Leaning on a walker, Natalie Sudman stood in front of the crowd with her leg encased in a walking cast, her arm wrapped in a brace, and a patch over her right eye. She said softly, “I loved working in Iraq, and this…” — she gestured at her injuries — “…was worth it.” Beside her sat Jarrod Bonnick in a high-tech wheelchair.

On Jan. 7, 2008, Sudman and Bonnick received the Defense of Freedom Medal at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Headquarters in Washington, DC. Both were injured in Iraq on Nov. 24, 2007, when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device (IED). They were traveling in a convoy to visit water treatment plants in the USACE Gulf Region South District.

Chief of Engineers and USACE Commanding General LTG Robert L. Van Antwerp presented the awards. DOD created the Defense of Freedom Medal after Sept. 11, 2001, to honor civilians injured during the attack on the Pentagon. The medal is equivalent to the military Purple Heart and is now awarded to any DOD civilian injured by enemy action in the global war on terrorism.

Sudman, an archeologist with the Bureau of Land Management, had been in Iraq with the USACE since Aug. 7, 2006. She had volunteered to work for the USACE on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and later her USACE friends invited her to work in Iraq. Sudman is attached to the Transatlantic Programs Center in Winchester, VA, and worked as a project engineer in the Basrah South Regional Office managing a number of projects, including a roll-on/roll-off berth and perimeter fence at the port of Um Qasr and a primary health care center at Khor Az Zubair.

Bonnick is a regulatory project manager with the Louisville District and worked with Sudman as a project manager on electricity and water projects in Tallil. He arrived in Iraq on Oct. 20. The day of the attack was his first trip to project sites and only his second time off the base in Tallil.

Both sustained serious injuries in the IED explosion. Sudman had a broken right heel, right forearm, wrist, and eye socket; skull fracture; and blunt-force trauma to her right eye. Bonnick sustained a broken right femur, severed femoral artery, collapsed lung, and nerve damage to his right leg and right arm.

Both Sudman and Bonnick had high praise for the care they received, beginning with the Aegis contract security team that rode with the convoy. “I was conscious from the time we were hit until they put us on the helos to medevac us out of the incident area, and Aegis was so professional,” said Sudman. “They knew exactly what they were doing, and they got a tourniquet on Jarrod immediately and stabilized me. They were great.”

“They saved my life,” Bonnick said. “They were well trained, very professional. They brought me back to my wife and family. With the injury I sustained, a severed femoral artery, you’re talking just minutes before you have no blood left in your body. They were that quick.”

Both Sudman and Bonnick are getting the same level of care that wounded Soldiers receive at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and praised the staff for the quality of their care. “They’ve been exceptional, and I’m talking from the doctors to the nurses to the nurses’ aides,” said Bonnick. “They’re all high-morale, high-tempo, caring people. They love what they do, even jobs that people would cringe at. I made friends with one nurse, and he has to do some things that I wouldn’t want to do. I asked, ‘How do you deal with it? That’s kind of disgusting.’ And he said, ‘I just love taking care of wounded Soldiers.’ And that’s their attitude. They don’t look at it as a nasty job — they’re taking care of their fellow Soldiers.”

An inevitable question that both Sudman and Bonnick hear is whether they will go back to Iraq. “I have a family, so at this present time, I don’t think I would go back,” Bonnick said. “However, given different circumstances, I would certainly do so. It’s a very beneficial experience. I would encourage anybody who is interested in serving their country to support the mission in Iraq.”

“I would go back,” Sudman said. “I think my recovery time will be up to a year, and I can’t think about it until then. But I would like to go back to work over there.”