Mary Louise Kelly was thousands of feet in the air, decked out in bulletproof body armor, and crying. The veteran NPR correspondent had just piled into the last of the Black Hawk helicopters streaking through wartime Iraq, along with then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. On the airstrip minutes before, Kelly had gotten a call from Washington. It was the nurse at her 4-year-old son’s school. “He’s struggling to breathe,” Kelly remembered hearing. “We need to get him to a doctor or a hospital.