Paradise General (31 page)

As I surveyed the destruction, I heard soft moaning coming from the blood-crusted lips of the insurgent. With gunshot wounds to all four extremities, he had to be hurting, but there are times when your sympathy meter just isn't set to the same level as it is for a good guy. Then, eventually, as always, the physician inside your soul kicks in and you dose the enemy with liberal amounts of morphine and use a more gentle touch to probe his wounds.

The rest of the doctors are no different. We've all seen our own people suffer at the hands of guys like this, yet we simply follow our oath and do our jobs. I think the worst we've ever done is look down at a helpless form on a stretcher and say, “Welcome to Infidel General Hospital, now we're going to save your life.” Then we go to work and heal a fellow human being.

I looked up at the soldiers who chased him down—they stood at a distance and let us do our jobs but their eyes projected a blank stare. Some of it had to be fatigue, after all, they had been out in the heat chasing down people all night, but I think it was more that their eyes were a closed door to the room of emotion. Over the weeks, I'd had a chance to shoot the breeze with some of the men and women who bring in prisoners and many were frustrated. Frustrated they didn't finish the job. Frustrated to see insurgents get four-star medical care. Frustrated at the ever-changing rules of engagement that define when they can fire their weapons. At one point, a sweat-stained soldier with
bulging forehead veins told me they weren't allowed to shoot at anyone from behind even if they'd just planted an IED; you had to see the whites of their eyes before pulling the trigger. Yet this day, like all days, they just stood stoically and silent as we worked to save those who would hurt us. They are good men and women, wise beyond their years.

And with their latest delivery, we thumbed to a well-worn chapter of our medical guidebook titled
You Shoot 'Em, You Own 'Em
.

That's the unofficial name of the policy when it comes to taking care of insurgents. If we catch them doing something bad, they get popped and we become responsible for their health care. It's a rather unique plan—a form of free, universal coverage not available even in the United States. No matter their wounds, prisoners are blindfolded, cuffed, and brought to the hospital. We doubled-check them outside for explosives, and quickly but cautiously cut their clothes off. Only then are they brought into the ER and their injuries repaired. We simply can't take a chance on a suicide belt or weapons inside our hospital. And as the Surge pushed more bad guys out of Baghdad, the more insurgents our guys got to chase and wound. That was why our August census had seen a big jump in the number of patients who hated us.

We didn't know the name of my patient, which was often the case when a bad guy was dragged in. So we christened him, as we did the others, with a special surname solely for the purpose of medical records: “Unknown.” This month it seemed like we'd had the whole Unknown family come through: Sammy Unknown, Mohammed Unknown, Khalaf Unknown, Ahmed Unknown, and now, Unknown Unknown. The Unknown family had been up to a lot of dirty tricks lately.

Ian and Bill would wind up taking Unknown Unknown into surgery, then he would go to the ICU to recover. He'd have guards with him twenty-four hours a day and would be kept separate from other patients, hopefully with more than a flimsy portable screen.

At times, the insurgents really didn't trust or understand us.
One guy had skin grafts to repair his burnt and mangled arm, and he couldn't figure out why the newly grafted areas had a different color and texture compared to the rest of his arm. He concluded we had sewn a new arm onto his body while he was asleep in surgery. Worse, he was a Shiite and thought we had attached a Sunni arm.

When we joked a few weeks ago about how insurgents must feel after getting a few units of good ole American blood, we also wondered if they truly understood the men and women who donated that blood.

We typically kept several dozen units on hand, but one bad case and we'd go through blood like water. Frankly, it would have been easy to just hold all the life-nourishing liquid for our own troops and let the bad guys leak until the gauge said empty. But we never did. As an equal opportunity hospital, we didn't discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, or killer. The protocol was always the same no matter who was on the table—a call went out from the OR for a “blood drive” because we had someone running on fumes. And when the call went out for a specific blood type, dozens of American soldiers with that blood type showed up to donate. We never told them who the blood was for, and they never asked. Sort of this war's version of the military's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy.

