Fixing Hell

by Larry C. James

  I took a deep breath and opened the door slowly, peeking in without the occupants noticing. Inside the interrogation booth was a twenty-two-year-old female soldier trying to conduct an interrogation. Sitting across the table from her was a shackled forty-year-old male prisoner, who had been brought into the prison for being a hardcore, killer terrorist, and he looked every bit the part. Alongside the prisoner was a male Arabic interpreter.

  The American soldier was slumped in her chair and had tears in her eyes as the prisoner yelled at her ferociously in Arabic. The translator interpreted the prisoner’s words effectively, repeating them in English with a harsh yell and fast pace consistent with the prisoner’s voice. It all made for a strange combination: the screaming vitriol from the prisoner, followed quickly by the translation of the harsh words from a kind-looking Iraqi translator.

  “I’ll kill you, bitch! When I get out of here, I’ll sodomize you before I cut your throat! You American women are nothing but whores! After I rape your mother I will set fire to that bitch’s body. In my country a bitch like you would be beheaded for looking in the eyes of a man like me!”

  Clearly the tables had turned in that room and the interrogator was in trouble. No supervisors were around, this violent prisoner was clearly out of control, threatening the life of a young soldier, and the lone MP guard was asleep. I chose to remain quiet and observe the wrongness of this awful place at that time—a young soldier abandoned by her superiors, practically on her own at night with a vicious terrorist, struggling to do her job in a horrible place, under wretched conditions. She was so young and innocent-seeming that she immediately reminded me of my niece, whom I pictured in the same situation. I felt sorry for this young soldier. As I watched her, I realized the reports of prisoner abuse, as bad as they were, did not tell the full story of Abu Ghraib.

  This, too, was Abu Ghraib.

  2

  Journey to Gitmo

  May 2002

  When I was sixteen, I attended an all-black, all-male Catholic high school that was strict about rules and heavy on the discipline. For me, that meant constantly getting in trouble for running my mouth too much. A buddy named Tyrone and I were talking about what our parents did for a living one day, and he said his old man was a psychologist. I didn’t really have any idea what a psychologist did, so Tyrone explained that his father talked to people for a living. I didn’t think much more about it until I visited Tyrone’s house one evening and had a chat with his dad. I asked Tyrone’s father exactly what he did at work.

  “Well,” he said, “I get paid a lot of money for talking to people.”

  This sounded interesting, but I was still trying to fit the concept into the world I knew at my strict school. “Do you ever get sent to detention for talking too much?” I asked.

  Tyrone’s father laughed long and hard before catching his breath and answering my question. “No, son, I don’t go to detention,” he said. “I talk as long as I want, and the longer I talk, the more I get paid.”

  I was sold on the idea. Many more conversations followed with Tyrone’s father in the next few years, and by the time I went to college in 1975 I had my plan all laid out: an undergraduate degree in four years and on to a PhD and a career in psychology. I left my beloved New Orleans, where I felt truly at home as a light-skinned black man of Creole heritage, to attend the University of Dubuque in Iowa, where I feared I would stand out like a palm tree in a cornfield. The folks in Iowa welcomed me warmly, though, and my full football and track scholarship paid for nearly everything I needed. I was an intensely focused student athlete, spending every minute on my studies or on the practice field, so much so that my roommate insisted on setting me up on a blind date because he figured I would never make the effort myself. The blind date turned out to be a lovely, petite Iowa girl named Janet who had fourteen brothers and sisters, all of them raised by their father to be fiercely independent and capable. When he was repairing the roof and needed someone else up there with a hammer, he didn’t give a damn if the closest offspring’s name was Jack or Jane, the kid better scramble up on the roof.

  On our first date, we were riding around in Janet’s little white Gremlin when a tire went flat. Already liking this gal enough that I wanted to impress her with my gallantry, I hopped out and went right to changing the tire. What I had forgotten, and what I could never tell this girl I’d just met, was that being raised in a house full of women had left me with absolutely zero mechanical skills. I looked into the trunk of that car and had no idea how to even get the spare tire out. After I fumbled with it for a while, Janet finally came around and, with a look of consternation, showed me how to do it. At least she wasn’t strong enough to actually lift the tire out by herself.

  Once we got the tire around to the side of the car, I began fumbling with the jack, getting more embarrassed and ham-handed as I realized I didn’t know how to work it. Janet watched for a few minutes and finally had had enough. With a heavy sigh and a roll of the eyes, she said, “Stand back and get out of the way.” I did as I was told and watched this beautiful little gal change that tire like she’d done it a hundred times before and didn’t need any man to come to her rescue.

  Ten minutes later, we were back on the road and I was in love. Later, I called my mother back in New Orleans and told her I’d met the woman I was going to marry. She expressed skepticism, to say the least, but I kept going on and on about how capable Janet was and how I’d never seen a woman take charge like that before, a woman who could be so delicate and gentle but also so independent. By the end of the phone call, my mother knew I was serious.

