Another fffffppp BOOM, this time much louder and closer.
The sirens wailed on, and black smoke from the exploding mortars mixed in the air with the blowing sand and the usual smell of burning waste and oil. I choked on it. My eyes were burning at least as badly from the hot tears in them. I wiped my nose on the back of my arm.
Another detonation nearby.
I decided to ask God for help.
“Please, please get me out of here alive,” I prayed. “I’ve got so much to do.”
Every time something blew up, I pled anew for God to rescue me. And each time the enemy answered with another explosion. I saw vivid mental images of the burned flesh and brokenness that similar shells had caused in people I’d treated as recently as the day before.
After an hour, I stopped pleading with God to get me out of there, because it seemed like every time I did, something else flew over my head and exploded.
By the time the twelfth mortar landed another terrifying hour later, I was shaking and crying, lying on the ground, curled into a ball. I had no place to hide, and never before had I felt so exposed, so powerless. But in the chaos, I found a moment of clarity. My powerlessness demonstrated to me that my plan to control how my kids would react to me was just as irrelevant and ineffective as my wish that the terrorists trying so hard to kill everyone on base that day would just go away.
Dr. Baghai’s words to me years before — “You have to maintain control” — had become my mantra not just for surgery, but for my whole life. During that attack, huddled against a concrete wall in nothing but a running outfit, it became laughingly obvious to me that even my own survival was utterly out of my control.
And then, just as unexpected as the Alarm Red siren that had caught me in an open field two hours before, I heard Chaplain W’s words: “Pray more, worry less, and let God do the rest.”
What happened to me that day is hard to explain. It would be inaccurate to say that I stopped caring, but at that moment, with Chaplain W’s words ringing in my mind, I just let go of the fear. The mental clarity that resulted was stunning to me, and the list of things I could not control played across my mind like movie credits rolling up the screen:
There was absolutely nothing that I could do to stop the war.
I could not control where any of those mortars or rockets would land.
I could not control what would happen to my kids if I died on that field.
I could not control what would happen with my kids if I survived.
And then, at the end of the list of all the things I couldn’t do, I finally understood the one thing I could do: have faith that whatever God intended to do would be best for me and for my kids.
Once I let go of the fear, it felt as if with each breath I drew in peace and let out worry. The relief and sense of calm I felt was beyond any rational understanding. I knew I was going to be okay — and not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually and professionally and personally. And I knew, somehow, that the peace would follow me home.
Finally, the All Clear sounded. I picked myself up and walked back to my trailer, because the PX didn’t seem so important at the moment. My legs were shaky, my stomach was churning, and my head was pounding.
But my heart was healing.
CHAPTER 31
SAYING GOODBYE
By mid-April I had mixed emotions concerning my fast-approaching departure date. I couldn’t wait to hug my kids and start my new life with them, but there were so many unknowns. I knew I was going to Montgomery, Alabama, since my kids and their mother had moved there when I deployed, but I didn’t know where I was going to live. I knew I was going to join a practice there, because I’d accepted an offer from two neurosurgeons before I left for the war. But I didn’t really know them or what my practice would be like. I had no other family in the area, no church, no friends, and no idea what being a divorced single dad and civilian doctor was going to be like. I could feel my old need to control everything bubbling just under the surface of my newfound peace, and I had a hard time concentrating on anything else.
Perhaps God had been waiting for me to stop worrying, to stop trying to be in charge, because all of a sudden my access to the kids improved greatly. It started with one phone call.
“Hello,” I heard Kimber say.
“Kimber, it’s Dad.”
“Yay! Dad, I miss you so much. Come home!”
From that point on, the kids answered every time I called. There was only one rough spot in those conversations. One day Mitch asked, “Daddy, are we moving into a new house with you as soon as you get home?”
I realized that I hadn’t yet explained to them that I still owed the Air Force some time, and that when I first saw them, we would have only a few days before I would have to leave again to go back to Texas until I was out of the Air Force for good.
Kalyn cried, “No! You can’t leave us again.”