When I inquired why they rolled up their sleeves to donate without knowing if they were actually saving the life of a car bomber, the answer was haunting.

“People is people, sir. We just don't want to know which people. I'll go back and take a nap figuring I just helped save an American. If it's a
hajji,
well, you doctors are going to have to live with that one, not me.”

When I walked over from the ER to the ICU for a cold bottle of water, I saw the nurses working with our longest-residing guest, Awatif. She was about forty years old going on eighty. Almost a month before, she was caught in the middle of a midnight raid—the details still aren't clear, at least to us. We didn't know if she was running an
insurgent halfway house or just relaxing one evening when a group of bad guys sprinted in to hide out.

When we blew the house up, she blew up with it, going blind, deaf, and suffering severe burns over most of her body. The doctors had done all they could; it had been the nurses who kept her alive and nursed her back to health. As I walked in, Awatif was sitting upright in a chair next to her bed—two of the nurses were washing and braiding her hair. She'll never look the same as she did before the blast—for that matter, being blind she'll never know what she looks like any day the rest of her life, but the nurses cared for her and tried to pretty her up the best they could. They had to possess a deep well of humanity that helped them deal with the next hate-filled gob of spit coming from a prisoner or a quiet moan from a broken American soldier.

Dinner that night was a happier affair. Though we wouldn't say it, we were each watching the calendar fill up with X's—silently counting the days until we got on the magic flying bus to take us home. We felt bad for the ones that came before us and will leave after us—our deployments were just under 120 days—everyone else, it seemed, was getting the fifteen-month special. That's a lot of birthdays, weddings, and funerals, let alone soccer games and bedtime stories, to be AWOL from.

In a way our deployment had been divided into three phases—the first third a time of uncertainty and nerves; the middle phase a time where we became confident in ourselves and each other; then, as we reached the final third, we walked around with fingers crossed that we'd leave on a high note. No mistakes. No bad cases. Like leaving the playground or gym, you've always got to put your last shot in the hoop.

As we sat at dinner, we all noticed the empty chair.

“Is Rick back yet?” asked Bill.

The day before, Rick flew to the CSH in Balad to have the neurosurgeons look at his MRI, the one taken at the hospital at Benning after he had failed his hearing test. Rick thought the MRI had to be
fine since the Army let him board the plane and partake of the honor of serving his country in time of war.

It turned out Rick was the victim of a massive screwup. After the MRI was taken, it sat on the desk of a specialist who was on a lengthy vacation. It was thirty days before he finally returned and had a chance to eyeball Rick's scan … and see a tumor sitting in the corner of the brain. When Rick got the news, he somehow kept his cool and had copies of the scan sent to some neurosurgical colleagues back in Oklahoma. They assured him the tumor looked benign and could wait until he got home in September. To play it safe, though, Rick decided to fly down to Balad for yet another opinion that the tumor could be safely left alone. Like nervous parents, we waited for word that our friend would be okay.

“No, not back yet,” I answered. “Later tonight or in the morning. But he shot an e-mail saying the guys in Balad thought it was a lipoma. Just a benign fatty tumor that's sitting in a bad place.”

I thought about how much I missed my friend. But still had to laugh at how he made me laugh.

“You know,” I said, “all that shit pouring out of his ears can't be just wax, now I think it's got to be fat.”

Bernard chimed in. “Anyone who says he wants to listen to Johnny Crash or the Beach Bums in the OR has to have a fat head. That's good news, though.”

No question, we missed “Uncle Ricky” at the hospital, especially me. No one for me to yell at, no one to yell at me, no one to toss adolescent quips around with like we did on the rooftop the night before he left for Balad:

“Hey, look, right next to that bright star is Uranus.”

“I don't see it.”

“Well, bend over a mirror when you get back to the barracks.”

It was like two junior-high kids dropped into the middle of war.

Our conversation at the dinner table shifted from Rick.

