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We found chemical weapons my first week in Iraq.

At Contingency Operating Base Speicher, I was a lieutenant working in the operations department for an explosive ordnance disposal battalion. We were responsible for the entire northern sector of the country, about 50,000 square kilometers (or roughly 19,300 square miles) of ground touching the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders.

The information came to me in an otherwise benign email, alongside the dozens of field reports that hit my inbox every hour. After just a couple of days as the new guy on the team, the reports showing the aftermath of vehicles and soldiers torn apart by explosives started feeling routine. I’d been expecting them.

But this one showed something I didn’t see coming: M110 shells, which are American-designed 155-millimeter artillery projectiles. These had tested positive for sulfur mustard, a blister agent.

“Chem rounds.”

I looked away from my screen, and not 10 feet away from me was Chuck, an Army E.O.D. technician who’d already served tours in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was the kind of noncommissioned officer every lieutenant hopes for: a smart, talented young soldier who trained you up and made you better. I was already relying on Chuck for everything.

Here, I turned to him in disbelief.

I told him that the team had found chem M110’s and that the shells had tested positive for mustard.

He was unimpressed.

I persisted. As far as I knew, we’d just made the first “WMD find” of the war.

But it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know.

He cut right to the chase.

Chuck turned to me and peered over the eyeglasses low on his nose. He looked at me for a while without blinking.

“LT, let me let you in on something,” he said. “We find three or four of those things a week up north here. Everybody knows about them. And nobody cares.”

I was stunned. “You got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

As good noncommissioned officers do, Chuck got me up to speed quickly but also didn’t hesitate to give me swift reality checks when needed. This was one of those times.

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Like many Americans, I questioned the rationale for invasion after the United States failed to find weapons of mass destruction in 2003. But now, in February 2007, I was staring at color photos of chemical weapons taken just hours before.

Some days, we saw as many as three Americans killed and others wounded in our sector. And the majority of those casualties were caused by makeshift bombs made with high explosives. But every once in a while, one of our teams took a “chem hit” – where one of the troops was exposed to a chemical warfare agent.

Within my first month in Iraq, we had our first chemical warfare agent casualties.

One of them was Specialist Richard T. Beasley. (The New York Times is withholding the name of Specialist Beasley’s partner at that individual’s request.)

Chuck went down to check on them.

When he got back, we asked about the team and how its members were recovering. Chuck shook his head and described how the two wounded men were sitting on lawn chairs outside their trailer, and were pumped full of opiates so they could handle the pain.

Chuck said they were basically in la-la land, thanks to the drugs.

Both men were being kept in Iraq instead of being medically evacuated to surgical hospitals in Germany or the United States. We wondered if it was an attempt to keep their wounds hush-hush.

Eventually both men recovered, but they bear scars from their wounds and the mustard exposure could mean potential long-term health complications later in life.

I found out only recently that my unit had submitted them for the Purple Heart, but a higher headquarters denied the awards.

If you served in Iraq and believe you were exposed to chemical weapons or participated in operations involving them, The New York Times would like to hear from you.

John Ismay was a Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer who served in northern Iraq during the 2007 surge. He was a contributor on C. J. Chivers’s article “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons.” Follow him on Twitter.