No Place to Hide

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No Place to Hide Page 21

by W. Lee Warren


  For the first time since arriving in Iraq, I had good dreams that night. I kept hearing my kids’ voices and woke up with a smile. In the morning, I took advantage of the amazing availability of indoor plumbing and showered in my own bathroom. It felt luxurious after many weeks of walking so far to the showers each day that I was inevitably sweaty again by the time I got back to my trailer. My shower lasted longer than three minutes.

  Outside the window, I saw dawn breaking over Baghdad. A new day in the ancient city awaited me, and I was excited about the change in fortune with my kids and what that meant for our relationship.

  Before I set out to find Jeff, I checked myself in the mirror. I saw something in my weary, pale blue eyes I hadn’t seen in a long time. It took a second for me to recognize it, but there it was: hope.

  CHAPTER 25

  BAGHDAD: A BEAUTIFUL, BROKEN PLACE

  I met Jeff for morning rounds with the surgical team, all Army doctors and all looking better than any of us at Balad. Their uniforms were clean, their boots weren’t muddy, and none of them were wearing body armor. Every patient was in a real hospital room, the ICUs and ORs were not made from tents, and everybody had indoor plumbing and no shortage of hot water. I was not looking forward to going back to my ten-foot metal cube and the long walk to the bathroom.

  After rounds, Jeff took me to a dining hall for breakfast. The large room felt like a five-star restaurant, and I had scrambled eggs and sausage, the first hot breakfast I’d had in Iraq.

  Jeff took a sip of coffee and let out a long sigh. “Well, I guess I better tell you now,” he said.

  “Tell me what?” I asked between bites of what I thought was probably the finest sausage patty ever made in the history of breakfasts.

  “Command has decided that no matter what we think, they’re going to keep four neurosurgeons in theater.”

  I held up my hands in confusion. “Why?” But what I really wanted to say was, “Then why did they make me risk my life flying down here?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Good question. I suspect it’s political. Imagine what the press would say if a soldier or a diplomat were injured in Baghdad and died before we could get them to Balad.”

  “But you and your partner have been here over a year,” I said. “If the trauma patient flow is really directing more and more people to Balad, couldn’t you drop down to one neurosurgeon here, or have shorter deployments?”

  Jeff pointed at the bronze oak leaf on my helmet, sitting on the table next to me. “That question is above our pay grades, buddy.”

  “Then why did they have me come down here?”

  He laughed. “My boss just told me this last night. You were already on your way. But look on the bright side. I’m going to take you on a tour of Baghdad.”

  As we walked back to Jeff’s room to get our body armor, I wondered how much the pointless flight I’d taken the day before had cost the Air Force. My trip outside the wire, the danger I’d been exposed to — all for nothing. Then I remembered the young soldier from last night, the one who’d needed to know where the phone was and how to find the chaplain. I smiled inside, knowing that I’d been in the right place at the right time to help him.

  Jeff pulled his pistol out of its holster and chambered a round. He motioned toward mine. “Better load that thing. You never know what you’re going to find outside.”

  We donned our armor and helmets to head outside. On our way out, Jeff reached behind his bedroom door, pulled out an AK – 47 machine gun, and slung it over his shoulder.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  Jeff smiled. “Traded someone for it. Can’t say more than that.”

  He walked down the hall. After a second or two of considering the wisdom of going into a city where we needed a machine gun, I followed. With our official business concluded, I figured seeing Baghdad was a nice alternative to a day spent hashing out policies the bureaucrats were going to disregard anyway.

  We stepped into a beautiful, cloudless day and made a left turn onto a sidewalk. I had to step around a group of Iraqis loitering under the awning at the hospital entrance, smoking cigarettes. We took pictures in front of a statue of Hammurabi, and then we reached the edge of the Green Zone. Inside, where we were, only Coalition forces and “approved” Iraqis can enter. The checkpoint was a beautiful arched monument called the Assassin’s Gate.

