Chaplain W came up front and the worship team sat down. I couldn’t see the soldier from my seat.
At the end of the sermon, we stood and sang another song, and I saw the soldier again. Now he was standing and singing along, tears running down his face. When the song ended and Chaplain W ended the service with prayer, I watched as the soldier shouldered his armor and weapon and stepped out the back door, looking taller than he had when he came in.
I’ve thought about him a lot over the years since — about how we come to worship with our lives strapped onto us, and the longer we stay the layers begin to peel off, until ultimately all that’s left is just us, standing before something bigger, something more important than ourselves. When we reach the place where we can say, “I am here to say thank you, despite what I’m going through,” we’re finally really worshiping.
After church, I walked with the team and Chaplain W to DFAC II for lunch. I was dragging after another long night in the hospital, and my spirits were somewhere south of low despite the great worship service.
“You seem pretty down today. Want to talk about it?” Chaplain W said.
No matter what I was feeling when I started talking to him, conversations with Chaplain W were always upbeat. He had a breezy air about him, one of those preachers who seemed to think that you should never let life get you down, and he had a catchy little phrase for every situation, like “You’re too blessed to be distressed,” or some other bumper-sticker slogan. But somehow he managed to sell it, like his faith was so real that I couldn’t help but respect it.
I let out a long sigh. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen when I get home. I haven’t been able to talk to my kids since I was in Baghdad, and I don’t know if they’ll want to have anything to do with me.”
Chaplain W stopped walking and put his hand on my shoulder. He looked into my eyes and said, “Worry is like paying interest on a debt you don’t owe. Pray more, worry less, and let God do the rest.”
I know that some people might think his words trite, but I thought about them all afternoon. The hospital was quiet, so that evening I lay down in my room, hoping to get a few extra hours of sleep. Every time I drifted off, though, I saw those drowned soldiers and wondered what it must have been like for them, trapped upside down in the ditch while their vehicle filled with water. Suddenly, the instant death offered by IEDs seemed more humane.
Chaplain W had told me not to worry, to pray more. I really tried to follow his advice, but on that Easter Sunday I felt like I couldn’t possibly get any sadder or feel any more alone.
Sleep finally came, but after about an hour the beeper went off again.
By the time I got to the hospital, a full-blown mass casualty was unfolding. Four Black Hawks were on the helipad, and I ran into the ER to find the Czar standing in the vestibule of the trauma area with his hands on his hips. Every bed held a patient, but no one was doing CPR, no one was running to CT or calling for blood.
“Sir,” I said, “what’s going on?”
The Czar just shook his head. It was the only time I saw him cry, and his tears were silent.
An Army captain I hadn’t seen before stood next to the Czar. The unit designation on his DCUs told me he was an unexploded ordinance officer. “These guys are a bunch of Coalition troops from Europe,” the captain said. “They found an unexploded IED, and they decided to gather around it and have someone take their picture.”
I looked into the trauma bay. Every single one of them, I realized, was dead. Their uniforms were mostly burned off, the blood was baked onto their skin, and they all had open chest and head wounds.
“We think that the radiofrequency signal from the camera flash detonated the bomb,” the EOD captain said. “Most of them still had a pulse when the medics arrived, but they all bled out on the way here.”
The whole Easter weekend had been wrapped in tragedy. Apropos, I supposed, since Easter memorializes the most tragic event in human history. But unlike the weekend when Jesus died, there would be no resurrection of drowned or blown-up soldiers to replace the sorrow with joy.
CHAPTER 29
IT’S GOING TO TAKE A WHOLE SERIES OF MIRACLES
On Tuesday, March 29, 2005, a few miles outside the wire, a group of Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers were looking at the crater made by an IED that had detonated near them. As they looked at the still-smoking hole, their sergeant pointed at something nearby.
“Guys, hold up,” Sergeant Paul Statzer said. “I’m going to go check that out. Stay alert.”
Statzer had joined the Navy after high school and was deployed in the first Gulf War. He left the Navy, went to work, and then decided he needed to do more for his country. He joined the Guard and was sent off to his second war. On this Tuesday morning, he was doing what he’d always done: taking the lead, checking things out to try to protect his team.
He walked slowly, his weapon ready, carefully choosing his steps to avoid land mines. Sergeant Statzer was three feet away from the object he’d spotted when it detonated. Inside the wire that morning, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.
Everyone in the hospital seemed stunned after several days of working nonstop. We had become robotic and lifeless, waiting for the next wave of inevitable horror. I walked through the emergency department with Tim on our way to the operating room to re-implant the bone in an Iraqi shopkeeper from Balad who had survived his injuries and recovered enough to go home. He wanted his head put back together first, and we planned to do it that morning.
Just as we entered the ER, the radio operator called, “Sirs, we just got a call from an incoming Black Hawk. They’re about five minutes out, and they say they’ve got an American with a severe head injury.”
Tim went down the hall to tell anesthesia to cancel our case and be ready for an emergency. I told a tech to have radiology prepare for a CT scan, then ran out to the helipad where a team was already waiting to unload the injured soldier when he arrived.
