"Minnestoa nice" goes to war

The healdine has a B-Moive flair -- "They ride with danger" -- but in today's Pioneer Press reporter Richard Chin has a good piece of writing based on his tour in Iraq . I'm a sucker for a good lead --

Here's what happens when a "Minnesota Nice" girl gets a .50-caliber machine gun and goes to war.

"I was not an aggressive person. I was the most passive person: 'It's OK, you go first,'" said Michelle Maxwell, who works in a nursing home in Austin, Minn.

Then, eight months ago, the 21-year-old Army National Guard specialist was sent to Iraq, taught to operate the heavy machine-gun turret of a Humvee and told to shoot or run over anybody who threatened the truck convoys she was assigned to protect.

"I said, 'There's just no way.' I put old people to bed. There's no way I could run over a kid," Maxwell said.

That was before she saw fellow soldiers in her transportation unit getting blown up on the roads of northern Iraq.

Read the whole thing. Not the typical Green Zone fodder.