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No Place to Hide Page 23

by W. Lee Warren


  “He needs an operation,” Mark said. “It’s his gallbladder.”

  I didn’t touch Hussein, but he looked into my eyes. My head spun with so many thoughts that I couldn’t quite order them. He was an aging man in pain, chained to a bed. But in his eyes I saw death and hatred and a callousness that unnerved me. I actually backed up a step or two when he looked at me.

  Mark motioned toward the guards. “When are you guys going to let me take him to the OR?”

  The guard shrugged his shoulders. “We have to get permission first. You guys need to step out of the room until we have orders.”

  Mark straightened. “Look, this man needs an operation or he could die.”

  Both guards came around the bed and positioned themselves between Hussein and Mark. One of them said, “Doctor, you step out of the room. We’ll let you know whether you can proceed when we hear.”

  Mark deflated a little. I could see the realization wash over him that he couldn’t argue with these armed men. We left the room with the tech and walked into the surgeons’ lounge. Mark and I dropped onto the couch.

  “Unbelievable,” Mark said.

  “In more ways than one,” I said.

  “Say that again.” Mark looked at the ceiling and let out a long sigh. We’d both been awake for twenty or so hours, but we were used to that type of fatigue. I think that being in the room with the man responsible for us all being here in the first place took us both to another level of exhaustion. I felt as if I’d just seen some evil being. His evil was palpable, worse than anything I’d experienced from any terrorist or insurgent. I felt cold, almost numb, and nauseated. But Mark had the added burden of having to worry about taking care of Saddam. I knew that Mark was professional and compassionate enough that not being allowed to end Saddam’s suffering made him even more sick, and that having nonmedical people make decisions on behalf of his patient made him furious.

  A nurse approached the sofa. “Dr. Warren, they need you in the ICU. Your patient from this morning is having trouble.”

  I squeezed Mark’s knee before I got up. We looked at each other, but neither of us had words for the surreal experience we’d just been through together.

  In the ICU, the soldier I’d operated on earlier that day was still on a ventilator. I asked the nurse, “What’s the problem?”

  She pointed at the monitor. His brain pressure was reading 40. It had been less than 10 the last time I’d checked on him. I went through the checklist of reasons his pressure could be so high and ultimately decided that his monitor was malfunctioning. I replaced the sensor, and his monitor showed a normal pressure.

  I found Mark standing next to the room where Saddam had been. All four guards and Saddam were gone.

  “They said that they were ordered to take Hussein to a more secure facility to have his surgery,” Mark said, “because they were afraid the local Iraqis might find out he was here and try to either kill him or help him escape. I told them they’d better hurry, because if his gallbladder ruptures he’ll probably die.”

  I looked at the empty room. It still felt unreal that he’d been here, in this tent hospital.

  Mark walked away. “I’m going to bed. Tomorrow tell me this was just a dream.”

  Maybe it was, I thought.

  Someone else was on the computer, so I went to the command office, where at night some of the computers were usually available. A picture of George W. Bush hung on the wall, the official commander-in-chief photo on display as it was in every US government facility in the world.

  I suppose the thought had been swirling in my head all along, but on that night it congealed into a crystal-clear idea: These two men, Bush and Hussein, wrestling with each other over power, oil, weapons of mass destruction, old family business, or whatever else they used to justify war, had both made decisions and taken steps that had led directly to my being there in Iraq. I’d been in a small auditorium once in college and heard then-Governor Bush speak from maybe twenty feet away. And tonight I’d stood closer than that to former President Hussein and looked into his cold, deadly eyes. There couldn’t be many people in the world who had been so close to both of them. I found myself wishing I could sit them both down and question them: Was it worth it? Would you tell Yeager’s family it was worth it? Could you, with your own hands, help Chris take care of the burned-up baby Maria and still think you were right in what you did? In the grand scheme of things, what have you gained from all the palaces and parades, from the bombs and the bullets and the dollars spent and the lives lost?