I heard the familiar sound of an approaching Black Hawk, and since there were so many people manning the stretcher, I stood back and took some photographs of the helicopter as it landed and the medics unloaded the soldier. I’d taken thousands of pictures since I’d been in Iraq and always kept my camera in my pocket, since I never knew when something was going to happen I’d want a picture of. I kept taking pictures until they rolled him into the ER. His head was completely wrapped in gauze, but the gauze was soaked in blood.
I stepped up to the bed and saw the soldier’s DCU blouse before the medics cut it off. His name tag said “Statzer.” He was an Army staff sergeant.
“Pressure’s really low, Doc,” a nurse said. The anesthesiologist started an IV and began squeezing saline into Statzer’s vein.
I unwrapped his head, revealing the worst head injury I’d ever seen in someone who was still alive. The left side of his face and forehead were gone. His brain swelled out of a fist-sized hole in his skull. Part of his jaw was missing, and his mouth was full of blood. It was a miracle that the helicopter medics had been able to get a breathing tube in him.
He was bleeding from his scalp and his face and had a huge laceration in his neck that gushed the dark, non-pulsatile blood that meant his jugular vein was torn. His scalp was so swollen that he had serum oozing out, and he had several burns across his chest and neck.
“Let’s get him to CT,” I said, “and somebody go get vascular surgery and ENT. Tell them to meet me in the OR. And get Tim. I’m going to need his help.”
Statzer’s scan showed that there were several large pieces of shrapnel deep in his brain, along with a lot of blood, air, and fragments of bone. I shook my head and wondered what I would have to do to help this young man. Whatever it was, I had to do it right now, or he would be dead in minutes.
I heard over the speakers: “Attention in the hospital. We need blood immediately. There is a whole blood drive in the lab now.”
We put Statzer on the surgical table in the OR.
I shaved what was left of the hair on his head while the anesthesiologist hung the first of many bags of blood the sergeant would need to survive.
“Knife,” I said to Nate. I held the scalpel over Statzer’s head and said a silent prayer that he would survive — and that I could figure out what to do.
Just as I was starting the incision, Tim backed into the room, his arms dripping the yellow iodine soap we scrubbed with before surgery. “I saw the scan,” he said. “Can’t understand why he’s still alive.”
Tim and I clipped and cauterized and tied off dozens of arteries and veins that were torn and bleeding. Vascular surgeon Todd explored Statzer’s neck to gain control of the jugular vein. Little by little, as we stopped the bleeding and replaced his blood with new units donated by hospital personnel, Statzer’s pressure and vital signs began to improve. Now that he was stabilized, we could start trying to put him back together again.
His skull was shattered so badly that I barely had to use the drill. I removed almost all of the remaining left side of the bone and found that the covering over his brain had been shredded by the many objects driven through it by the bomb blast. As I expected, his left frontal lobe was mostly gone, but the brain he had left began to swell dramatically with his rising blood pressure. Red, bleeding brain rushed out of Statzer’s head, and I again heard my old professor Dr. Baghai’s voice urging me to maintain control.
“Nate, give me a ventricular catheter,” I said. If I could place a catheter into the ventricle of Statzer’s brain, the release of spinal fluid would stop the brain from swelling out. The CT scan had shown me that the ventricles had shifted from their normal position, and placing a catheter deep in the brain when the anatomy is so altered by swelling is extremely difficult. But if I failed, Statzer would die.
“Here we go,” I said. I chose a trajectory and slid the catheter into Statzer’s brain. Normally we use a depth of seven centimeters as the maximum safe depth for the drain, because deeper than that and you risk injuring the brainstem. But because of the brain shift, Statzer’s ventricles were a lot farther away, and when the catheter reached seven centimeters, there was no fluid coming out yet.
“I’d go deeper,” Tim said.
I pushed it to eight centimeters — still no fluid. The brain was getting more and more tense. I was sweating because I knew that if I couldn’t get the catheter in and relieve the pressure, he was done for. But if the catheter went into his brainstem, I’d kill him on the table.
“Your trajectory is good, Lee. Go a little farther,” Tim said.
I pushed the catheter a centimeter deeper. I felt the pop, and spinal fluid gushed above my head, under so much pressure that it hit the ceiling and dripped back down onto my neck. Statzer’s brain relaxed and settled back into his skull.
I removed the rest of his frontal lobe, finding a walnutsized metal fragment and Statzer’s left eyeball buried in the white matter. Several of his major cerebral arteries were torn and actively bleeding, and I was afraid that once I got them stopped, he’d lost so much blood supply that he would have a stroke. I doubted that he would ever use his right arm and leg again, even if he survived and woke up someday.
Tim placed Statzer’s skull fragments into his abdomen, and Joe from ENT performed a tracheostomy while Todd finished repairing the torn veins and arteries in Statzer’s neck. I sewed up the hole in the skin where Statzer’s eye used to be, and by the time we were done he had several hundred stitches.
Somehow that drain stayed open, and in the ICU after surgery, Statzer’s brain pressure was normal. If he could avoid infection, I thought, he just might survive. Recovering would be an entirely different story.
