The pilots flipped a few switches, and the rotors began to turn. By the time the medic buckled himself into his small seat behind the cockpit, the engine was roaring. I felt the whole machine shudder and then begin to rise into the air. I smelled the smoke and dirt from the air outside, mixed with aircraft fuel.
I saw the hospital from a new perspective as we gained altitude. The pilot hovered for about thirty seconds, and during that time I counted about thirty spots where the dirt was lighter in color than the surrounding areas — places where mortars had recently landed. The distance between the hospital and the outside of the base also seemed very close from the air, and I realized how very dangerous a place I had been in. Flying away from the base, I couldn’t decide if I felt more safe — or less.
Moments later, we were flying over the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. I could see the shadow of the helicopter projected onto the ground, and the beauty we had been so close to in our uniformly brown world inside the base surprised me. There were lush green fields, trees, and two lovely rivers. It wasn’t hard to imagine the garden of Eden being there, as described in the second chapter of Genesis. Watching the sun set over the birthplace of humanity, seeing the end of another day from a perspective high above the ground, I became acutely embarrassed for all of us, sickened at the fractured mess we humans have made after such an ideal start. Somewhere down there, I thought, Cain killed Abel, 2137 killed Yeager, and we’re still killing each other.
I thought again of the soldier whose hand I had held the night before as he bled to death. The most frustrating part of his death to me was the irony of him dying as a result of wearing gear designed to make him safer.
The body armor systems US troops wear include a small collar of material in the back, providing some protection for the neck in the exposed area between the top of the vest and the bottom of the helmet. This type of collar created a problem for soldiers when they dropped to the ground in a firing position. The collar hit the bottom of the helmet, forcing the front of the helmet down over the soldier’s eyes. Obviously, not being able to see what you are shooting at would be a major problem in combat, so it’s no wonder that soldiers complained. The Army made a simple, logical change: raise the back of the helmet high enough to avoid hitting the armor.
While this seemed like a great solution, and it has probably saved many lives, exposing the back of the head created opportunities for snipers and disasters for neurosurgeons and their patients. The back third of the skull contains huge veins, through which all the blood in the brain passes on its way back to the heart. Gunshots there are routinely fatal. The only way to prevent death from such a wound is to prevent the wound from happening in the first place.
The sniper’s bullet had found the exposed spot, and we had been powerless to save that young soldier last night. I could still see his lifeless eyes and feel his failing grip as his hand slid away from mine, the memories as vivid and palpable as the vibrations from the helicopter. I had seen many people die before that moment, but the worst part of last night was that I had been powerless to do anything to help that soldier, and I believe he was awake enough to know it.
My thoughts were interrupted — an Apache helicopter gunship appeared outside the left window. A second Apache appeared on the right, and for a moment I felt comforted that we had an escort. My comfort was short-lived.
Suddenly, the pilot made a hard turn to the right. Our helicopter went through a complete 360-degree circle, and then made another spin to the left, this time dropping a lot of altitude. My stomach flipped, and I felt a little nauseated.
I could see the highway and the Iraqi countryside below us, but I had no idea what was going on. The pilot flared to land, and I snapped a few photos out of the window. On the ground below us, I saw pink and orange smoke from a flare, a car on fire, and a few Humvees. Then I saw soldiers and Iraqis, the GIs fanned out in a circle with weapons at the ready. I felt sweat pop out on my forehead. My hands were shaking.
We landed on the highway, and the medic jumped out of the helicopter with his M4 carbine in his hands. He turned and pointed at my holster, then yelled over the noise: “Make sure your weapon’s ready, Major. Don’t know how long we’ll be here.”
My heart was beating so hard I could hear my pulse in my ear. I had no idea why we’d landed in the middle of what looked to be a very dangerous situation. I pulled my pistol from its holster and slid the rack to chamber a round, but left the safety on.
For several minutes, I saw nothing, and heard nothing other than the noise of the engine. I played through many scenarios in my mind, most of them ending with a large group of terrorists overrunning the helicopter and me having to fight my way out. I knew how that would end.
Even though I could clearly see US soldiers guarding the helicopter, I had seen many patients who had been hit with RPGs and mortars, and I knew that my fears were not irrational. I told myself that if anyone who wasn’t wearing a US military uniform approached the helicopter, I would shoot them.
I had never before had to contemplate actually shooting another person. My job is to fix people others have shot. But sitting there in that very real situation, I knew that if it came down to me pulling the trigger or dying in the back of that helicopter, I would do my duty.
I remembered my frequent habit on the firing range of missing high and right due to failure to control both my breathing and how hard I squeezed the trigger, so I reminded myself to aim a little low and to the left.
It may sound crazy, but I actually planned what I was going to say if I was captured and became the subject of one of those videos we all saw of the captured pilots during the first Gulf War. I prayed and thought of home. My little field trip had seemed a great way to break up the monotony of daily life at Balad, but this wasn’t what I’d had in mind.