  I married Janet while still in school and we had our son soon after. While obtaining my doctorate, I wrote my dissertation on child molesters. That required working twenty to thirty hours a week in a prison, interviewing prisoners. Still facing several more years of training as a psychology resident in a hospital, I looked at the different opportunities and my attention kept going to the military option. Medical residents were, and still are to some degree, treated like indentured servants, working extremely long hours under stressful conditions for very little pay. Of all the places you could train, the military provided the best pay, and it also offered excellent benefits for my family. And on top of that, I liked the idea that I could serve my country while seeing the world. I joined the Navy and trained at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., and then my first assignment right out of training was the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where my years of experience working with prisoners for my dissertation prompted my boss to immediately assign me as the brig psychologist.

  Temporary assignments followed in Guam, Japan, and the Philippines. Though the experience was largely positive, I didn’t reenlist in the Navy when the time came. Instead I became an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, not far from New Orleans where I always felt at home. While teaching at LSU, I also worked as a consultant at the local prison. The work was satisfying, but I soon felt out of place in the almost entirely white suburb where I lived with other professionals from the university. This was Louisiana, but it wasn’t New Orleans. My wife and son also didn’t feel at home in Baton Rouge, but none of us wanted to complain. The final straw for me came in 1991 when the white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke came in second in the Republican primary for governor. I was dismayed to see that 85 percent of voters in my district had voted for this former Grand Wizard of the KKK. How could I raise my biracial son in this community?

  I was miserable but I didn’t want to uproot my family again after only eighteen months in Louisiana. With great hesitation, I broached the topic of moving from Baton Rouge and was relieved when my wife and son revealed that they, too, hated this place and wanted to go. Was there any chance of moving back to Hawaii? we wondered. I was still a Navy reservist so I looked into going active duty with the Navy again, and found they would be glad to have me back. But the most likely assignment would be Beaufort, South Carolina, or Cherry Point
, North Carolina, and I didn’t think that would be much of an improvement for my multiracial family. I was having a drink in a bar one evening, mulling over what to do next, when good fortune walked in wearing an Army uniform and sat down next to me. I was wearing my Navy reserves uniform, so we struck up a conversation and I soon learned he was the chief psychologist for the Army. As we talked and compared notes on our previous tours in Hawaii, he mentioned that he was having a hard time finding qualified psychologists in the Army who were willing to pick up and move to Pearl Harbor. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

  “Sir, don’t jerk my chain,” I said. “If I could do it, I’d join the Army and take that assignment in Hawaii myself.”

  My new friend made a few calls and soon I was in the Army, headed to Hawaii. I spent eight good years there and then in August 1999 I was reassigned from Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. By then I had established myself as a leading military psychologist and an expert on the psychology of prisoners.

  In the spring of 2002, I had already had a long, interesting career as a military psychologist. A colonel with plenty of experience in the field, I was not going to be at a loss for stories to tell after dinner or having a beer with other veterans and psychologists. I still had several years before retiring from the Army, but my three-year assignment at Walter Reed was winding down. I had about six to eight months left on this tour before my wife and I returned to our quiet life in Hawaii, where I would return to working at Tripler Army Medical Center.

  Until then, the global war on terrorism was ensuring that, as for most people in the military, there was always something to keep me busy. I always loved it when people asked me about my position on the war. Some assumed that because I was an Army colonel, I would be a gung-ho, conservative Republican, over the top in support of the war, praising President Bush at every opportunity. Others assumed that because I was a psychologist, a medical professional dedicated to caring for people’s mental well-being, I would be a liberal Democrat opposed to the war and the president, only begrudgingly following my orders as an Army officer. Plus, I am a black man and everyone knows that black Republicans are about as rare as white running backs in the National Football League. The truth was I didn’t fit any of those templates and many people who knew me well considered me something of a paradox.

  My political orientation is best described as conservative Democrat. I carry a gun at all times, even in civilian clothing with a concealed weapon permit, and I believe very strongly in the right to bear arms. But I also believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe in less government but also that all Americans should have health insurance. Those positions made it hard to align myself simply with one political party or the other, but politics didn’t come into play when my country launched the global war on terrorism. As an Army colonel I followed orders and did as my commander in chief instructed, and I was largely supportive of the growing calls to invade Iraq. In 2002 it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein was a modern-day Hitler, killing hundreds of thousands of his own people and committing unspeakable atrocities on men, women, and children. Humanity, in the form of the United States military, had to stop him, and if the president decided to abandon the sanctions, inspections, and talking, I was glad to be part of the effort to go in and stop this dictator. I just wanted President Bush to do a better job of explaining why we might have to go. The oft-cited explanation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was pure nonsense; a group of angry Girl Scouts could have posed more of a threat to our national security than Iraq did. There was a perfectly valid reason to send in U.S. troops, but I cringed every time I heard my commander in chief tell the world that it was weapons of mass destruction.

