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Navy medic Chris Walsh heard a woman's cry for help -- then took on a risky new mission.

• • Iraq War
• Best of America

A Rare Disease

It started with a bomb.

The convoy was patrolling a rubble-strewn neighborhood of Fallujah, in Anbar Province, when the homemade mine detonated. The IED made a thunderous noise but succeeded only in cracking the windshield of one of the platoon's Humvees. The Marines leaped from their vehicles and tore off after the suspected triggerman, who'd been watching through binocs from the roof of a mud-walled house.

The temperature that June 2006 morning hovered around 125 degrees, normal for late spring in central Iraq. The men pounded down the alleyways in their Kevlar body armor -- 70 pounds of gear apiece. One contingent spotted the suspect running south and gave chase. They were searching house to house, M-4 carbines ready, when a wizened woman emerged from a doorway, cradling an infant and repeating a plaintive phrase in Arabic.

A corporal translated: "Baby sick." The soldiers shifted nervously, fearing a trap; even if the child was really ill, this delay would make the group a perfect target for a sniper. That's when Chris Walsh appeared. He stowed his rifle and knelt to examine the patient. Her name was Mariam. She was nine months old, with curly black hair, brown eyes and a face twisted in misery. What Walsh saw when her grandmother removed the child's diaper made him gasp, then reach for his digital camera.

Walsh, 30, had arrived in Iraq three months earlier as a Navy medic assigned to Weapons Company, First Battalion, 25th Marines. Before that, he was an EMT for the St. Louis Fire Department. He'd seen all the horrors that keep an ambulance crew busy, and men blown apart on the battlefield in Iraq. But he'd never seen a little girl turned inside out.

He snapped some photos as the corporal marked the house's location on a GPS grid. Then everyone scrambled back to their Humvees, and the patrol moved on.

At base camp -- a cluster of half-ruined buildings on the city's eastern outskirts -- Walsh showed his photos to Navy Capt. Sean Donovan, the battalion's chief medical officer. Donovan recognized Mariam's affliction: a rare condition called bladder exstrophy, in which the organ develops outside the body. As a further complication, the end of Mariam's large intestine protruded through the same opening and was severely inflamed. Without an operation, Donovan predicted, the child would soon die -- and there wasn't a surgeon in Iraq who could help her.

"Then we've got to get her out of here, sir," Walsh said.