After what seemed like hours, two soldiers rushed to the helicopter carrying a stretcher with a man on it. Four other soldiers guarded them as they placed the stretcher into the helicopter’s cargo bay. I had to stretch around the partition to see the man, but the first thing I noticed was how bad he smelled. Then I saw that he was covered in blood and that his eyes were open. He wore a black shirt and khaki pants, and he wasn’t wearing shoes. He had a beard. He was moaning and writhing. He looked right at me, but I was too far away to touch him. I started to unfasten my seat belt to see if I could help, but the medic held his arm out, signaling for me to stay in my seat. He climbed closer and yelled in my ear, “Don’t try to help him! We’re not equipped to do anything for him on this flight, because we were just supposed to be making a run to drop off blood and then take you to Baghdad. We’ll go straight back to Balad with him.”
“Who is he?” I yelled back.
“Terrorist. The pilot will tell you more when we land. Hold on tight — we’re going to go fast.”
The medic shut the door and gave me a thumbs-up. With great relief, I holstered my handgun. Then I remembered that there was a bullet in the chamber, but I decided to wait to eject it. Visions of accidentally shooting the engine and crashing the helicopter made me keep my hands off the live weapon.
I looked at the patient again. Both of his hands were gone. I could see the stark white of his right radius and ulna bones protruding through the skin where his hand had been. I didn’t yet know his story, but I knew that he was suffering terribly. He looked terrified and smelled like sulfur. I prayed for him, glad that I could not hear his moans. Sometimes I dream about him.
We lifted off, made a very fast turn, and flew extremely low to the ground all the way back to the hospital. The helicopter shook with the speed, and my guts were churning with every dip and turn. I could feel the wind rushing through the windows, which brought the terrorist’s smoky, burned smell even more strongly into my nostrils.
It was fascinating, as we landed, to see the team running out with the stretchers. I was usually on their side, running toward the helicopter. I watched their faces, determined and intent, showing a strong d
esire to help whomever it was that they were about to rush into the hospital. I imagined being a patient and seeing their faces as they wheeled me across the helipad and into the emergency department.
Before they had the terrorist around the corner, we were airborne again.
We flew to the other side of Balad Air Base to refuel for our trip to Baghdad. The pilot asked me to get out with him. Once the rotors stopped spinning, I took advantage of the quiet to ask him, “What was that all about?”
“We heard a distress call,” he said. “Medics on the ground needed a medevac for a terrorist who blew himself up trying to set up a car bomb. We had a convoy going by, and the man accidentally detonated his bomb before he could get away.”
A worker called out to the pilot, “She’s ready, sir.” The man patted the side of the helicopter before he rolled up the fuel hose and walked away into the twilight.
“Saddle up, Major,” the pilot said. “Hopefully that will be all of the excitement for this trip.”
We lifted off. I watched the base fade in the distance. I thought about the terrorist, about his agony-filled eyes. He was about my own age, but our lives had been vastly different. Our paths had crossed in the back of a helicopter, but I wasn’t a doctor to him, and at that moment he wasn’t a terrorist to me; I was just a man, watching another man who was suffering terribly, who probably just wanted to go home. In the hospital, such men were patients to be saved regardless of the uniform they wore or the cause they defended. In the helicopter, he was a ravaged human being in need of help, and I had felt completely powerless.
I prayed for him — for all of us.
We flew to a Marine outpost called “TQ,” and the medic delivered his ice chests full of blood to the small hospital there. I knew that whoever received that blood would end up at our hospital eventually. The Marines at TQ were at “the tip of the spear,” the guys kicking in doors in Fallujah, clearing out insurgents from Iraqi towns and villages. I had cared for many of these Marines when their missions went awry.
The next stop was the prison at Abu Ghraib. Infamous for a few soldiers who had videoed themselves abusing prisoners, this place felt like pure evil. I could see prisoners standing just inside a barbed-wire fence. These were hard men, men who would not think twice about taking another person’s life. I could imagine that guarding them was no easy feat. And yet, once someone is under your care, he or she deserves to be treated with dignity.
Was 2137 standing with the men I could see, recovered now from his wounds and facing his punishment?
Being at war changes people in ways that cannot easily be understood by those who have not experienced it. The line between interrogation, torture, and horrible abuse of another human being had been crossed by a handful of young and undertrained guards, leading to at least two US soldiers going to prison. I felt a chill looking across the wire and into the eyes of the prisoners, partly because I knew what they were capable of, and partly because I wondered what would happen to them. I was glad when we lifted off, the altitude making me feel safer, but my emotions were still stirred as we flew away from Abu Ghraib.
Eventually we landed on the helipad at Ibn Sina Hospital as darkness fell on Baghdad. I could make out mosques and palaces mixed into the skyline, but there were no streetlights or skyscrapers as in an American city. Many of the buildings had huge holes in them or their top stories missing, and I realized that many people had died when all those missiles and bombs fell. Somewhere down there, a man had once tried to build an empire, and the conflict between his ego and my president had caused the damage spread out before my eyes. I couldn’t imagine the lives of the people who lived in this beautiful, bloody city.
The medic motioned for me to unbuckle and exit. I patted him on the back and yelled, “Thanks for the wild ride.”
He yelled back, “No problem. Hope your return trip is less exciting.”
