But it was a moment of tenderness, she said, that stuck with her most. It happened when she was helping to care for a young Iraqi woman, whose belly had been left ripped open and infected from an amateur cesarean.

“The eldest women in the room took my hand, and started kissing my cheek and then all the other adult women each came over and kissed my cheek too,” said Major Condon, now 43 and living in Loudonville, N.Y. “It was a very warm, wonderful, wonderful feeling. I don’t know if I saved the woman or whatever. But it was very, very emotional.”

Major Condon’s experience is one of 10 such moments â€" each drawn from an instance of high drama in a war zone â€" that have been given a surreal twist by the photographer Jennifer Karady for “In Country: Soldiers Stories From Iraq and Afghanistan,” an exhibition opening on Thursday at SF Camerawork, a downtown gallery here.

“In Country” is the result of five years’ work by Ms. Karady, who interviewed dozens of veterans and asked them to talk about their most traumatic war moments. She then overlaid those memories onto their present-day lives, in the suburbs, back at school and, in one case, on the streets.

Ms. Karady, 43, described a process that she called equal parts journalism and psychotherapy. “This thing is replaying visually in the person’s head, and we really have no idea what is going on,” she said. “But the idea, conceptually, of taking that moment and recontextualizing and placing it in the civilian world, is based on a therapeutic model.”

The portraits are striking. In one of the large-format color prints, which measure four feet square, a soldier ascends a dark flight of stairs, armed with nothing more than a pair of textbooks held like a rifle. In another, a smiling ranger sits on the edge of a placid lake, camping, as two buddies â€" each wearing googly-eyed glasses and bloody fatigues â€" smile back. In a third, a sergeant sits bolt upright in a burned-out house with no other company other than a giant pink bunny.

Adding to the photos’ emotional impact for the subjects is the fact that many of the models used to create the images â€" a little boy holding a gun, a young woman holding an IV, a mother holding a bouquet of lilies â€" are their friends or family members.

For Andy Davis, 29, a former Army staff sergeant who served two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, that meant enlisting two other Iraq War veterans and his wife. The moment he chose involved a 13-day firefight, in which a fellow soldier was shot in the eye by a sniper.

Mr. Davis said it was his reaction to the shooting â€" laughter and gallows humor â€" that haunted him. “How quickly we were dealing with it with humor made me feel sick,” said Mr. Davis, who now works as an outreach and training coordinator for the New York State Division of Veterans’ Affairs. “It made me feel like we were laughing at a car accident.”

Ms. Karady, who has done freelance photography for The New York Times, approached Mr. Davis last year when she was at Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and began general conversations about his experiences. Slowly, Mr. Davis recalled, those chats “started getting more specific.” They talked, he said, “about things you still think about daily, very specifically: the smells, the sights, the thoughts and the feelings.”

In the photograph, shot last fall at Saratoga Lake, Mr. Davis sits, bloodied with an awkward smile, while his buddies sit nearby, also washing off blood and wearing those novelty glasses with their eyes bulging out. In the distance, it seems, is Mr. Davis’s more serene current reality, with his wife, Jodie, sitting next to a small pup tent.