Word: baghdad
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Walsh was a student at West Point when Congress first authorized the 2003 invasion, and remembers thinking the war would be over by the time he graduated. He deployed last August and spent the first six months in Baghdad patrolling the city's southwest side as a Stryker Rifle Platoon leader before becoming a project manager in the country's reconstruction effort...
...first impressions of Baghdad Everything kind of became very day-to-day very quickly. When I was a platoon leader, I lived in a converted meat-packing plant, [and] we were able to go out and meet the people. It's not like it looks like on television - even just the diversity of the area. Where I was living, even though it was in Baghdad, it is actually very, very rural. We had to move our strykers to let herds of sheep go by. Then you go maybe 15 kilometers, or even 5 kilometers to the west...
...patrolling Baghdad's streets When I was a platoon leader, we had to maintain continuous patrols so I would be out from 3 in the morning until 11 in the morning, or I'd be out from 10 at night until 6 in the morning - just ridiculously odd hours that would change every day almost. So it became really weird - not to sleep or eat really...
...like we thought we were coming home and then found out it would be later. I actually had one soldier who, in his earlier tour, was pulled out of Iraq to Kuwait and they were on the plane to go home, and they had to turn back around to Baghdad. So we were actually kind of happy that the situation had happened, it became a lot easier to accept it, and deal with it, and tell our families ahead of time...
Shaheen left Iraq as a teenager to attend school in the United Kingdom. After graduation, he returned and served in the Iraqi Army as an officer for three years. He began working as a translator when U.S. forces invaded in 2003. He currently works as TIME's Baghdad bureau manager...