  The problem, I realized, was that I didn’t think either of them would be able to answer my questions. I wondered if my kids would look at pictures of their mother and me and ask similar questions, in the wake of our divorce. It hit me then that wars always have different impacts on the populations than they do on the participants. And I’m not sure anybody really ever wins.

  I walked down the hall to check on Maria before I went to bed.

  EMAIL HOME

  Friday, March 25, 2005

  Good morning, friends.

  It’s cold here in Iraq. The temperature dropped steadily throughout the day yesterday as the wind blew hard. After the sun went down it got really chilly. They’re forecasting a low of 39 degrees for tonight.

  Yesterday was a hard day. After rounds were finished, I was working at a computer when Chris came to tell me that Maria was doing very poorly, and he didn’t think she would survive. We went together to her bedside, and I put my hands on her little swollen body and asked the Lord why this was happening. Someone had placed a little Beanie Baby skunk at the end of her bed. It was one of those really cute little critters that people love — they take an animal that you would never associate with cuteness or cuddliness, like a snake or a T-Rex, and make a loveable toy out of it. Here was this cute little skunk, lying there on the bed of a dying baby in Iraq. Cuteness aside, the metaphor was compelling: the whole situation stank.

  Chris is a fantastic doctor, and an even better human being. He and the nurses and other doctors caring for Maria gave their all for this little girl, going above and beyond and delivering a standard of care for her that absolutely could not have been achieved elsewhere in this country. Maria would have died from her injuries much sooner, and her family would not have had these weeks of her improving, being playful, seeing her smiling face again had it not been for Chris and his team of heroes.

  Maria died last night.

  Chris and I went to the chapel and cried and prayed for a long time. He looked at me and said, “Did I do everything I could have for her?”

  I said, “You did more than anyone else could have. You gave her a chance.”

  We sat in silence for a while, and then Chris stood and said, “We better try to get some rest. There’s still a war going on out there.”

  Not surprisingly, the sun rose again today, beautiful as always, signaling that the world spins on. Rounds today will be very hard when we pass the empty bed that so recently held an angel who made us soar with hope and then crash with despair. And despite our pain over losing Maria, all of us know that the enemy has more in store for us today. So, we soldier on.

  Watching the care and compassion with which Chris cares for his patients, and the incredible job so many of my colleagues here are doing in the midst of such suffering, made me feel a heavy burden to be better.

  People like Chris make me want to try harder, to do more, to be more than I am. I hope there’s someone like that in your world.

  Lee

  CHAPTER 28

  NOT SO GOOD FRIDAY

  March had exceeded the previous two months in its volume of bloodshed, its interesting patients, its poignant and heartbreaking moments — and also in its incessant efforts to break our spirits. As we neared the end of the month, I hoped March would follow the old adage and go out like a lamb.

  It kept roaring all the way to the end.

  I woke on Friday, March 25, in a bad mood and with a bad headache. I’d tried to c
all home the night before and heard that machine — again.I wondered: was the hope I’d felt after my short reconnection with the kids while I was in Baghdad just wishful thinking? I rolled over in bed, picked up the picture of the three of them from the bedside table, and told them all about Maria.

  “You would have loved her,” I said. “I did.”

  I wrote the daily email on my computer and saved it to my thumb drive to send out when I got to the hospital. Then my beeper rang, summoning me to the ER. No shower for me today, I thought while I threw on my DCUs.

  On the way to the hospital, I ran into the sergeant who had shown me around when I first got to Iraq. He was walking the same direction as I was, but not in a hurry. “Morning, Major,” he said.

  “Hey, Sarge,” I said, picking up my pace to show that I didn’t have time for a chat.

  He matched my stride. “You’ll be heading home soon, right?” he asked.

  I actually stopped dead when he said that. I’d gotten into such a bad mental place I had started to think that I would always be in Iraq, that my life would forever remain the carousel of carnage it had become in Balad.

  “Yeah, about five weeks, I guess. You?”

