HARRISBURG — In May of 2003, Stacy Garrity was in Iraq with the U.S. Army Reserve when she had to make a difficult decision.

Garrity was a 38-year-old major tasked with helping to process incoming and outgoing prisoners of war at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, just a few months after the U.S. invasion had begun. A newly arrived detainee came through her line with a cracked nose and blood flowing down his face.

She asked him through a translator what had happened, and was told that en route to the camp, U.S. soldiers had brutally kicked and stepped on him and other prisoners.

After hearing similar accounts from two soldiers who witnessed the incident, Garrity spoke to a high-ranking sergeant in another unit about reporting the abuse. That person advised against an official report, according to Garrity. The next morning, she made one anyway.

Garrity wasn’t the only one — at least one other soldier, then-Major Al Garbarino, heard about the incident secondhand and reported it immediately, he told Spotlight PA.

The aftermath of that bus incident and those reports divided the camp, according to testimony Garrity gave in a 2004 military investigation into soldiers’ mistreatment of prisoners at an internment facility in Iraq. Garrity noted she felt personally targeted by her colleagues for speaking up.

“I lost a lot of friends,” Garrity said at the time, “but I would report it again.”

More than two decades later, Garrity, now 62, is Pennsylvania’s second-term treasurer and Republican nominee for governor. She will face Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro this November.

She often talks about her military career on the campaign trail, highlighting the accolades she received and describing how it prepared her for public service. But this particular episode rarely makes it into her stump speeches.

“It was kind of a tough time,” Garrity told Spotlight PA. “I had death threats.”

Detailed accounts of those years of the Iraq War — and Garrity’s role in them — were compiled as part of the 2004 abuse investigation, which informed a record of soldiers’ conduct in Iraq known as the Taguba Report. Its findings, and the now-infamous images of human rights violations at the Abu Ghraib internment facility, cast a shadow over the United States’ war on terror.

Camp Bucca, hundreds of miles southeast of Abu Ghraib, did not receive as much public attention, but many details about the bus incident Garrity reported were highlighted in the military’s investigation and subsequent court martials of soldiers who served there.

Some soldiers left the military in disgrace after this period of the Iraq War. Garrity, on the other hand, emerged with a reputation that later became the foundation of her political career. A 2004 NPR story credited her with helping make Camp Bucca “happy,” as one former prisoner put it, and called her the “Angel of the Desert.”