It’s been 20 years since I held the sweaty hand of a mortally wounded U.S. soldier, desperate to keep him engaged as our vehicle sped toward an aid station.

His name was Spc. Francisco Martinez, and he was dying from a sniper’s bullet that pierced his right flank in that soft area of his protective vest between the two armor plates. The single shot cracked the afternoon air as he and I stood together in the Five Kilo section of Ramadi, Iraq, about 80 miles west of Baghdad.

The date was March 20, 2005, and I was an embedded reporter with Army Times newspaper on one of several trips I took over the years to write about America’s soldiers at war. The U.S. troops I met in Ramadi hadn’t seen too many reporters, they told me, because it was a hard place to get to and known to be teeming with snipers.

Into the War Zone

Determined to go despite the danger, I endured several miserable days sleeping in an office in Baghdad’s Green Zone, socked in by bad weather, until a Marine Corps helicopter flew me closer. It would take two more days before I made it to Camp Ramadi.

The camp was a mud bog from days of rain, but the next morning, the sun popped out, and I was invited to go on a patrol with an infantry unit. That’s when I met Martinez, and we quickly bonded over our shared upbringing in Puerto Rico. Seeing our fast friendship, the company commander asked him to stay close and keep an eye on me during the patrol, a task he took seriously.

Martinez was creative and funny, a little cocky, maybe, but serious about soldiering and well-liked by his fellow soldiers. He had jet-black hair and olive-toned skin, and he easily befriended shopkeepers, shepherds and children with his outgoing nature. On our second patrol together, the one on March 20, I watched him delight a young boy following along by gifting him a pair of green earplugs.

Sniper’s Bullet

But just moments later, to my horror, Martinez lay bleeding on the dusty road as some soldiers ran toward the gunfire and others rushed to get him into the Humvee where I was already sitting behind the driver. I helped pull off his blood-soaked T-shirt and clutched his right hand while another soldier pressed a bandage into his wound.

As we bounced along in the back of the speeding Humvee, Martinez slapped his legs with his left hand, screaming, “I can’t feel my legs.” He responded to my short commands, spoken in Spanish, “Look at me. Breathe, my love. Lick your lips and squeeze my hand.”

Though he was a forward observer, Martinez took every opportunity to get out of guard duty to join an infantry foot patrol, and I know he believed the medics would save him if he got shot, because his buddies told me so later.

In a golden late afternoon sun, about an hour after Martinez, age 20, died from a wound the doctor described to me as “catastrophic,” the darkness fell over us all. At dinner, I watched his friends eat together in silence. They had been through this before, I thought, and at such a cost. My heart ached for them, but there was nothing to say.

Sorrow and Reflection

I flew back to Baghdad that night through a star-speckled sky, weeping as I thought of all the U.S. troops whose lives had ended in that country—and of their families’ sorrow.

Martinez was one of 4,418 U.S. service members killed in Iraq between March 20, 2003, when Operation Iraqi Freedom began, and Dec. 3, 2024, the latest available data from the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which maintains casualty statistics dating back to World War I.

I covered U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, but most of my trips to the war zone were to Iraq. The pall that descends on a unit after one or more of its soldiers is killed was always hard to wade into, but not morbid. That’s not to say the soldiers weren’t counting the days to redeployment, but they knew they had a job to do, and their leaders had to lead them through it.

Contrary to what I expected, soldiers were eager to talk about their fallen friends. But apart from the poignant memorial services, I never saw them cry. Operations kept moving, and they had to suit up and get out there.

As one soldier I met in Balad, Iraq, told me, “I know I’ll cry when I get home and see my mother.” Another stoically told me that it sucked to lose friends, but he thought he’d be fine once he got home and had a “fat steak and a beer.”

Not Forgotten

I’ve thought of Martinez on March 20 every year since his death, and each year, I’ve sent a little missive—a text, an email, a social media message—to his mother, father and grandmother. Because I witnessed his final day of life, and wrote about it in Army Times, his family and I are forever linked.

His father, Francisco Martinez, said my article “was a blessing and a curse,” because it was painful to read, but has become a cherished account.

“With those details, I have the privilege of feeling like I was there,” Francisco Martinez, who goes by Paco, told me in December, just a few days before his son, Paquito, as his family called him, would have turned 40.

The cold, clinical details of the autopsy report, Francisco Martinez said, help affirm the finality of what happened, but they bring no comfort. Yet, that report is what most families end up with after a soldier is killed and, hopefully, over time, they learn more from the stories told by their loved one’s battle buddies.

Russ Riego, whose close friendship with Martinez began when they were teenagers, knew Martinez was part of the war, but it never occurred to him that his friend might get killed. Martinez’s death moved him to serve.

“I wanted to serve because I was angry that my friend was taken from me, and I wanted to honor his legacy and his service,” said Riego, an Air Force senior master sergeant. “His death had far-reaching effects on me. I think about him every day.”

Martinez’s grandmother, Mimi Martinez, lost a 17-year-old son to an accidental gunshot decades ago and another son to disease. At 87, she told me, it’s still difficult to have lost their dear Paquito. “It’s so tragic, when you think of it, the way he was killed in action but not real action, just patrolling,” Mimi Martinez told me. She is satisfied that her grandson’s fellow soldiers did what they could to save him.

“We have no complaints or bitter feelings about it. We know what happened, and that’s it,” she said. “After a while, and by a while I mean years, you don’t feel that constant pressure of losing him. It sort of leaves your mind, and you get used to it. He lives forever in our hearts.”