Kelly was a military police sergeant with the Colorado National Guard. She escorted convoys of KBR trucks. They regularly broke down, and the convoy would continue while MPs were left behind to guard the trucks until they could be towed away. Iraqi civilians would gather, hoping to loot the trucks because the Iraqis were poor and the cargo was valuable. Often, they would later be ordered to destroy and abandon the trucks. Once, when they were ordered to destroy a truck loaded with food, she proposed to her superior that they let the people have the food. But he told her that would be too dangerous because people would come close to the MPs and might attack them. So she wound up pointing a machine gun at Iraqis people to keep them away as the food burned. "When you're in the military, you want to feel proud, you want to feel good about what you're doing," she said. "That made me feel really ashamed."