Paradise General (32 page)

I finished my note before I sealed the box and headed to accountability:

Just a couple of thoughts to end up with. I really want to say I'm sorry. I joined the Army at an old age and left you behind to worry. It's been kind of hard on me sometimes—most of the soldiers I see are your ages. When they are lying on the stretchers wounded, I look in their eyes, and I often see one of you. Coming here was a good thing, as painful as it's been for all of us. Thank you for that.

I don't think I've ever explained all the reasons behind my decision—you know a lot had to do with your grandfather. I wish you could have met him. A funny guy but he carried a lot of demons—sometimes I think it was my job here to lay some of those demons to rest—but you know, they don't make shovels strong enough or holes deep enough to bury the past. Even though we can learn from
the past, we just can't undo it. We can only look forward and, even then, be ready for what life throws at us. We adjust or we spend our lives in misery complaining. As the old saying goes: Get busy living or get busy dying. When I look at all of you, I see you've chosen well. Stay on that path and you will change the world. Even if that world is one person. My accomplishment here, I hope, is at least one soldier, who because of me will someday have the chance to look at today and remember it as just some rotten day in the past. And a future with unlimited horizons.

I've got something to give you, but it's better hand-carried than mailed. It's the diary from my war.

Love, Dad

I
F THERE WAS
one thing the Iraqis were good at, it was hurting each other.

A couple of days ago Bernard spent five hours in the OR piecing together the face of an Iraqi policeman who was pushed off the back of a moving truck by his fellow cops. The effect of asphalt on a skidding face was to pull the skin and muscle off like a Halloween mask. Hanging by a flap, you could lift the face directly over the underlying bones. It was a one-man repair job, but I kept Bernard company as he tried to make a formerly handsome guy look like a human again. A few months ago, I would have vomited at the sight, now I just stood and chatted with Bernard as if we were talking about which team had the best chance to beat the Red Sox this year.

“I called Balad since the muscles around the eye are probably still lying on the road—but they said he's not worth flying down. So here I am, like an old grandmother, quilting away. I just don't know what goes where.” Beads of sweat were building on Bernard's face from the painstaking work.

I told him, “Actually, it looks pretty good. But Jesus, it was his buddies that did this? I'd hate to see what they would have done if
they didn't like him.”

“You got that right. Say, need a ride back to the barracks later? We can sit in the back of the truck and talk about you busting my balls over Captain Dee. Just hold on tight when we drive, man.”

I rubbed my still intact face and answered a quick “No, thanks.”

Yet the Iraqi policeman was just a single illustration of the hatred that was part of daily life in Iraq. Frankly, he was a nonnewsworthy speck compared to the eight hundred who died in a series of bombings in Qataniyah a few days before. All told, more than eighteen hundred Iraqis would die during the month at the hands of their countrymen; who knew the number of wounded.

Surprisingly, we rarely took care of civilians wounded in car bombs—a fact that seemed to confuse a lot of people back home. After a news report on some massive bomb, I'd hear “You sure must be busy.” And yeah, I was busy, but the hospital cup wasn't overflowing with civilians. Although we did take care of the Iraqi army and some Iraqi police, we only opened our helipad to civilians if they worked with us or got caught in the middle of the crossfire—like the ancient woman Awatif. When I first got here, I thought I'd be working on Iraqis all the time, especially kids, but we were told right off the bat we had a new hands-off policy for civilians. Seemed cruel at the time, but when I went to a division surgeons meeting at the 25th Infantry back in June, that directive made sense.

Think about it: our primary job was to care for American soldiers. And it was really hard to send helicopters, vehicles, or put troops at risk picking up wounded civilians from all corners of the country. As the commanding general of our medical brigade wisely said, “I run the world's biggest trauma center. I don't run a full-service hospital.”

Plus, we simply didn't have the room or the staff to care for the entire country's medical needs, even when there were mass casualties. It was the ugly and harsh reality in this neck of the world. I knew it frustrated a guy like Mike, who would have liked to save the Iraqi people, but at this point I think we were just trying to save ourselves
first and foremost.

