Mike looked up. “Yeah, but every time we pull the plug on somebody, it feels like I haven’t done enough.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I know how you feel.”
Mike looked ready to change the subject. “By the way,” he said, “Chris is looking for someone to take my place on his dodgeball team tonight. I’m way too tired. You want to play?”
I laughed. “Dodgeball? Like in junior high?”
Mike smiled. “Yep. You’ll love it. Gives you a couple of hours away from this place.”
I hadn’t played dodgeball in years, and I was terrible at it in eighth grade gym class. In those days, I was more of a “mathlete.” I shrugged. “Tell Chris I’m in.”
Mike said, “Welcome to the Hurling Panthers. Oh, and we’re playing an Army team full of infantry guys.”
If I hadn’t seen it coming, I would have thought it was a bullet. The ball hit me so hard that I was pretty sure it broke something, and my face slammed into the floor as I fell.
Then I heard a thundering voice. “You okay, man?”
I shook my head and actually thought I saw stars for a second. My ears were ringing as I lay on the floor of the gym, in more pain than I remembered ever feeling before.
I rolled onto my back and looked up to see who’d knocked me down. We were playing an Army team comprised of players who were mostly huge, chiseled Polynesians from a National Guard unit. I hadn’t expected to be hit in the small of my back from five feet away by a six-foot-five, two-hundred-fifty-pound Samoan. We’d both been running toward center court after a loose ball, and once I realized he was going to get there first, I’d turned around to run. But before I had taken a single step, he’d nailed me.
He wore a huge smile as he reached down to offer me his hand. I took it, and he lifted me to my feet. His bicep was bigger than my thigh, and it was covered with a terrifying reptilian tattoo. I was glad he was my opponent in dodgeball and not in battle.
“You got to keep moving or you get hit, bro,” he said before he turned away.
Chris yelled across the gym, “Lee, you’re out. Get off the court, if you can still walk.” I dragged myself off to the corner and decided to retire from my career as a replacement dodgeball player.
When the game was over, we shook hands with the other team. The big Samoan soldier who’d crushed me earlier shook my hand and said, “Good game, bro.”
Still hurting, I went by the physical therapy clinic and found some sports cream for my back. I rubbed it into my sore muscles, hoping the menthol would provide a little relief.
It was too early to go to bed, so I decided to check on Rose. She made a funny face when I bent down to see her, and Saeed translated her words: “Dr. Lee, you smell bad.”
A few days later, my back was well, I didn’t smell like Icy Hot anymore, and Rose was ready to go home. Raul and Saeed and I went to the clinic for me to say goodbye. Rose smiled and gave me a hug. We had been briefed extensively about not touching an Iraqi woman or speaking to them without their husband’s permission, so I formally nodded to Rose’s mom and shook her dad’s hand. Then Rose’s mom whispered something to her husband, and he nodded to her.
They said something to Raul, and he turned to me. “Doctor, Rose and her mother would like to take a picture with you.”
Rose’s mom dropped her veil, stood on Rose’s left side, and smiled for the camera. Raul took the photo, and Rose’s dad, Hasim, placed his hands over his heart.
After the picture, Rose’s mom turned to me and extended her hand. I looked at Raul and he said, “She wants to shake your hand. Hasim says it is okay.”
I took her hand. Both of us had tears in our eyes, and she said, in English, “Thank you, sir.”
Custom and culture couldn’t contain her gratitude, and in that moment I felt like the purpose of the whole war had been to bring me to Balad to help Rose. I put my hands on Rose’s head and said to Saeed, “Tell her that she is going to do great things. Tell her that I believe in her.”
Saeed translated, and Rose smiled. Hasim stepped close, put his hands on my shoulders, and hugged me. “It is time for us to go,” he said through Raul. “But you will stay in our hearts. You will always have friends in Iraq.”