In the surgeons’ lounge, I prepared to call Statzer’s family. We didn’t do death notifications from Iraq, but we did call families when a soldier had been injured badly enough to send them home. We wanted to let the families know their soldier was alive and on the way to Germany and then America, so that they could make travel plans to be there when the soldiers reached Walter Reed.
The operator connected me to the number on Sergeant Statzer’s Red Cross form. After a few rings, I heard a man’s voice. “Jim Statzer,” he said.
“Mr. Statzer, my name is Dr. Lee Warren and I’m a neurosurgeon at the 332nd Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, Iraq. Your son Paul has been critically injured in battle, but he’s alive.” I went on to tell him that Paul’s injuries were very severe, and that, although he had come through his surgery and was stable, I was unsure if he would survive the trip back to America.
From thousands of miles away, I heard Mr. Statzer suck in a breath, and when he spoke next, his voice shook. “You said he’s alive, right, Doctor?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I heard Mr. Statzer repeating what I’d said to his wife. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Then you send him home. Doctor, by the grace of God, I know my son is going to be okay.”
I hung up and walked back to the ICU to check on Statzer. His dad’s words hung in my mind, and I thought, For Paul Statzer to be okay is going to take a miracle. A whole series of them.
To my great surprise, in the ICU a critical-care transport team was preparing Statzer for his flight to Germany. Normally, we first had to contact the team to let them know we had a patient, and then it would take a day or two before they were able to move that patient. This team had a C – 17 ready to leave, and they just came by the hospital to check to see if we happened to have any patients who needed to go.
I watched Paul Statzer roll out of the ICU with a brain pressure of zero, leaving Iraq less than four hours after his surgery. He’d survived an IED blast to the face from three feet away, a combat helicopter ride, and three hours of surgery by four surgeons, and his veins were full of other people’s blood. The most injured man I’d ever seen alive had a normal blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature when he left our tent hospital. I thought, There have been a few miracles already.
CHAPTER 30
NO PLACE TO HIDE
Bloody March finally, thankfully, gave way to April. But any hope we had of the enemy slowing down was quickly dashed, and March’s cool temperatures and rain gave way to April’s heat and oppressive dust storms. Entering my final month in Iraq, I couldn’t remember what a long hot shower or a comfortable bed felt like. I couldn’t even remember the last time I slept all the way through the night. As the days crept by, I felt both excited and afraid at the thought of going home, in almost equal measures. I had no idea how my kids were going to react to me. And every time I talked to one of my Army colleagues, I felt guilty that they had to stay so much longer.
I checked my email one morning and found a message from a friend of a friend in West Virginia. “My family has been reading your letters every day. We’re praying for all of you. Thanks for your service,” it said. I checked the map I kept showing the states my emailed letters had reached, and saw that West Virginia made fifty. I was amazed. The email journal I’d intended for my family and friends was being delivered every day to at least twenty thousand email addresses I knew of. I’d received messages from fifteen other countries as well, and I was getting over one hundred emails a day. I was happy that so many people were benefitting from my stories — but what a frustrating irony: I could reach people in Scotland and South Africa, but not my own kids. It didn’t seem possible in this age of instant communication that my children could essentially be quarantined from me, but I was living it.
A few days after Paul Statzer left, I tried to call the kids and got voicemail again. This time I got angry. I decided that I wouldn’t just go back to America and meekly try to work my way back into their lives. I went back to my room, sat on the edge of the bed, and started planning. I would control every aspect of my life tighter than ever before, and no one would keep me from succeeding. I would keep it my little secret that I was in fact scared to death and had no clue how to be a single dad.
Armed with a renewed commitment to my “Lee’s in Control of Everyt
hing” game plan, I decided to walk to the PX to pick up a few things, traveling the nearly two miles by the most direct route.
That route avoided the roads and crossed large swaths of empty desert between developed sections of the base. The weather had gotten a lot warmer, and we hadn’t had a mortar attack in a couple of days, so I decided to wear running gear to make the trip faster, rather than strap on my body armor and Kevlar helmet.
I was about halfway to the PX and in the middle of an open field when the Alarm Red sirens began to wail. A few seconds later a mortar landed close enough that I felt the concussion and heard the explosion at the same time. I looked around for the nearest bunker — but in this part of the base, there were none. The only protection for a quarter mile in any direction was a twelve-foot-high concrete T-barrier. I ran to it and sat on the ground with my back to the wall. At least I was protected from one side.
Several more explosions came over the next few minutes, and smoke rose into the air across the base. I sat on the ground in shorts and tennis shoes and hoped that none of the mortars would land within the ten-meter “kill radius” around me. I pressed my back against the concrete wall, tried to shrink myself into the smallest area I could, and waited.
A half hour passed. I thought about running for a bunker. I stood, flattened myself against the wall, and tried to swallow the acid fear burning in my throat. I heard the fffffppp of a rocket overhead, then the detonation far enough away that the sound was muffled. I decided I was safer where I was.
“My kids need me,” I said out loud. “I will get through this. I’ve got to get home and fix everything with them.”
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