  I expected our tour to stop there, but Jeff waved me forward. “Come on, the really interesting stuff is out here.”

  He led me through the gate and onto a sidewalk. I could see businesses and homes and people milling around in the early morning sunshine. It was like any other city you might visit, except that most of the buildings had been bombed to rubble, there were bullet and missile holes in almost every wall, and razor wire guarded the entrances to many buildings. War and daily life were juxtaposed in a way that was foreign to me but a fact of life for these people. Other than the interpreters and the few family members of patients I had met inside the complex of Balad Air Base, these were the first non-injured Iraqis I had seen. They all looked tired.

  I watched a man lead two small children down the street. He led them as far away from every parked car as he could, and he positioned himself between the cars and his kids.

  Everywhere we went, I saw reminders of Saddam Hussein’s narcissism. Opulent palaces and monuments stood next to housing areas where people lived in poverty. While most of the population lived with barely enough clean water to survive, Saddam had ordered many elaborate fountains built as monuments to himself. It was easy to understand why the people pulled Saddam’s statue down when Baghdad fell; the city that had thrived since it was founded in ad 762 had been turned into a celebration of the fact that Saddam had everything and his people had nothing.

  We passed a government building that had been hit by cruise missiles, and it occurred to me that I was looking at the result of the “shock and awe” attacks that heralded the start of the war in 2003. I tried to imagine what it must have sounded and looked like from the ground. While most Americans had seen those attacks on the news, flashes of light from far away, the citizens of this ancient city had heard and felt those bombs destroying their hometown. From the couch in San Antonio, it had been pretty cool to watch. It did not seem so cool now.

  There was a sudden burst of gunfire, and concrete flew off the wall behind my head.

  “Get down!” Jeff shouted. He pulled me down behind a low wall, and I drew my pistol. A few more shots rang out, and then there was a short burst of machine-gun fire from the American soldiers in a guard tower at the corner of the street we were on. Silence fell on the street.

  Everyone I could see was either on the ground or hiding behind something. After a few seconds, it seemed likely that whoever had done the shooting was either gone or dead. People started moving again as if nothing had happened.

  Jeff stood and said, “Why don’t we go a different direction now?”

  When my heart started beating again, I realized that in this place, I was not a doctor. To the unknown shooter who had fired in my direction, I was an American soldier, bearing arms and occupying his country. I wanted to find a way to tell him that I was just a tourist, looking at this lovely but war-torn city, and that I just wanted to get back to Balad safely. I had a new respect for my little tent hospital. What we lacked in variety we made up for in only having mortars and rockets to worry about; in Baghdad people actually tried to shoot you.

  A few minutes later, I heard a loud explosion from not very far away, close enough that I could see smoke rising soon thereafter. Several more explosions occurred throughout the day. I found out later that it was one of the bloodiest days in Baghdad that year, with more than thirty-five people dying from multiple car bombings throughout the city. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, or I probably would not have continued my little tour.

  We had lunch in Saddam Hussein’s former main presidential palace. Inside the building, in addition to cafeterias, were offices hous
ing government agencies and intelligence units, as well as a dungeonlike room previously used as a torture chamber for people deemed enemies of the state. Jeff told me there was an Army Bible study group meeting daily in the former dungeon.

  During our tour, I saw the crossed swords monument, two giant hands holding swords that arch over a street. It represents Iraq’s victory over Iran in the 1980s war. Tied to each hand is a large net bag filled with Iranian army helmets, most of which have bullet holes in them.

  We climbed a spiral staircase to the top of an observation tower, where I cut my hand on a hole in the metal. I wrapped a bandana around my hand, glad the Air Force had made me have a tetanus shot before I deployed. Jeff pointed at the hole in the metal railing.

  “Look up and down the staircase. See all those holes? Iraqi snipers used this tower during the Battle of Baghdad. None of them survived.”