After Rose left that day, I wondered how long it would be before we had something positive to think about again. February had been brutal; our spirits were sagging, and our bodies had been pushed to their limits by the fatigue and stress of the unspeakable things we had to see and do every day. The team that had arrived in late January now seemed as if they’d been combat medics their whole lives, and I couldn’t remember what it was like before they came.
We took care of good guys and bad guys alike and lost a lot fewer than we saved. We knew that Americans and the Coalition soldiers would have deployed with their medical teams to any war their governments sent them to, and we understood that any other country would likewise have sent doctors and nurses with its army to the fight. But we also knew that not every army in the world would have let its medical teams care for the enemy, and we felt lucky to be fighting for the side that would.
But being allowed to take care of civilians and kids created some of the brightest days for us. Those were the saves — like Jassem and Mohamed and Rose — that we knew would never have happened had we not been there.
So when I watched Rose and Hasim and his wife leave, I knew that the happiness I felt at that moment wouldn’t last long. I knew it because the only thing consistent about the war was that the enemy was always out there, ready to take your hope and turn it into despair.
I went into the ER, where two of the emergency doctors were walking away from the bedside of someone they’d been working on. There was trash all over the floor, the empty IV bags, syringe wrappers, and cut-off clothing that mark the site of a resuscitation attempt because the team is focused on the life they’re trying to save and not on making sure everything gets into the trash can.
A nurse unfolded a sheet and was about to cover the obviously dead soldier when I passed by. I stopped when I saw his bloody arm, because I recognized the tattoo.
“What happened?” I asked the nurse.
“IED. He was DOA, but we tried anyway. Three others were dead on the scene. They stopped their convoy to check on a disabled vehicle, turned out to be a car bomb.”
The dead soldier’s torn body and lifeless eyes contrasted so starkly with the memory I had of him from the dodgeball game a few days before.
I felt numb, and for a second I thought I was going to be sick. It was the first time I saw a body in the war that I’d known before they died. And I couldn’t believe it. Even this strong, smiling warrior with the giant muscles and the terrifying tattoo couldn’t withstand the terrorists’ bombs.
I thought of how much more pain he must have felt than I did when he hit me with the ball.
“You got to keep moving or you get hit, bro,” I said softly.
Someone called my name, and I turned to see a tech running toward me.
“Doc,” he panted, “all the other surgeons are in the OR, and Dr. Chris needs some help in the ICU. He told me to find someone. Will you help him?”
“Of course. I’ll be right there,” I said.
I took one more look at the big Samoan, put my hands on his chest, and said, “Good game, bro.”
The nurse pulled the sheet over the Samoan’s face as I turned to walk away. I went to find Chris, hoping to clear my head and find a way to keep breathing.
I heard a baby crying before I reached the ICU.
CHAPTER 27
WE HAVE A SPECIAL PATIENT HERE TONIGHT
Need some help?”
Chris was leaning over an ICU bed. One of the Australian nurses was standing across from him, her back to me. I could hear the cries of a small child but couldn’t see the child. The nurse was blocking my view.
Chris looked up when he heard my voice. “That would be great. Meet Maria.”
I reached the bedside and looked down to see a beauti
ful two-year-old Iraqi girl. Her eyes were glazed over from the anesthetic and pain relievers dripping into her IV, but she was still whimpering and moving her legs. Her body was wrapped in gauze from the chest down, all the way to the tips of her toes.
“What happened?” I asked.
In the time I’d worked with him in Iraq, Chris seemed to always have a smile. He’d been steady and cool in the worst situations we’d been through together, and all of us looked to him as a leader and a good example of handling the stress of the war. But when I asked him about the baby, darkness crossed his face.
Chris is very thin, and I could see every vein in his shaved scalp. His jaw muscles clenched. “Help me unwrap her legs and you’ll see,” he said, in a tight, low voice. He looked at the nurse and said, “Belinda, give Maria more Ketamine so maybe she won’t remember this. Then please hold her down while we do the dressing change.”
