Ladies and Gentlemen, God gave us heart and the power to use to bring joy and happyness to others. The story with in this post happened in May of 2007. I do NOT know any involved ,though I certainly wish I did..... I cut and pasted this out of Readers Digest... if I get in trouble for reposting this story..... then let it be!

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.

Photo: Courtesy Maureen Walsh 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.

It didn't take much to convince the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chris Landro, whose wife had just given birth to a son. "I kept thinking, What would any of us do if this was our child?" he says. But carrying out the rescue would be a complex and risky proposition.

The greatest danger was, in fact, to Mariam's family. Any Iraqi seen as collaborating with the Americans would be marked for murder by the insurgents. When the Marines came to fetch the baby for an examination at the base, her grandfather suggested they lead him out in handcuffs, as if taking him in for questioning. Mariam came along in an equipment bag.

All subsequent visits to the family's home took place between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. A mile from Mariam's house, four or five Humvees parked in hidden locations, and 20 Marines equipped with night-vision goggles stole through the darkness. Several soldiers stood watch in posts outside the family compound, while a handful of men entered its courtyard. Chris Walsh was always among them, with Donovan there about half the time.

Mariam's grandfather was always the one to open the inner door. Though he was just 39, he looked two decades older -- worn down, like his wife, by privation and worry. Islamic custom dictated that Mariam's mother, in her early teens, remain in seclusion; the father, a day laborer, never made an appearance. In a tiny vestibule lit by a gas lamp, the medics examined the baby. They made sure her pelvic area was clean and free of infection. Through an interpreter, they advised her grandfather on the fine points of her care. They delivered medications, sterile gauze, bottles and formula. Then they disappeared into the night.

Only a few surgeons in the world specialize in bladder exstrophies. Donovan learned that one, Rafael Pieretti, MD, practiced at Massachusetts General Hospital. He readily agreed to help baby Mariam.

But that hardly solved the child's problems. The Iraqi Health Ministry was flooded with requests from citizens who needed medical treatment abroad. And though cultural taboos prevented Mariam's female relatives from traveling without a male family member, U.S. officials were hesitant to issue visas to Iraqi men. Then there was the question of payment -- the hospital bills would exceed $250,000. Dr. Pieretti and his colleagues would work for free, but Massachusetts General needed help to defray other costs.

The battalion's chaplain, Rev. Marc Bishop, began e-mailing his Bay State connections for help. "When a child is in danger," he says, "we are required by our deepest selves to respond." He received a sympathetic response from Sen. Ted Kennedy, who said he'd try to break the visa deadlock. One of Bishop's parishioners rallied 16 companies to cover the $16,000 needed for transport. And a nonprofit medical-evacuation group called Project HOPE agreed to coordinate the flights.

Meanwhile, the fighting in Fallujah was growing more intense, forcing the Marines to cut back on their house calls. By the end of August, says Donovan, "the situation on the ground had become poisonous."

Then came the second bomb. On September 4, Chris Walsh was riding in his Humvee with three members of the Mariam task force. LCpl. Cody Hill was driving; the other passengers were LCpl. Eric Valdepeñas, 21, from Seekonk, Massachusetts, and Cpl. Jared Shoemaker, 29, a former cop from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The convoy paused at an intersection where boys were playing soccer -- normally a sign the insurgents were elsewhere.

The explosion caught the Humvee in its belly, lifting it off the ground and engulfing it in a massive fireball. Only Hill escaped, surviving with burns over half his body. Walsh and the other two servicemen died instantly.

The disaster came just a month before the battalion was to return home, and it was followed that night by an IED blast that cost two other members of Weapons Company their legs. "We were beat up pretty bad," says Ewing. His platoon was ordered to take a few days off -- to recover from the shock and discourage retaliation against civilians.

The group spent much of that time talking -- about the buddies they'd lost and about how they would carry on. One thing was certain: They would not abandon the mission Walsh had started. "You don't get too many positives out of Iraq," Ewing says. "We were gonna freakin' get it done."

The visits to Mariam resumed, with Navy corpsman Edgar Gallego, a 26-year-old EMT from New York City, tending to the baby.

By the last week in September, Donovan was in despair. The battalion was packing to leave Fallujah, but Mariam was still stuck in her hovel, in pain. "I don't think this is going to work," he told Bishop. "We're so close, but we're a million miles away." Bishop responded with a question: "Have you prayed?"

"No," Donovan admitted. Bishop sent him to the chapel with instructions to recite the Memorare -- a prayer to Mary, which reads, in part, "Never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection ... was left unaided." Donovan, a Sunday churchgoer, knelt and did as he was told.

The next day, he received an e-mail: Mariam was cleared for departure.

The team made their last nighttime trip to the compound. They snuck the baby and her grandparents into a Humvee, which took them to Camp Fallujah. A helicopter ferried them to Baghdad International Airport. They caught a plane to Jordan and another to Boston. On October 13, Mariam was wheeled into an operating room at Massachusetts General.
The surgery took nearly five hours. A normal bladder is shaped like a ball, but Mariam's had never properly closed. Dr. Pieretti stitched the two hemispheres together, then tucked the organ inside her body. Other nearby organs were repositioned as well.

When it was over, Dr. Pieretti called Donovan at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where the battalion had been demobilized, and declared the operation a success. Donovan relayed the glad tidings to the men in the cavernous barracks. "The word went around like electricity," he recalls. "There were waves of cheers. It was joy. Just joy."

Maureen Walsh learned of her son's death on Labor Day, when a pair of Naval officers drove to her house in Shawnee, Kansas, to deliver the news. (Patrick, who'd been stationed at a different base in Anbar Province, accompanied Chris's body home.) The loss hit her like an asteroid.

In his letters from Iraq, Chris described the weather and landscape yet was mum on what he actually did there. But on October 4, the day before he would have turned 31, Maureen received a letter that clarified everything. It came from Donovan and told the story of Chris's most important mission. "The hope for Mariam's very tiny life," Donovan wrote, "[arose] from the charity and gallantry of your son."

Six weeks later, Maureen flew to Boston, where she found herself in a crowded common room at Massachusetts General. Donovan and Ewing were present, along with several other soldiers and the girl's grandparents. And there was Mariam herself, wearing a pink party dress and healing beautifully.

Maureen cradled the little girl in her arms, wondering at how healthy and alert she seemed. "She was like a brand-new child," Maureen recalls. "She had great big brown eyes, and she'd just look at you and smile."

The grandfather asked for pictures of Chris for a scrapbook. "God sent him to Mariam," he said in Arabic. "Thank you for your son."

Mariam and her family returned to Iraq a few days later, settling into their dangerous circumstances with a new sense of hope. Mariam is well enough now to be looked after by ordinary doctors, though she will need another surgery in two years -- at Massachusetts General, if possible -- to make her fully continent.

Maureen looks forward to meeting her again and getting another chance to touch the bit of Chris that still lives on. "It's hard not to have him around anymore," she says. "But I don't think he's in any way gone."