  From the top of the tower, I could see, among the palm trees and general lushness of the Tigris River Valley, many buildings with evidence of missile damage.

  Jeff pointed to a bridge in the distance. “Imagine what it must have been like for those guys to sit up here and watch the Army’s Third Infantry Division cross that bridge, knowing they were coming here.”

  A drop of my blood dripped off my hand and onto the staircase, the only blood I shed during the war.

  We visited some former Iraqi government offices, one of which had a ceiling mural painted all the way across the building. Following the details from left to right, you see a story depicted of the Iraqi army’s overwhelming victory over the Americans in the first Gulf War. The American soldiers are shown cowering and surrendering, utterly defeated, as the Iraqis hold their flag high and press the battle.

  I imagined the children who were raised in Hussein’s Iraq in the early 1990s. They saw the bombs fall, knew that their country’s army had been sent off to Kuwait to fight the United States, and expected to eventually see American ground troops fighting in their backyards. But the soldiers never came.

  One of the soldiers who worked in the building told me that the Iraqi government taught their children that they had crushed the Americans in Kuwait. The reason US troops never reached Baghdad, they said, was that the Americans surrendered in the desert. An entire generation of Iraqi schoolchildren learned that history, and they believed it.

  The problem with this is, of course, that it is untrue. As everyone else in the world knows, the Iraqi army was overwhelmingly defeated, but the American government decided not to move ahead with a military assault on the Iraqi government.

  When I saw this mural, it struck me that there must also be things I’ve been taught that simply are not true. I started thinking about political and religious beliefs I was taught as a child and how many of them I accepted as true or right simply because I was taught them. How much of the world’s history is simply decided on by those in power, based not on the truth but on their agenda, and taught by governments and their supporting media?

  Then I thought, Don’t we all do that in our own lives? We have our versions of our stories, our marriages, and our way of seeing the world. Those versions may be only partly derived from empirical truth. I made a decision that day to try to see things, and tell things, as they are.

  We returned to Ibn Sina Hospital. As we walked under the awning where the crowd had been gathered earlier, Jeff stopped and pointed at the sunset over the palace in the distance. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said. “A beautiful, broken place. Maybe someday people will stop fighting and rebuild it.”

  Jeff shook his head. “Maybe.”

  My day in Baghdad provided me with many memorable moments, but as the long day and the ten-mile walk in a helmet and body armor wound down, my prevailing emotion was sadness. This great city and its proud people had such a long and fascinating history, yet it was in shambles because of the savagery and arrogance of one man.

  Jeff walked me to the waiting area outside the helipad and asked to see my orders. “Oh, you’re flying space-A,” he said. “You might be here a while.”

  I remembered that I’d intended to ask the Master Sergeant back at Balad what that meant. I asked Jeff.

  “It means that getting you back to Balad isn’t a priority,” he said. “You have to wait until a chopper going there has room on board for you.”

  Four hours later, I was still sitting there, watching CNN describe the carnage throughout Baghdad that day. The odds of me getting “home” that night seemed slim, and I was exhausted and starving.

  Just then I saw a flight crew walking toward the door to the helipad and noticed parallel silver bars on one of their helmets. It occurred to me that I outranked the captain.

  I hoped I was a good enough actor to pull this off.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” I said. “Are you flying anywhere near Balad Air Base tonight?”

  The pilot stopped walking and squinted at me. “Pretty close, Major,” he said. “Why?”

  “I’m a brain surgeon stationed there. I have to get back tonight. If any casualties come in and I’m not there, somebody might die.”

  I handed him my orders, and his squint narrowed even more. “Sir, this says you’re space-A. We don’t have any space, and these orders mean you’re not a priority.”

  I stepped closer. He was about my height, but looked like he could easily drop me in a fight. But he didn’t need to know I thought that.

  “Captain, I’m telling you that I need to get to Balad tonight. If any of your guys are shot up, believe me — you want me there.”