Belinda injected a syringe full of the medicine into Maria’s IV. After a few seconds, Maria’s eyes rolled back and she seemed to relax more. Belinda held both of Maria’s shoulders to the bed so that the baby couldn’t interfere as we changed her dressing.
Chris took a deep breath and said, “Let’s go. Follow my lead and unwrap your side as quickly as you can.”
We began to unroll the gauze from Maria’s feet, and she whimpered and slightly moved her legs in spite of the Ketamine. As soon as I could see her skin under the bandages, I smelled the unmistakable odor of burned flesh.
Maria’s feet were terribly burned, and the skin came off with the bandages. As I worked higher up her leg, the burn seemed to get deeper. She moaned and pulled her little leg away but the drugs had taken most of the fight out of her. By the time we got to her chest, the full display of Maria’s injury made me almost retch. Most of her body from the nipple line down was deeply burned, except for the backs of her buttocks and thighs. Somehow, Chris had managed to insert a urinary catheter into Maria, in spite of the horribly blistered, swollen nightmare I saw in her groin.
In America, a baby this badly burned would need dozens of operations, skin grafts, long-term ICU care. And even then, even in America, this injury would be hard to survive.
“How did this happen?” I asked.
“Maria’s dad volunteered for the ING,” Chris said. “Some terrorists from his village retaliated by throwing firebombs into his house.” He wiped his red eyes with the back of his hand. “They knew he wasn’t home, so they bombed his house to send a message to him and other men in the village about helping the ING. Maria’s mom and her two-month-old sister were also badly burned, but Maria got the worst of it.”
Chris opened a jar of silver sulfadiazine cream and scooped a glob onto his fingers. He motioned for me to do the same.
“Rub this into the burns. It will help prevent infection. You’ve got to really rub it in, though, even though she’ll resist.”
I rubbed the cream onto Maria’s legs. There were spots where her muscles were visible because all three layers of her skin were burned off, along with the underlying fat babies should have. The serum and blood and blistered muscle felt sticky and warm to my fingers. Maria pulled her leg away harder.
Chris put his hand on top of mine, squeezing my fingers onto Maria’s leg even more tightly. “Lee, it won’t help her unless you work the medicine into the tissue. She needs this. You can do it.”
Even during medical school, burns were the hardest things for me to treat, because of the smell, the amount of pain the patients have, the horrible disfigurement that comes as the skin heals and scars. The caregiver’s compassion and the patient’s courage are as important as the medical care the patients require. In my field of medicine, even though I treat devastating problems and perform delicate and dangerous operations, my patients are asleep, and I never have to look in their faces while I hurt them. But burn patients look you in the eye the whole time you’re taking care of them, and you have to hurt them to help them. I hate it.
Still, Chris was right. She did need it. And with me helping him, Maria’s dressing change would take only half as long. I swallowed hard and scooped more cream out of the jar. With Chris coaching me, we got the cream applied all over her burns and then wrapped new gauze. By the time we were done, and with one more dose of Ketamine, Maria had fallen asleep.
Belinda covered Maria with a pink blanket and placed a stuffed animal on the bed next to her. Chris and I tossed our gloves into the trash and he shook my hand.
“Thanks for your help. I’ll have to do this for her every day, so come on by whenever you want.”
I took one last look at Maria. With her blanket hiding her bandages, she looked like any normal sleeping child. I thought of the terrorists who’d thrown the firebombs into Maria’s home. What kind of religion teaches that it’s okay to do that? What kind of man could light the fuse and throw that bomb?
My internal ideological debate was interrupted by the arrival of more patients in the ER. Chris and I ran down the hall and back into the war.
I helped Chris change Maria’s bandages several times over the next few days. Between trauma surgeries, Chris had to manage her burns and perform several operations on Maria to place skin grafts and treat her severe leg swelling. Because the back of her torso, buttocks, and legs wasn’t as burned as the front, Chris was able to find enough skin to cover most of the burned areas. His diligent care of the broken child helped her turn a corner, and when Maria became interactive, she proved to have a sweet and playful personality. Like Mohamed before her, Maria became a focus of hope and a source of smiles for the hospital.
