Alex Dehgan remembers the sound—it was like a car door closing. And then a few seconds of waiting, helplessly, never knowing whether the mortar would explode nearby, or at a distance. Some nights he went to sleep at his quarters in the fortified Green Zone wearing his flak jacket like a blanket. It was not what he envisioned when he first applied for the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships. But like a small corps of current and former Fellows, Dehgan, as a Diplomacy Fellow at the State Department, made a remarkable commitment to rebuilding war-torn Iraq. AAAS Diplomacy Fellow Krista Donaldson, also at the, State Department, made two extended trips to Iraq, using her expertise as a mechanical engineer to help bolster the nation's electrical grid. Peter Smallwood, a 2003-04 Congressional Fellow, spent nearly 10 months in Iraq managing the U.S. State Department's program to direct former Iraqi weapons experts and other scientists into reconstruction efforts. Dehgan, after 5 months in Iraq last year, worked with a half-dozen AAAS S&T Fellows from the Departments of State and Defense to organize a virtual library of science and engineering publications that will soon serve hundreds of Iraqi scholars and students.
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