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You hear the mortars going out, but you don’t know where they’ll land. This could be the last breath of your life.

Marine Lance Cpl. Bret McCauley of Kokomo, Ind., recalls crouching close to the ground, moving warily through a Sunni rebel neighborhood in Fallujah just before dusk.

He’d been in Iraq two weeks, he says, not enough time to fully absorb the treacherous uncertainty of the landscape and yet sufficient time to see the bloody reality of war.

It is March 26, 2004, and the sounds of combat are loud in McCauley’s ears as his infantry unit moves from house to house. Suddenly, a rocket-propelled grenade flies over his right shoulder, smashing into the building in front of him.

McCauley says he instinctively dived behind a cinder block structure cradling a propane tank and started shooting at insurgents perched on a rooftop.

Before he can find a safer location, a bullet from an AK-47 rips through his left thigh. Then the gunfire stops.

“Who’s hit?” someone calls out. “Who’s hit?”

McCauley says he responds, “Dude, I’m hit!”

Blood drips from a jagged hole in his camouflage pants. He tries to get up but his left leg buckles. A corpsman tells him to stay down on the ground, and administers a shot of morphine.

McCauley says he is picked up and moved to a Humvee. The limp body of a fellow Marine who had bummed a cigarette only an hour earlier rests next to him. The Marine is dead, shot in the face, says McCauley, and “his blood covers me.”