Whenever I wasn’t busy, I would go by Maria’s room, bring her a stuffed animal or a toy, and spend a few minutes just pulling for her to make it.
One evening, after I had been in surgery rescuing an American soldier from a gunshot wound to the head, I went to the ICU and found Maria sitting up, drinking from a Styrofoam cup. She looked so good and full of life. I sat at her bedside for a minute and talked to her. She lay down, her eyes heavy with sleep. I sang “Jesus Loves Me” to her until she was out, breathing heavily and sucking her thumb. She looked like any other two-year-old — apart from the monitors and the gauze wrapped around her body. As I turned to walk away, I glanced up at the screen and saw that her temperature was about one hundred degrees.
“When did she develop a fever?” I asked the nurse.
She came to the bedside and reached up to the IV pole to show me a bag of medicine hanging there. “Earlier today. Dr. Chris already sent labs and changed her antibiotics.”
Of course he did, I thought. Chris, as always, was taking care of it. Come on, Maria, I thought. We need you.
I walked down to the surgeons’ lounge, wondering whether world leaders would start wars if they had to change the bandages on babies who were firebombed or hold the hands of teenagers while they bled to death.
In the lounge, the general surgeon Mark was standing by the desk, talking to two Special Forces soldiers.
It was a running joke on base that the best way to tell if a guy was a Special Forces operator was to walk right up and ask him. If he refuses to answer, you know he’s an operator. In the field, these two guys standing in the lounge were probably ninja-like, stealthy super soldiers.
When we went to the PX or Pizza Hut on base and saw a group of guys in brown T-shirts and khaki pants, wearing beards and carrying very scary guns, and noticed that their uniforms had no names or symbols on them, we knew who they were.
The two men standing next to Mark looked serious. They both wore earpieces connected to microphones on their body armor, and both had Glock sidearms in shoulder holsters, as well as submachine guns strapped tightly in front of them. When I approached, one of them turned and stepped into my path.
“You can’t go past here,” he said.
“It’s okay, he’s one of our surgeons,” Mark said.
The soldier relaxed his posture a little but did not move.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
&n
bsp; Mark stepped closer and motioned for me to look through a door into a small exam room we used for female patients or as an overflow room when we had too many patients for the ER to hold. A man lay inside on a stretcher, with two armed guards flanking him. It was too far away to tell more than that.
“We have a special patient tonight,” Mark said. “I’m about to go check on him.”
“Who is he?”
Mark smiled and said, “See for yourself.”
I followed Mark down the hall with the two soldiers right behind me.
We entered the room. The man on the stretcher, wearing a hospital gown, had a black hood over his head, and his feet and hands were chained to the bedrails. He was writhing from side to side, obviously in a lot of pain.
The guards stepped in front of us, and one of them whispered, “Do not tell him where he is. Do not tell him your names. And you are not to tell anyone he was here. Understood?”
Mark and I slowly nodded. I said, “Who is he?”
The guard’s eyes narrowed, and he looked over our shoulders to make sure no one else was nearby. He leaned close enough for me to smell his breath and said, “Ace of Spades.”
We stepped toward the bed while I processed what the guard had said. I remembered the deck of cards our soldiers were issued to help them recognize the most-wanted members of the Iraqi government, and I wondered if I’d heard the guard right.
The second guard removed the hood from the moaning patient.
I looked down into the face of Saddam Hussein.
Mark examined Saddam, who looked pale and sweaty and a little jaundiced. He didn’t look like a person who could have killed thousands of people, or who had held a nation in an iron grip for many years, or who had had the guts to provoke a war with George Bush. He looked like he needed some morphine.
When Mark pressed on Saddam’s abdomen, the former dictator gasped in pain and pulled against his chains. He’d been captured about fifteen months ago, and from what I knew he had been in a secret prison since then, awaiting his trial and his eventual execution.
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