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As he goes about the life of a college student, there aren't too many things to remind Jeff Hunter of his tour in Iraq.

No quarreling sheiks. No roadside bombs or firefights. No Azerbaijanis guarding home base at a dam in the Sunni triangle.

But there is his daughter.

"When I see her, I think about how Christopher used to smile like that, how he used to have that mischievous look" said Hunter, who was presented with the military's Silver Star on June 18 during the Albuquerque City Council meeting.

His daughter, Ella, is 2 now. She was born in a little town in Ohio to his fellow soldier Christopher Lyons and Lyons' wife, Bethany.

Hunter, a 28-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Albuquerque, met Lyons after Hunter wound up attached to Lyons' Marine unit in Iraq during 2005. They were based at the dam with the Azerbaijanis, but spent most of their time patrolling the roiling towns and villages in the heart of the Sunni insurgency. They were spread thin.

"Somebody told me we had one Marine for every 11 square miles" Hunter said. "When we'd leave an area, the insurgents would come right back in. We couldn't hold an area."

During a patrol May 25, 2005, Hunter's squad was ambushed from a house. His squad leader, Sgt. David Wimberg, was mortally wounded during an initial attempt to quell the ambush.

Hunter, also a sergeant, charged into the house and pulled Wimberg to safety, according to the military. Acting as squad leader, Hunter reorganized his Marines and led them into the house a third time, finally taking it.

Two months later - on July 28 - Hunter's squad was on patrol near Cykla, when an adjacent squad came under small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire, according to the military. Hunter pushed his squad forward to help. He shot two enemy troops and made two unsuccessful assaults against enemy fire to retrieve a wounded Marine.

He then ran across a fire-swept street to link up with an American tank and guided its fire, allowing the extraction of a mortally wounded Marine, the military says.

Christopher Lyons was killed that day. An ad rep at an Ohio newspaper, he'd left home three months before his daughter, Ella, was born. He'd seen her only in e-mails.

A few weeks later, Hunter got an e-mail from Lyons' wife, Bethany. She'd found his address among Christopher's things, she said.

They stayed in touch and eventually, Hunter says, they fell in love. They got married, and their son, Atticus, was born four months ago.

But if he hadn't fallen in love with Bethany, Hunter says, he'd probably be back in Iraq now. Back in the place he and his buddies called the "Wild West."

"We'd hear gunfire coming from a village, and we'd find out it was two tribes fighting each other to see who got to fight us," he says.

"There were a lot of scumbags there; a lot of people who had no problem hurting people, beheading people, torturing people," he says. "But there were a lot of people who were just poor people stuck in a rotten situation. We were there to help them. I'm proud of what we did."

Hunter, a member of the Mormon Church who did a two-year mission to Ukraine before joining the Marines, now hopes to be a high school history teacher. He is a junior at the University of New Mexico.

He left the Marines, though he has a year left in the inactive Reserves.

His memories of Iraq are starting to fade, perhaps.

"Sometimes I won't think about the actual combat for weeks," he says. "Actually, that's not true. I think about it every day."