Purple Fingers, Steel Rain, and Voting on Deployment

By January 2005, I had lived in Baqubah, Iraq, for nearly a year. In a month, I would return home. Well, sort of home, as I would head back to a small village in southwestern Germany that hosted the headquarters for the Third Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division—popularly known as the “Big Red One” for the red numeral emblazoned on the patch.

But just a few weeks before the Army would let us go back home, we got a front-row seat to the first democratic election in Iraq for nearly five decades. Only a few months prior, in…