  By May 2002, the U.S. military and our allies had been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for eight months and we were treating many casualties from that operation at Walter Reed, where I was chair of the Department of Psychology. One day in May there was a knock on my door. It was my deputy department chief, Lieutenant Colonel Denise Dobson. Denise wore two hats as my deputy and also as the director of training for the Department of Psychology. I had enjoyed working with her for nearly three years. It had been a long haul and we had been through a lot, notably the tragedy of 9/11, in which Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and I relocated most of our clinical services to the Pentagon to provide mental health services to those who survived the attack and responded during the rescue efforts. I had worked sixteen hours a day for three months, from September 12, 2001, to December. Managing the Department of Psychology also had put Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and me through the wringer with the usual administrative hassles, a hospital-wide power failure, tremendous staff shortages, facilities in disrepair, and even a mold problem that threatened your health when you were merely sitting at your desk.

  Dobson had proven herself a tough officer and a valued colleague, but I was worried about her. In spite of her desire and energy to keep up with me, which sometimes is a tall order, she had had a scare with a life-threatening disease and at times didn’t look well. She responded by always taking on more duties, as if trying to prove to herself that she was not weakening. On top of this, the invasion of Afghanistan had produced a type of patient we had never seen before—the Islamic extremist terrorists. Treating them, even understanding their mental health issues, was proving to be exceptionally challenging. Dobson came to my office with a specific intent and a special purpose on this day. She was winding down in her capacity as the director of training for the clinical psychology training program and we needed to select a new director. Lieutenant Colonel Dobson requested permission to assign these new duties to Major (Dr.) John Leso, a slender, good-looking fellow who was about five feet eleven inches tall and gave the appearance of spending a great deal of his off time in the gym. John was a very capable military officer who had the confidence of everyone in the department, and in particular the young Army captains who were interns in my department.

  As much as I respected Major Leso’s performance, I was not convinced that he was the appropriate choice to replace Lieutenant Colonel Dobson, because a few weeks earlier he had requested a Professional Filler System (PROFIS) position, a temporary assignment for a medical professional to a field hospital outside of their primary hospital. A PROFIS assignment provides the physician with unique experience outside the walls of Walter Reed, and in this case Major Leso wanted some time with the 85th Combat Stress Control Company (CSC), located in Fort Hood, Texas. A CSC is made up of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, psychiatric nurses, and enlisted psychiatric technicians. Their mission is to provide mental health services to soldiers in the field—sort of a mental health MASH unit. His request was reasonable, and I was inclined to approve it, but letting him go to the field unit might create a problem if that unit deployed. It would be a real shit mess if I appointed him director of training at Walter Reed, on the assumption that he would be away in Texas for only a couple weeks, and then he ended up on a long deployment with the PROFIS unit. It was more than just a matter of needing someone qualified to fill the position here at the hospital. The American Psychological Association has strict standards for accredited training programs like ours that require we maintain continuity in the director of training position, so appointing him and then having him away on deployment could cascade into other problems for us.

  I balked at appointing Major Leso, but he and Dobson convinced me that my worries were unfounded because there were no deployments on the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Dobson was enthusiastic about Major Leso’s qualifications for the position, and I had no argument with her on that point, but she had limited experience in thinking out strategically what was about to happen in the Army world around her. She did not see the buildup in the war that was about to occur and how this would affect not only her life, her world, but Major Leso’s and mine as well. She and Major Leso were both hard-charging, highly motivated officers with the best intentions, but they didn
’t have enough years in the Army to fully appreciate how the system can kick you in the butt when you least expect it. I was just like them twenty years earlier.

  But really, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson argued, how likely was it that the CSC unit would be deployed in the two weeks that Major Leso was assigned to it? I had to agree that would take some colossal bad luck for him to be there when the unit deployed. So finally I relented, but I restated my concern to them both that the war on terror was cranking up and warned that Major Leso might get deployed. Perhaps, just maybe, my nearly twenty years of experience in both the Army and Navy was off base and I was worrying over nothing.

  After we gave Major Leso the good news, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and I returned from lunch and were soon joined by the major, who was ecstatic about the opportunities he would be afforded and wanted to thank me. He was very excited that he was going to be able to go to Fort Hood for a two-week field training exercise and then be allowed to return to Walter Reed and assume duties as the director of training. I again expressed my concern to him, still worried even after granting permission.

  “Sir, don’t worry. It’s not a problem,” the major told me. “I spoke to the commanding officer of the 85th CSC down there in Texas and she assured me that it is not a problem at all. I’ll be gone for two weeks, sir, and then I’ll be back in time to greet the new incoming intern class.”

  Even though I had some regrets about letting him go, I needed to express confidence in this young officer, so I said, “John, I know you’ll do a great job in Texas with the 85th. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”