Maybe you’re content to get your Iraq news from some embed, who spends most of the day at the hotel pool in Baghdad, ventures out once in a fortnight, and turns tail at the first whiff of Cordite. But unless you’re reading Michael Yon, you’re not really following the War in Iraq.

The last time I saw Noah was during a big raid in Buhriz when his unit found weapons and bad guys in the houses. I followed Noah and his soldiers into the palm groves nearby where they found weapons. There were a bunch of beehives stacked next to the river and someone said, “that would be the perfect place to hide shit.”

There were dozens of bustling beehives; the locals have citrus trees planted among the palms, and I imagined the bees were there to pollinate the orange trees. That’s how it works in Florida.

Most of the soldiers sleeked back from the bees, but one walked forward and said, “We can search, guys … just have to be slow. Nice and slow.” And he started lifting up covers, nice and slow, and looking inside.

“Ain’ch you ever heard of African killa bees?” asked a soldier.

“You ever done that before?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “These are just regular bees.”

“Reg’la bees sting too!” said the killa-bees soldier.

The hive-checking soldier wasn’t running away under an angry cloud of bees, which I took as an endorsement of his apiarian credentials, and I started lifting covers, too. Nice and slow. Then, a couple more soldiers started checking hives, which really would have been a great place to hide weapons. But most of the others stayed back. Then I said, “Can you imagine if we take some RPGs now? These bees are gonna sting.” And that’s when the lieutenant said, “Let’s go!”

That was one of the last missions I did in Baquba, and it was the last time I saw Lt. Noah Harris, the same Lt. Noah Harris the Stars and Stripes reports killed in action.

Later, he visits a hospital:

There are three Iraqi patients in this room: two men and a woman. One of the men is a wounded Iraqi policeman. The woman is young, perhaps in her twenties, and she’s lost both legs to an IED. The other man has a stomach wound that is stinking up the room.

We head down the hallway and into a room with two patients; an Iraqi man who is unconscious and breathing erratically, and little Iraqi girl. A nurse says the girl is eleven. She is sedated, her face is very pink, her skin has been burned. She has no shirt and her chest and stomach are smooth and without injury. She breathes slowly and regularly but her hands are horribly burned, charred and cracked, covered in some kind of medicine. She’s been here for three weeks, a nurse explains, but the girl has a long way to go before she can be released.

The girl could have been blown to bits, but the flash of the bomb only burned her, searing her skin as if over a grill. Flash burns are common; soldiers often cut off the fingers of their gloves for better dexterity, only to end up with charred fingertips, such as this little girl suffered on her hands and face. The mercy of her sedation doesn’t extend to her visitors, visibly upset to see one so little so badly hurt. The Australian slowly shakes his head.

“Where are her parents?” I asked the nurse. Her father is living at the hospital until his child can get skin grafts. The staff provides her fatherâ€â€?along with any other parents of wounded childrenâ€â€?rooms to live in, and meals while they stay and care for their children. The Australian sailor looks saddened as he puts a stuffed animal at the foot of her bed.

Lying in a bed close to the burned girl is a man who’s been shot three times in the torso. He’s an insurgent. He looks to be in his forties. His face is several tones darker than his bare chest. Blankets cover his legs, but the soles of his feet are thick, like dog pads; filth so embedded that it has become part of the skin. The feet look as if they have walked around the earth without shoes. He is heavily sedated. “Why did we shoot him?â€Â? I asked. Apparently we caught him–in flagrante deflagratu–emplacing an IED.

Hearing the details of the shooting, I recall an interpreter who was severely burned in an attack that killed two of our soldiers in Mosul. The interpreter was flown to Amman for treatment. But infection beat him there in Jordan. He died because he couldn’t get the authorization for us to provide the treatment, yet this enemy is given excellent medical care.