  He chuckled and pointed to the front of his DCUs. “Ha! I’m Army. Another six months for me. But at least I only have to drive folks around and work on computers. If I had to be in the hospital every day, I’d lose my mind.”

  I started walking again, remembering what my squadron commander had said to me the day he told me I was going to Iraq: “The Air Force doesn’t think its medics should stay at Balad too long because of the psychological effects of what they’ll see every day, and because most of them will be working twenty-four-seven.”

  At the time I’d felt bad that I was only going to war for four months — as if that wasn’t long enough to count. But now I realized that if I could have paid someone to let me leave that very day, I would have. Five more weeks sounded impossible to survive.

  At the corner, he said, “Well, Doc, this is my turn. Keep your head down.”

  As he walked away, I touched the US Air Force label over my DCU pocket, glad that I’d decided to talk to that recruiter and not the Army guy next to him at my college’s student center that day back in 1989 when I first thought about taking a military scholarship for medical school. How much of me would be left if I had to stay in Iraq for a year? And then, as clearly as if it were written on my soul by God himself, I knew something else, and said it to myself out loud: “Lee, you will always feel like you didn’t do enough here.”

  When I reached the hospital, an Army Chinook helicopter was landing. I ran out to the helipad behind several techs.

  The Chinook’s rear ramp opened. Inside, an Army flight medic straddled a stretcher, performing CPR on a soldier. Another medic was squeezing a ventilator bag, breathing for the injured man.

  The other stretchers in the Chinook contained black body bags. No one was working on those patients.

  The techs lifted the stretcher onto their gurney, and I ran behind them into the ER.

  “No pulse,” one tech said.

  One of the nurses connected a heart monitor to the soldier. His face was swollen and blue, and he was wrapped in a space blanket and zipped halfway into a body bag to keep him warm. His eyes were open, a startling hazel color with little green flecks. It struck me that this might be the first patient I’d seen who did not seem to be bleeding anywhere.

  The helicopter medics came in behind us, pushing a stretcher that held another body bag, zipped shut.

  An ER doctor looked at the hazel-eyed soldier’s heart monitor and said, “He’s dead. Mark the time.”

  There are always a few seconds after someone calls the code — when a physician determines and announces that the patient is gone — when everyone stops what they are doing and just stands there. In that silence, we look down at the person who has just died and feel useless. I’m always sad, always wish I could have done more, could have somehow saved the person’s life. This time, as usual, I stood looking down at the dead, blue, bloated young man and wondered what happened. I could see no injury, no blood.

  I heard a noise behind me and turned to see techs bringing other stretchers carrying zipped-up body bags. Six more. Techs opened the bags to identify and tag the bodies. All of them were also bloated and blue.

  The helicopter medic sat on a chair in the corner, dropped his helmet onto the floor, and put his face in his hands.

  A nurse asked him, “What happened to these guys?”

  The medic sat up, pinched the bridge of his nose, and said, “Their truck rolled into a ditch full of water and they all drowned. This one still had a pulse when we got there. The rest were already dead.”

  I walked off into the surgeons’ lounge, feeling completely empty. It was such a bizarre, senseless thing — this truck full of highly trained soldiers who’d flown halfway around the world to fight terrorists but ended up drowning in the middle of a desert. I’d grown accustomed to the sounds of trauma: screaming victims, doctors yelling orders, the soundtrack of the chaos in the emergency room. My mind just couldn’t adjust to eight silent, swollen soldiers who went off to war but died in the water.

  I sat on the couch, feeling that I was drowning too. How much worse could this place get?

  Someone had decorated the Christmas tree for Easter. That was the first time all day I’d remembered that this was Good Friday. I sat and stared at the ceiling, feeling numb and cold and exhausted.

  Pete had said “We’ll see” when I told him I’d never sleep on the terribly uncomfortable couch in the surgeons’ lounge. But on that Good Friday morning, my brain and my body gave in to the headache and heartache that were pushing me down into the cushions.

