Dawn Halfaker woke up in hospital thrashing around, thinking she was still lying in the dust next to her Humvee in Iraq.
"Is my arm OK?" she asked.
"Honey, they already took your arm," her father Stephen told her.
Halfaker, now 33, was back in the US at the Walter Reed military hospital, where staff thought she wasn't going to make it through the ravages of her wound and the subsequent infection.
But she survived her combat wound, was promoted from lieutenant to captain and today, missing her right arm, is an extremely successful businesswoman.
She sums up the views of so many military women at the announcement by Leon Panetta that combat jobs will now finally be officially opened to women.
"Business as usual, then," said Halfaker.
Before the night when she was wounded out on patrol with her military police platoon in Baquba, about 35 miles from Baghdad in 2004, she had already been in combat.
Based in an Iraqi police station, she was in a firefight for several hours when the base came under siege by insurgents.
"We took positions on the roof fighting off a full-fledged attack and firing back at them," she said. She personally scored hits on the enemy, and her own side took casualties.
Her platoon had 33 males and four females. But she recalls gender making no difference, and the only relevant question when approaching any job was: "Are you competent?"
Then one night on patrol they were ambushed. Halfaker was in the back of the Humvee when the officer in front screamed. A rocket-propelled grenade had torn through the front of the vehicle and ripped off his arm. The limb fell in the lap of the driver.
The grenade continued its path, slicing through Halfaker's arm and temporarily blinding and deafening her.
"Some people don't recall feeling any pain. This felt like someone was repeatedly chopping at my arm with an axe," she said. She was hyper-alert, asking after her colleagues before being bundled into a helicopter and evacuated, a dramatic end to her five-month tour.
It was also the end to her military service and a prodigious basketball talent. Halfaker was devastated.
But seven years later she now runs Halfaker Associates, her own company in Arlington, Virginia, with a staff of 150 – a third of whom are veterans. It fulfils military contracts for the federal government such as providing civilian intelligence analysts.
She is also a big player in the Wounded Warrior Project, which assists returning veterans on a host of levels from family retreats to dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. She welcomes the decision by the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"It's important to acknowledge that women and men are both already serving in combat and more than 130 women have paid the ultimate price in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Some women returning with, say PTSD, are turned away when claiming benefits because they are told they were not officially in combat – that's absurd. This will hopefully correct that, and level the playing field across all military jobs," said Halfaker.
Women in the military police have found themselves in the firing line repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Texan Teresa Grace, 29, deployed to Iraq in July 2004 with the 194th Military Police (MP) company. Her great grandfather, grandfather and father had all been in the military and despite the fact that she had to overfeed herself to make the recruitment minimum weight of 100lbs, Grace followed in their footsteps.
That October she, two other women in her company and four men all won the Bronze Star with the added bar of valour.
Stationed in Karbala, Iraq, Grace (nee Broadwell) remembers a frantic call for help coming in over the radio. A fellow MP company had been pounced on by al-Qaida forces just down the street.
"There was no frontline that you could draw on a map, but it was definitely a combat area," she said.
She and her colleagues jumped into their Humvee, adrenaline thumping through them, and raced towards the danger.
"We got into the kill zone and could see the patrol's vehicles stopped and people lying in the road," she recalled.
Her personal machine gun was bolted to the top of the Humvee. Some Humvees have firing platforms that adjust for height. This one did not.
At 5'4", Grace was half on tiptoe but could not get square with the sights. But on the belt of ammunition, every five rounds is a tracer round that glows as it flies towards its target, assisting aim.
Grace used these to aim the gun. She and other gunners lay down bursts of fire as cover in a 360-degree circle around them as enemy fighters popped up from alleyways and windows and shot back. Other colleagues, women and men, ran to retrieve the wounded, dead and trapped soldiers.
"I told myself to keep calm and I just focused, concentrated as hard as I could to keep control," she recalled.
The force of incoming rockets threw her repeatedly down into the Humvee, and she would have to scramble back up to continue firing.
Grace remembers seeing her bullets hit one insurgent, who went down. Various colleagues later told her she had killed anything from six to 20 enemy fighters, while all 20-odd of the stranded Americans were brought back, some dead, some alive.
General David Petraeus awarded Grace her Bronze Star.
"Women should have the chance to prove themselves for any job in the military. I never had anything handed to me. I had to earn it, and that's how it should be.
"But when I was in that firefight it was what we had trained for, and there was no issue with who was a man and who was a woman," she said.
Grace is now based in Fort Hood, Texas, no longer serving in the military after having open heart surgery a few years ago, and three children with her husband Jake Grace, who is still serving with the Military Police.
Meanwhile, Susan Sonnheim, of Franklin, Wisconsin, felt as though she was on a Hollywood set when she arrived in Iraq – the palm trees, the sand, the sun – in 2003 as a member of the National Guard.
It wasn't long before she was in her own version of an action movie. As she walked past a small box with a wire sticking out of it, she had a about one second to realise it was a bomb.
She had time to turn slightly and warn the four Iraqi trainee police officers on patrol with her.
"It's going to blow," she remembers yelling.
She was fully conscious as she was blown 15 feet into the air. What crossed her mind was an angry thought: "Those fuckers got me!" Then she landed, a pin cushion of shrapnel, and broke her back.
Sonnheim became the first woman from Wisconsin ever to be awarded the purple heart medal for being wounded in combat.
She had hospital treatment for two years, with multiple operations on her face because of severe shrapnel damage. The medics weren't able to save the sight in one of her eyes and today she is very hard of hearing because of the damage done by the explosion.
Now 53 and a trained nurse herself, she works part time at a local veterans hospital. Her husband Dennis never got over her going to war and coming back so damaged, and they broke up a few years ago. She now lives alone and is very selective with her friends, limiting them to those that "get it" about her military experience and combat injuries.
While on active duty, Sonnheim said that respect from the men was not automatic. But once earned, "the whole unit was like a family".
Her fellow guardsman Sergeant Troy Tuschel, who served alongside her in Iraq, said military men had gained a lot more respect for the women during the conflict and that the military "could not do without them now".
"I've seen some men do a lot more bitching and whining than the women," he said.
It might be hard for men to get away with saying what, conversely, Teresa Grace concluded with.
"I can't stand girlie girls in the military," she said.
"If I see them acting like 'I'm a woman, so I think everything should be handed to me', I want to punch them in the face."
Spoken like a true combat medal winner.
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