“Big day tomorrow, though. Mike gets his board certification.
Ricky better be back for that.”

Besides war wounds, butt surgery was a big-ticket item this summer. It seemed like an awful lot of soldiers got hemorrhoids, some to the point they couldn't do their jobs, standing or sitting.

The high number of cases was a match made in heaven. The surgeons hated doing them, and Mike loved doing them. So they let him operate on each and every hemorrhoid or ass case that came in. So many that Mike would be fully trained to perform rectal surgery when he got back home. Tomorrow he would be awarded his graduation certificate in “Official Care of Any and All Ass Complaints,” as well as being promoted from major to
rear admiral
. Too bad his wife and kids couldn't make it to the ceremony.

The final item on the dinner menu was our upcoming rooftop party: the politically incorrect “Hos and Pimps Farewell Extravaganza.” The invitation was clear: the females would dress up like pimps and the men as … women of the evening. The swankier the better. The more bizarre the better. I decided I would go as “Helga the hooker.” Rick as “Betty Boob.”

After dinner, I went back to my room for a big project: mailing all my excess stuff home. Even though it would be weeks before I'd see my front door, it would take that long for a big box of junk to arrive … and anything I could stuff in would be less poundage to lug. I dropped in a note:

Dear guys,

I'm sending along some extra stuff I don't think I'll need the rest of my time here. A bunch of books (which I haven't read), some spare clothing, boots, and a beat-up pair of running shoes. Sorry for the smell. Take extra good care of the Ziploc bag filled with index cards. I spent the first few nights here scribbling crib notes on them—they were my cheat sheets for taking care of the wounded. I carried them everywhere I went—the good news is I never needed
them. Not even once. A couple of cards are bloody but that's only because I used them to scribble wound locations in people who were blown into a lot of pieces—I couldn't recite them fast enough to the nurse, so I just looked at the patients and wrote what I saw as I worked. Funny, I thought I would need these cards every single day I went to work. Never did. Put them in a safe place—they will always remind me of how scared I was when I first got here. So when I get home and think I'm having a bad day—I'll pull them out and get a reality check.

I needed a break, so I walked to my locker for an energy bar and a Gatorade. As I got to the corner of my room, my body was slammed into the open door of my metal locker. A breath later came the loudest explosion I'd ever heard. I shook the blurriness from my head and waited for a few seconds. I was stunned that anything could make a concrete building shake like a rag doll. I headed outside my door onto the roof and saw that a rocket had hit yards from the building. We'd had a safe deployment with only a smattering of mortars and rockets—and most of those were duds. You'd be walking along, hear a clank and a screech as a round landed on the gravel, then skidded a few yards harmlessly to a halt.

This one, though, carried death. When it hit, the rocket left a huge crater and set some fires. But at this point, it didn't look like there were any casualties.

My dad told me he hated mortars and rockets more than anything, and I understood why. There wasn't a hole you could dig that was deep enough for protection.

As I watched a group gather on the roof to watch the results of the fireworks show, I thought of the first rocket that zipped my scalp. April 2004. I was crossing a causeway over a small lake with a group of guys when we heard a big pop. Someone said, “Don't worry, that's just a mortar hitting.” We yelled a collective “Bullshit” and
contemplated an emergency dive into the water when the rocket whirled overhead. The pop was actually the rocket launch and we knew it had to come down somewhere. The shell missed us, but not the arms and legs of a group of people in a small building less than a hundred yards away. I could still hear their screams. Now I watched a group of gawkers on our roof looking to see if there would be an encore. But I knew the top of a building was the last place any of us should be.

We were saved by the chirping of our pagers: report to the hospital for accountability. Meaning, we didn't have wounded to treat, we just needed to all make an appearance and show them we were alive. But since the rule was all helmets and body armor was to be stored at the hospital, we'd make a fast trip across the gravel and hope another round didn't hit. Great planning. It made me beg for my old commanders from 2004, like Izzy Rommes, who really knew war.