The date was April 2, 2007. Daniel Rowe had been in Iraq for only a few months when his squad was pulling security at the Major Crimes Unit. “We had been there for an hour when a large truck bomb blew up 20 feet in front of my truck,” says Daniel. The explosion demolished his truck and nearby buildings and killed his gunner, Bryan. It also killed a group of schoolgirls who had just been dismissed for the day. “I was in the same truck when this happened, and I walked away unscathed,” says Daniel.

When the explosion happened, Daniel admits he already had a shaky faith. After graduating in 2003 from Wisconsin Lutheran High School, Milwaukee, he joined the army and was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. There he became friends with many atheists. “They joked about religion all the time,” says Daniel. “I also did not have a lot of people that I could share my religion with.”

Then Daniel deployed to Iraq, and his faith continued to weaken. “My roommate was an atheist, and his constant putting down of religion got me thinking,” he says.

That thinking led to his reaction after the blast. “I blamed myself at the time for what had happened and also blamed God for letting it happen,” he says. Eventually he stopped blaming himself because he realized he had no control over the situation. “Even though I stopped blaming myself, I still blamed God.”

Not even five months later, a rocket hit his unit’s supply. “I was over in the area when it happened, and I ran to help,” says Daniel. He soon discovered that his new gunner was in the building and had lost his legs. “I had just lost my second gunner this deployment and did not understand why everything was happening to me,” he explains. “After the attack, I was about done with God. My faith had taken just about all that it could.”

He didn’t know then that his faith was about to take more. Two months later, while driving to the Major Crimes Unit, he was entering a traffic circle when an IED blew up in front of his truck. (IEDs are improvised explosive devices—bombs fashioned out of whatever explosive materials are available and whatever makes suitable shrapnel.) “All that happened this time was that it cracked my windshield and broke a headlight,” he says.

That was the last straw for Daniel. “All these bad things happened to me, and I blamed God. I did not understand why God would do something like that to me,” he says. So he did what his friends were doing and became an atheist. “I believed there could be no God if all these bad things were happening in Iraq,” he explains. “I didn’t have faith in anything.”