There was also the issue of getting the Iraqis to step up to the plate and run their own damn country, not just the security but its medical care as well. As we tried to get them to do so, we needed to step out of the way and force them to develop a system that was appropriate for their culture. An American-style health care system would not work here. Unfortunately, the current Iraqi civilian health care system didn't work here, either. It sucked. But that wasn't from a lack of trying on our part.

One of the best examples of failure was TTH, or by its proper moniker: Tikrit Teaching Hospital, the main hospital in Saddam's hometown. The United States had sunk more than $30 million into this place for equipment and supplies. But where that $30 million went was anyone's guess. Not equipment or supplies. Probably into some guy's pockets, the universal destination of much of the funds we pumped into this country.

We called TTH and other Iraqi hospitals “dog kennels,” and for good reason—there was no nursing care. Meaning your family had better be around if you needed your wounds treated, dressings changed, even your Ambu bag squeezed. The family typically set up camp next to your bed and cooked your food as well. As for rules—there were none. Smoking was allowed even with oxygen running (when there was oxygen). All those cigarettes left a layer of smoke swirling throughout the wards. Bandages were reused and hopefully you didn't get a bed stained with old, dried blood, which I suppose was better than one damp with new blood.

Beds and basinets just sat in the parking lot, empty of patients but full of dirt and sand. TTH did have a spanking-new MRI machine and CAT scanner—but they were broken and unused—the money for replacement parts privately pocketed. The emergency crash cart had empty drawers. Bugs crawled up the walls and down onto patients. Completing the picture of a hospital from hell were the layers of dirt and mud coating the floors. The only thing missing were packs of
wild dogs wandering the hallways—instead, they gathered outside and scrounged for scraps of used bandages.

And that was the bright side of the situation—the bad was a patient had better be of the correct religious sect when going to the hospital or else the trip would be a one-way journey. We all knew if a Sunni went to a Shiite hospital or if a Shiite went to a Sunni place, it was a roll of the dice whether a patient would be assaulted or killed. So when we transferred an Iraqi out of the CSH into the civilian system, we made sure they went to the right place; it was even more important than their being stable enough for transfer. Allah help any Iraqi sent to a hospital without family, friends, or the correct religious membership card. Recently forty patients from the wrong side of the religious tracks went into the hospital in Kirkuk and were dead within twenty-four hours.

At rounds each morning, no one was vaccinated from criticism from Dr. Quick, but it was the liaisons and translators that caught the most heat. They were the ones responsible for getting patients out the door and into the Iraqi system—as ugly as the system was. Quick wanted the Iraqis discharged ASAP, but to the right place. No sense sending a Sunni to Shiite General or vice versa—all you got back was a dead patient.

The issue of “where are we going to send these patients” was big at rounds this particular morning. We'd just gotten in a batch of Iraqi police from up the road at Bayjii, a small town north of Tikrit. These people were guarding something—it wasn't clear what—when they saw something suspicious and opened fire. At each other. The ER was packed with cops full of holes. We patched them up, they'd stay a few days, then be sent to the right hospital. The liaisons were already working the Iraqi grapevine for a place for these guys to recover, and family members to become instant medical experts.

In the meantime, we were still busting Bill Stanton over his bedside manner the day before, when the group first came through the doors. The ER was instant chaos—a million voices chattering over each other, the extra noise coming from the translators we needed to
communicate with the Iraqis. Bill was the busiest doctor that day—he had his hands full with bone injuries—and was zipping from stretcher to stretcher, poking and prodding and trying to reassure the patients they'd be fine. The translators were good; they could listen to our rapid-fire English, convert it to Arabic, then quickly convert the response back to English. But I think for the first time in this war they got stumped. As Bill tried to talk and ask questions of a wounded Iraqi, the translator interrupted with a confused look: “Excuse me, sir, what is word: ‘dude'? Is that a person or an injury?”

