints as a medic with his civilian vocation.

Walsh was attached to the 25th Marines, and his unit landed in Fallujah in March 2006. Saving Mariam went beyond his job description, and that of his platoon mates. Nonetheless, when he asked one evening over chow for volunteers to join the effort, hands shot up around the mess hall.

It would be a two-pronged operation: one side geared toward arranging Mariam's treatment overseas, the other toward keeping her alive long enough to make it there.

But first, the Marine Corps brass would have to agree that the mission was worth undertaking. Donovan -- a radiologist with a practice in Mecan, Wisconsin, and five kids of his own -- argued that it could provide the battalion a "tactical advantage," by winning a few Iraqi hearts and minds. He also promised that all patrols to Mariam's home would be done on the soldiers' own time.