  He looked at his copilot, a first lieutenant, who shrugged and said, “We could move those ammo boxes and he could sit in the back, if he holds his stuff in his lap.”

  A few minutes later I crawled into the tight space the combat Black Hawk crew had made for me. They requested permission to fly me to the hospital at Balad and spun up the engine.

  I hoped they wouldn’t tell Colonel H I’d bossed them into giving me a ride.

  Looking at the sporadic lights scattered across Baghdad as we climbed, I thought about my day there: the explosions, the gunfire aimed at me, the man and his kids who would grow up knowing more about car bombs and terrorists than homework and playgrounds.

  After we landed at Balad, I walked into the hospital and checked my email. I was surprised to see that my colleague Jeff had already written me.

  A chill crept through me as I read his report. An unexploded IED had been discovered at the front entrance of the hospital. He said it had probably been planted by one of the Iraqis who had been standing in the entryway as we’d left the hospital to explore the city.

  I shook my head. It appeared that I’d found the answer to my previous question of where I felt safest. I was now sure that I felt safer in my little tent hospital, if only because we were largely ignorant of the dangers most of the time. But safety was a relative term, as the ringing gunshots, IEDs, mortars, and rockets reminded me that many people out there didn’t appreciate our presence.

  Before I gave in to the fatigue and mental exhaustion from the previous two days, I went to check on Rose. Her mother was at her bedside, and they both smiled at me. Rose motioned for me to kiss the teddy bear I’d given her. Her mother said through the interpreter that she’d been praying for my safe return. The insurgents may not have been particularly happy to see me in Baghdad, but I realized that at least two people in Balad were glad I was there.

  On my way out of the hospital, I passed through the conference room, where someone had hung a huge, vintage picture of a very young, suit-wearing Saddam Hussein. He’d been quite handsome in his youth, I thought. Whoever had taken that photograph had probably had no idea of the monster Saddam would become. People in the conference room were lining up to have their picture taken with the now-deposed and imprisoned dictator, and I decided to as well. When it was my turn, I smiled for the camera, thinking that being on Saddam’s old air base and posing with his picture was as close as I would ever come to him.<
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  I was wrong.

  CHAPTER 26

  YOU GOT TO KEEP MOVING OR YOU GET HIT, BRO

  The day after I returned from Baghdad, I felt a little like a movie star. Everywhere I went in the hospital, people wanted to know what it was like to be in a Black Hawk, and they wanted to hear all about my experiences outside the wire.

  The enemy didn’t seem to notice I’d been gone, though. During those twenty-six hours, Tim had had to do four emergency brain surgeries, and the rest of the surgeons were busy with new trauma patients also. From the moment I walked back into the hospital, I was taking care of patients as if I’d never left. Tim gave me the beeper and immediately went to bed.

  I was in the ICU taking care of Tim’s newest patients when the general surgeon Mike walked in. “How was Baghdad?”

  I looked up from the chart I was writing in. “Lovely, other than getting shot at and having to land on a highway to pick up a terrorist,” I said.

  Mike looked surprised. “Wait a minute. Were you on the chopper that brought in the guy who blew himself up with an IED?”

  I nodded. “He looked pretty bad. What happened to him?”

  Mike sighed and looked at his boots. “He blew off both his hands and had really terrible burns and intestinal injuries. Todd and I worked on him for several hours. I thought for a while we could save him, but he died this morning. Saeed said he knew the guy, used to be in the Republican Guard. His name was Omar. He had three kids.”

  I remembered what the commanders had told us: that when the Iraqi military was disbanded, all those former soldiers were suddenly unemployed. Iranian funding had helped the insurgency offer a lot of them new jobs as terrorists. Omar had to feed his kids somehow, and the Americans weren’t hiring former Iraqi soldiers. What would I be willing to do to take care of my family if I lost my income and had no ability to earn a living?

  I squeezed Mike’s shoulder. “Good try, man. You guys have saved a lot of lives here — you know that.”

 

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