As we finished up rounds, a familiar face strolled in. Rick had made it home from his brain tumor consultation in Balad in one piece, sporting the wide crooked grin of a kid who had just come back from the amusement park. And in a way, he had. As he flew into camp on a Black Hawk helicopter, the bird passed over a firefight just outside our gate. The pilot looked to see if any support was needed, the chopper rocking, bobbing, and weaving as it spiraled down to avoid any rockets or gunfire. Just the kind of stuff Rick loved—we could picture him whooping and hollering as the speeding circles got tighter and the ground swooped up toward the chopper. A total nut bag.

The flight was “administrative,” meaning it was a routine transport of noncombat personnel, so it was filled with a bunch of folks not used to the idea of getting killed by a stray RPG—rocket-propelled grenade—or strapped into a copter barreling toward the ground during a firefight. Rick said more than one guy peed his pants in terror. We stared at
his
crotch. Dry as the desert. The only odd thing was his bulging pockets. I realized they were filled with Harika Tats, and when he caught me staring, Rick answered, “I never leave home without 'em.”

Even better than the war story was the confirmation of his e-mail, which said his brain was okay, or at least by his standards was okay. The neurosurgeons at Balad said the tumor could simply be observed; no need to go under the knife. He'd stay the rest of the deployment, even though we only had a couple of weeks to go.

“So how was Balad?” I asked. It was a place we called almost every day, but never knew what things looked like on the other end of the satellite phone link.

“You should see this place. A few years ago, they were just a bunch of tents, but now, holy smokes. Beautiful chow halls, an outdoor pool with lounge chairs, rock climbing wall in their gym, and an official movie theater with padded seats and popcorn.”

Okay, we had a nice chow hall, but after that, we came in dead last in the beauty competition. Our swimming pool was bomb-damaged and bone-dry, the only rocks we had were the ones we stumbled over each day as we walked to work, and our movie theater was small and portable—personal computers we crowded around to watch DVDs. It was true; we had a bad case of Air Force envy.

“So did they tell you why you mumble your words and bastardize everybody's names?” I asked.

“Nope, but it's not because of the tumor. It's just me.”

Which made me feel better. I wasn't mocking someone with a brain tumor, I was dealing with a medical mystery dressed as a surgeon—a guy who when looking at a badly broken arm would say, “This patient has a fraction of his radial.”

“You mean fracture of the radius.”

“That's what I said.”

“Christ, man, we're not doing math problems with tires here. Bones. Skeleton. Hard long things inside the body filled with calcium.”

“I know. Orthopedic stuff. That's why we got Stalin.”

“You mean Stanton.”

“That's what I said.”

The thoughts of his lunacy made me laugh, and I wandered off and said a quick prayer thanking God my friend had made it back in one piece. We lived a safe life here, much different from what I found myself in a few times in '04. Under my breath, I muttered a curse at myself for putting my family through this deployment. I was okay,
but every day they probably still worried I'd get wounded or killed. I knew differently, or at least talked myself into believing differently, yet I wondered if every time the TV back home blared news of “Another death in Iraq,” the heartbeats in my household screeched to a halt until details spilled out. Relief on one hand, sorrow on the other. I was fine but another family would now begin a new life minus a loved one.

I stopped in the phone tent and decided to make a quick call home.

I'm doing okay, I said. No, nothing was up. Everything was fine. Just wanted to tell everyone I love them. Be home in a bit. Look for a box with some stuff. Yeah, my friends were fine. Glad the Rockies were starting to win some ball games. Talk to you soon.

The hollow click at the end of the call matched the loneliness in my heart. What the hell was I thinking coming here? It wasn't only me serving my penance; I had sentenced my loved ones to serve it as well. How could I be so selfish? I hoped one day I'd look back and believe I did the right thing, maybe helped a few people, and didn't irreparably harm others. But that day was in another dimension. I couldn't see it or feel it. I couldn't even imagine it. I needed to sleep before my final night shift.