“Roger that,” I said. I waved at the pilots and shouted thanks but knew they couldn’t hear me. I stooped under the still-spinning rotors and ran to the edge of the helipad, where an armed guard held a door open for me. The Black Hawk was airborne again by the time I reached the door.
I looked back, surprised to feel a little apprehension. I wasn’t sure whether it was because of what I’d just been through or because they were leaving me here.
The guard led me to a reception desk in a lobby that looked like a movie-set version of a 1950s-era American hospital. A pimply Army private sat at the desk, and he looked up from his computer when I approached.
“May I help you, sir?”
I showed him my orders and asked where I could find the neurosurgeons.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Major. I’m supposed to call the hospital commander when you arrive.”
A few minutes later, I met a colonel who was in charge of the facility. As we talked, I heard a voice behind me: “Lee! Welcome to Baghdad.”
I turned and saw Jeff, an Army neurosurgeon from San Antonio I’d known for a few years. It was good to see a familiar face. Jeff showed me to my room — a hospital room with two beds and its own bathroom and shower. Comparing it to my quarters back at Balad, I felt like I’d just checked into a five-star hotel.
Then Jeff led me down the hall. We passed a small office, and Jeff waved at a kind-faced man sitting at the desk. “Evening, Chaplain.”
Then he led me into another office. “This is our computer room. You can use the Internet and check your email.” He pointed to a telephone on the desk. “That phone dials directly to the US. Just dial the number you want to call as if you were in the States.”
He took me back to my room and said, “I’ll let you get some rest. I’m glad you’re here. See you in the morning.”
Jeff walked away, and I went back down the hall to call home. I dialed the number, and after four or five rings I heard my son Mitchell’s voice. I was so surprised Mitch had answered that I almost couldn’t speak. “Mitch, it’s Daddy,” I said finally.
“Dad! Kimber, Kalyn, Dad’s on the phone! Come to the phone!”
I heard commotion, heavy breathing, and then two other voices. “Daddy!”
We talked for a few minutes. The kids explained that their mom was in the shower. Mitch asked if I still loved them.
“Mitch, I’ll love you forever,” I said. “Nothing will ever change that.”
Kimber asked if their mom and I were still getting a divorce.
“Yes, honey, we are,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “Will we ever get to see you again, Dad?”
I explained that when I got home I would live very close to them, and we would spend even more time together than we had during all the years I’d been in school and in training. I promised over and over that everything would be okay. Finally, Kimber said, “I can’t wait to see you, Dad. I’m proud of you.”
Kalyn said, “Daddy, when you finish saving all the soldiers, will you come play with me?”
By the end of our conversation, it felt as if the kids and I had formed a new bridge, one that would take us across whatever happened when I got home and into a new reality. Maybe it really would be okay. Maybe our relationship would survive the war — all of the wars — and come out stronger.
We said our goodbyes and I-love-yous, and then the line clicked and they were gone. My tears fell, but this time most of them were happy ones. I knew that I’d answered some of the kids’ questions, and they’d answered some of mine.
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes for a few seconds. Then I heard a voice.
“Sir, how long will it be before I can use the computer?”
I looked up and saw a soldier of about twenty-five in full combat gear. He looked as if he’d just stepped off the battlefield. He leaned heavily on the doorpost and slid his Kevlar armor off, letting it hit the floor with a heavy thud.
“I’m done, Corporal. You look pretty tired,” I said.
Looking dazed, he took off his helmet and gloves and said, �
�I need to email my wife because she thinks I’m dead.”
“What?”
I got up and he sat down in the desk chair while he told me the story. He said that his vehicle had run over a mine earlier that day, and the medics had used his satellite phone to call his wife to tell her that he was okay. However, when she answered, the medics started the conversation with, “Your husband’s truck hit a land mine” — and then they were cut off. They’d been unable to get her back on the line. That had been several hours before.
I put my hand on his shoulder and asked if any of his buddies were hurt. Suddenly the tears began, and he said, “A bunch of them didn’t make it out.”
He tried unsuccessfully to get into his email, then asked me if I knew how he could make a phone call. I showed him the phone and explained how to dial out. He called his wife. I heard her scream through the phone in relief. He assured her that he was okay and that he loved her. Right before he hung up, she too asked him about his friends. He broke down again and, weeping, he told her their names and what happened to each of them.
How strange it seemed to me that, just before I met this young man, I had been shown the phone and had walked past the chaplain’s office. I knew nothing about this place other than where that phone and the chaplains were — and here was a guy who needed that information whom I’d known only for the past half hour. After he hung up, I took him to the chaplain’s office, told the chaplain the story, and left the soldier in his care. The corporal gave me a hug and thanked me for my help. He asked me to pray for him.
I found my way back to my room and tried to sleep.
The soldier and his friends stayed heavily on my mind. I was thankful to have been able to help him, even in such a small way. It was as if, because God knew the soldier would need some friendly help, he had armed me with the two pieces of information the young man needed. I felt almost as if I’d been merely an observer of God’s provision, simply watching it unfold, so perfectly had God orchestrated the scene.
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