It's the middle of winter in the desert mountains. I've been walking through the desolate wilderness for days with nothing but water. I barely notice the hunger, but we keep talking about big steak dinners and drinking more water to fill our empty bellies. Water to drink and water pouring from the sky. There's been record precipitation, not quite cold enough to turn into snow, just torrential rain creating rivers of ice water running through the ravines that cut through the hills. I have to cross a flooded ravine and there's nothing for it but to slog through. Great. Now my boots are soaked and they'll never dry. But I'm lucky. There are seven people on my patrol. The eighth had to be evacuated after some sort of foot infection from those wet boots. That means tonight, the odd man joins me and my partner sleeping in spoon formation. I get the middle since I'm the only girl. We have no other choice because we don't want to get hypothermia. God forbid we have to be evacuated and come back to survival school and get this training all over again. But it'll all be over in a few days. All that's left is to get captured, go to the POW camp for a night or two, and then I can go back to San Diego and eat a big juicy burger. One week in survival school is nothing compared with the misery of my first year at the Naval Academy. I can do anything for one week.

No one ever imagined that I'd join the Navy, least of all me. But in high school, as I sat in the guidance counselor's office wondering if I'd even be able to go to college to study engineering, let alone work for NASA someday as I had been fantasizing about as of late, she planted the seed in my head that day. I envisioned myself as the next Private Benjamin (only some of you will remember what I'm talking about), and thought maybe it wasn't a bad idea.

Well, actually it didn't happen quite like that. My image of the military was what I learned from Goldie Hawn and Bill Murray. Private Benjamin traveling to Germany or John Winger singing, "Here she comes just a walkin' down the street." They made the misery look fun. I guess that's what I told myself as I was flipping through the glossy brochure from the U.S. Naval Academy and felt like it was my only choice.

That year, my junior year of high school, was a bad year. My parents had already been separated for five years, and I hadn't spoken to my father in over 12 months. He stopped paying child support. Then he left New York. Then he left the United States so he could ignore court orders. My mom couldn't even pay the rent, so I could forget about any help for college. Those were the circumstances that led me to the Navy.

After four years at the Naval Academy and another eight in the fleet, I can't say I was unhappy then about where I ended up. After I made it through survival school, many other adventures awaited. I moved to Spain where I lived for three years and spent a lot of time flying over the Balkans and on the border of Iraq in the darkened fuselage of an airplane that fit 24 crew members, staring at green computer screens, intently listening to radio frequencies, trying to figure out what was happening on the ground below. When I wasn't flying, I could be found sipping coffee on the waterfront of an ancient Venetian port overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Hania, a little city in Crete, or wandering through the narrow streets of the souk in Manama, Bahrain, looking for the perfect silk sari to have made into a dress I designed myself. Yet I could never get rid of this nagging feeling that I didn't belong here. Was there any self-determination involved in where I had ended up in life? I'd been following a very narrow road with very few forks. But I did always bring my camera. Sitting in the barracks on the NATO base in Crete during the 2000 presidential election having to listen to one of the pilots on my crew, Gray, annoyingly recount yet again the current vote tally, with Dave and Mark cheering each update, made me sick to my stomach. I escaped by heading out to the old monastery where the monks made the best hand-pressed olive oil and taking pictures of all the cats that roamed around the crumbling stone walls. But I could only click away for so long before I had to get back to work.

Before I moved back to the United States, I took a month of vacation to travel to Vietnam. This was the first big trip where I got to choose the destination and finally take all the time in the world to capture moments on film. Walking down the dirt road of the little settlement known as the Chicken Village high up in the mountains near Dalat, there was time to talk to the villagers, not just rush by to take snapshots. I knew there was something special on that film.

People think it takes discipline to be in the military, but the truth is that the rigid structure already in place means you don't even have to think about it. You know exactly what is expected of you, how to spend each hour of the day. 0630: reveille; 0700: morning formation; 0800: class; and so on. You never have to decide what to wear or wonder when you might get a pay raise. There weren't many decisions to make about the direction my career might take as long as I didn't stray too far from the prescribed path. I wasn't unhappy at work. When my commitment to the Navy was over I could leave the military but continue on in the intelligence community, the most secure job industry in this post-9/11 world. Or I could leap off the path into the unknown and chart a new course.

It was the night of the 2004 presidential election, outside the glass-enclosed MSNBC studios where Chris Matthews was giving an update on the vote tally at 3 o'clock in the morning. It was that night, with camera in hand, Kelly, Lauren and RJ alongside me, snapping away at the crowd that was anxiously awaiting the results, that I felt that yes, I was where I was supposed to be, with these people and I had chosen to be here. For the first time in my life, I was with people who had a common passion and who had made similar choices about the direction of their lives. We had all given up first careers. We were all yearning to explore the world through a camera lens.

In the year since I graduated from photography school, there have been moments when I wonder what the hell I'm doing. It's still unnerving, when I think of all the security I left behind, and the trade I made for a totally uncertain future. I have craved, at times, a little structure in my daily existence, but I find exhilarating the experience of driving along a dirt road in Mexico to an isolated village in the mountains where I can take all the time in the world to meet with a village elder, make images that I can take back with me and share with you. Coming to Poynter has fulfilled my need for a little structure in my life, but it has also reaffirmed that I'm on the right path, sitting in the lab with Alex, Mike and the Michelles, sharing a common passion, talking about all the possibilities in our future careers, and then going back to the dorms on Sunday at 2 a.m. and not wanting to go to sleep in spite of the exhaustion, but to drink a cold one with everyone who's going through the same uncertainties.

Now I'm ready to head back out into the world with my camera. When I get back to D.C. next week, I don't know when I'll get my next pay raise, let alone my next paycheck. There are no concrete plans, no expectations, just a nebulous block of time that stretches from July 15 to eternity. But if I can make it through combat missions and survival school, I can make it anywhere.

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