When I joined the Army Reserves as a doctor in 1993, I wanted to ease the suffering that war causes. As an Army doctor, I have the privilege of caring not only for our soldiers, but also for wounded civilians and for prisoners of war.

I headed for Iraq this year with mixed emotions. My heart was heavy as I said goodbye to my loved ones, but I also felt excitement and enthusiasm. I believe everything we do and everything that happens to us is a part of God's story. My going to Iraq was part of that story.

The night before our departure from Fort Bliss, I drove around the little town nearby and heard bells ringing at a small Catholic church. I went in and sat in the back row. The text was 1 Corinthians 13, the well-known chapter on love. I knew that would be my mission in Iraq. No matter what else I would be called upon to do there, I wanted to love every person I met or served, whether a wounded American soldier, an Iraqi POW, or an innocent civilian.

My assignment was to be the field doctor for a battalion near the Iranian border. My duties were to take care of soldiers in the medical tent, provide supervision and training to eight combat medics, and visit two detainee camps to treat POWs. The work was seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day.

One day I was supposed to travel by convoy to a military hospital in Baghdad to accompany a prisoner with a severe abdominal infection, but the mission was canceled after a bomb hit a convoy returning to our camp. That was the third time in five days that one of our convoys had been hit, so we waited until a nearby combat unit could beef up security. A day later we headed out.

As I sat in the back of a Humvee with this very sick POW, I asked myself what I thought every soldier in that convoy was asking: Why are we doing this for someone we consider our enemy? I could see risking my life and the lives of American soldiers for another American. But risking all this for an enemy POW?

In addition to the anxiety I was feeling as we made our way along the dangerous road to Baghdad, I was also feeling very lonely and homesick. When I realized that it was Sunday, and that I was going to miss the chapel service again, I grew even more depressed.

So there I was in this armored vehicle, wearing about 50 pounds of body armor, helmet and weapons—the full "battle rattle." Standing next to me was the gunner, his head sticking through the roof of the Humvee, constantly spinning one way, then another, aiming his machine gun at anything that moved, looking for snipers, motioning for cars to stop or move out of the way, and screaming at drivers who didn't understand.

We drove down the highway as fast as we could, trying to make ourselves a more difficult target to attack, tailgating the Humvee in front of us so a suicide car bomber could not come between us, and being tailgated by another Humvee. Sitting in front of me was a soldier monitoring the radio, who received messages from the Humvees ahead of us and yelled this information to the gunner and me.

I decided to fight off my sorrow by listening to some music on my MP3 player. My son-in-law, Eric, had loaded my player with about 1,000 songs before I left home. Since it was Sunday, I decided to listen to some praise music. The first song was by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir:

Speeding toward Baghdad, crammed into the back of a Humvee, I sensed the presence of God as never before. I felt enveloped by the presence of God—God around me, God above me, God in me. As tears ran down my dusty cheeks, I peered through the thick, bulletproof window at Iraqis in their flowing robes, their mud-walled houses, children at play, the tall and stately palm trees. And just as surely as I felt the presence of God in that Humvee, I sensed God's presence in all that I saw—here, in this desolate country, with the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Kurds. God was surely here. He loves Iraq.