Wichita ? She doubts that people back in the States will believe her.

It is hard to imagine life at Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi, Al Anbar Province, Iraq, she said.

Start with the average 27 mortar and rocket strikes on the camp per day.

Then there’s the constant shooting, and the way you have to wear your flak jacket and helmet just to go to the outhouse.

And try working and sleeping in cramped plywood structures with sandbagged windows and dust piled thick on everything.

Betty “Rusty” Roberts, a 59-year-old native of Rose Hill who is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, volunteered for duty in Iraq a year ago, and even she sometimes has to agree with her children in Oklahoma and all her relatives back in Kansas that maybe she was just plain nuts.

But when she peeks out from all the craziness and tension, Roberts also can see Iraqi kids smiling because they have a new school and don’t have to study on mud floors anymore. And then she thinks maybe this is the right thing to be doing.

“These people just want their lives to be decent,” Roberts said by phone from Camp Blue Diamond, where she administers construction contracts for the corps.

Roberts said she didn’t know what to make of the war, so she decided to go to Iraq after serving 24 years with the corps stateside.

“I just needed to see for myself,” Roberts said. “And, boy, have I seen.”

The larger reason she signed up for Iraq was the death of a 13-year-old grandchild who was killed in a hunting accident three days after Christmas a couple of years ago.

The chance to go to Iraq came up last autumn, and Roberts, alone, with her four kids grown up and on their own, wanted to be gone for the holidays.

“Being here was a lot easier,” said Roberts, a 1963 graduate of Rose Hill High School who attended college in Oklahoma, where she raised her kids on her own after a divorce.

Roberts’ job has changed as the war has changed. With a background in construction, quality assurance, contract selection and other jobs, Roberts was sent to Iraq as a “miscellaneous mission specialist.”

She started in Baghdad in construction. Now she has to figure out how to get equipment and supplies through highly restricted areas to Camp Blue Diamond and to construction sites, where Iraqi workers don’t want you around because they are afraid of being seen with Americans.

“It’s frustrating because it’s very difficult to be able to go to a job site,” Roberts said. “You need security and can only go when Marines have time to take you.”

Roberts will return to Baghdad this month. She originally was due to return to the States on Feb. 14, but she has extended her tour until May 1. She promised a granddaughter in Oklahoma she’d be home for her graduation.

She said she has been asked to do a second tour. She told them she’d make a decision by the time she leaves in May.

But she already has an idea what it will be.

The elections, the pride she saw in the people that day, the looks in the faces of schoolchildren in their new classrooms, the enthusiasm she sees in the eyes of the children for their futures.

“I don’t think it’ll be too hard to decide,” Roberts said.