  When I woke up a couple of hours later, I found that someone had placed a huge sombrero over my eyes. It took me a few seconds to realize why it was dark, and when I moved the sombrero, it took my brain a few more seconds to realize what it was. I still have no clue why anybody thought they needed a gigantic Mexican hat in Iraq.

  My stomach rumbled; I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch the day before. I thought about Maria and the drowned soldiers and my inability to reach my kids, and I wondered how in the world I was ever going to last another five weeks. This Friday did not feel so good.

  EMAIL HOME

  Saturday, March 26, 2005

  Hello, everyone.

  First of all, thanks to all of you who wrote to offer condolences for the loss of Maria. Yesterday, everyone in the hospital was kind of down. There have been many casualties in recent days, and all of us are tired. Some of them I can’t tell you about here, but trust me when I say that we’ve been busy.

  I was in my room when I got a “911” page at about 6:00 p.m., just after the alarm had sounded for a mortar attack. I had to put on my battle gear to walk back to the hospital to see where I was needed. Two of the general surgeons had called for me to go into the operating room to look at something they had discovered.

  An American had been shot in the back with a very large rifle round. The bullet had torn his abdomen to pieces, and he’d been stabilized at another base before being sent here. The wound was infected, so the surgeons had taken him to the OR, where they’d found the bottom of his spinal cord and all the nerves to his legs floating free from his destroyed spinal column. The nerve sack was in the middle of the infected material, and they wanted to know if there was anything I thought I should do. I looked around in the wound for a while and could find no evidence of spinal fluid leaking out, so I decided that more harm would come from exploring aggressively. He’ll be paralyzed permanently, and he’ll need spine stabilization surgery after his wounds heal.

  After the operation, the All Clear finally sounded, and we watched The Passion of the Christ in the tent. What a powerful way to spend Good Friday in the war zone. Here we are, so close to where these events happened. We’re seeing daily the terrible things that people can do to one another, and watching them doing
those things to Jesus on the big screen was very troubling.

  This Easter will be unforgettable for me — in fact, for all believers here in Iraq. Our hope in the resurrected Lord remains strong, but this year seems somehow more important, more real, and more personal. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’ve just seen an innocent baby firebombed because her father’s attackers hated his way of working for a better way of life. Then we watched an artistic representation of the innocent Jesus being murdered because people hated the standards he set, the purity he revealed, and the truth of their own sinfulness.

  We watched as those hate-filled people killed Christ, and I thought of the hateful murderers who killed the innocent Maria. Hate, pride, fear of change, and sinfulness caused both.

  I’ve only got about five weeks left here, and right now that seems like an awfully long time. But my life has been changed forever by the things I’ve seen and done here, the people I’ve touched and been touched by. And God has been good to me here in this desert place.

  Tomorrow is Easter, the day Christians celebrate the fact of Jesus’ resurrection and his empty tomb. The war’s been filling a lot of graves around here lately. It will be good to worship and to remember the hope that Easter gives to us, because hope is in short supply in Iraq.

  Lee

  On Easter morning, two hundred soldiers gathered in the chapel for a worship service. John, Luther, Andre, Shauna, and I began singing a hymn, without our instruments. As our voices combined in harmony, I found myself for the first time in weeks not thinking about the war or my own problems. I played my guitar while Shauna sang the next song, and in the back of the chapel I noticed a tall Special Forces soldier walk in. He carried a tactical shotgun with a grenade launcher under the barrel. He wore body armor, and his helmet had night-vision goggles strapped to it. He wore black knee and elbow pads. This man was one serious soldier.

  As the song progressed, I watched him. Shauna sang about Jesus on the cross, and the soldier loosened the straps on his armor. When she got to the line about Christ in the grave, the soldier set his gun on the floor at his feet and took off his armor. Then with her powerful alto growl, Shauna sang about the stone being rolled away and the tomb being empty, and I saw the man slide down the wall and sit on the floor. He buried his face in his hands while the song ended.

 

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