I said, “Honey, if I don’t go back, the Air Force will put me in jail.”
“And besides,” Mitch said then, like an incurable optimist, “we only have to say goodbye one more time, but we get to say hello twice.”
His logic seemed more convincing to Kalyn than mine had been, and the rest of the conversation went well. The hope I’d felt in Baghdad when the kids sounded so eager to reconnect with me grew stronger every day. I grabbed on to it and would never let it go again.
April 24 was my last Sunday in Iraq. Two hundred people filled the chapel, and the worship team sang its heart out.
I met with the whole team afterward. “Guys,” I said, “this is my last service. I’m heading out soon.”
We talked for a while, shed a few tears, and prayed together. Then John grabbed my shoulder and said, “Hey, do you think you’ll lead worship in your church back home?”
I slowly shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m about to go through a divorce, and my personal life is going to be a mess for a long time after that. I don’t think God would want me up there leading worship.”
Chaplain W put his arm around me, pulled me close, and said, “Listen. Worship is not a place where perfect people get dressed up and go tell God how great they are. Real worship happens when broken people tell God how great he is. And that’s grace: you tell God how great he is, that he’s enough for you in spite of what your life sometimes feels like, and then he gives you forgiveness and peace.”
I walked away from the chapel that day with a new feeling simmering in my heart, and I hoped it would work its way into something I could hold on to. Before the war, I’d thought that religion was about keeping rules and acting happy. But after all I’d been through in Iraq, I was starting to believe that maybe it really was about praying more, worrying less, and letting God do the rest.
On Monday morning of my last week in Iraq, I received an email from the base command section. It contained a departure checklist, along with a schedule of briefings I was required to attend before going home. I shook my head, wondering how the bureaucrats could think I would have enough time to do all of those things unless they had also sent the enemy an email asking him to stop sending us casualties every day until my checklist was complete.
If they did, the enemy didn’t listen.
For the next three days, I worked almost nonstop, as usual. Between Black Hawks and Chinooks bringing us more carnage, I stood in lines and filled out forms and answered questionnaires. One of them was titled something like POST-DEPLOYMENT DEBRIEFING. There were only six questions. Two of them were:
HAVE YOU BEEN IN COMBAT, OR BEEN EXPOSED TO SITUATIONS IN WHICH YOU FELT YOUR LIFE WAS IN DANGER?
and
HAVE YOU SEEN OR BEEN EXPOSED TO THINGS YOU FEEL MAY BE DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO FORGET OR WHICH YOU FEEL MAY BE TROUBLING TO YOU IN THE FUTURE?
There were three choices: Yes, No, and N/A.
If I checked Yes, I could explain my answers on three lines.
I checked Yes. I didn’t bother to write in the details.
I didn’t
yet know that those surveys would be the only questions the Air Force would ever ask me about what I had experienced in the war or how I felt about it.
The last thing on my checklist was to appear at a small clinic near the flight line, where a nurse checked my vital signs, drew some lab work, and signed a form that said I was healthy enough to go home.
Whenever I wasn’t standing in a line somewhere, Tim and I performed ten craniotomies in one twenty-four-hour period, and I operated every day and night. Those three days felt like a greatest hits compilation of Warren’s Wartime Neurosurgery Experience, because every type of case I knew how to perform showed up, one at a time. Subdural, epidural, and intracerebral hematomas, skull fractures, spinal cord injuries. And one more baby arrived, this one with spina bifida.
Chris and I worked on the baby together, and during the operation Tim scrubbed in to help. “Somebody get that cat outta here!” he said. I smiled under my mask and sighed a little when I realized that this would probably be the last time we would ever work together.
Spina bifida is a birth defect caused by part of the spinal column not forming properly before a baby is born. The lower part of the spinal cord sticks out of a hole in the skin, and if it is not repaired the baby usually develops meningitis and dies. Halfway through the complex operation to repair the baby’s spine, Chris shook his head and gave a nervous chuckle. “This operation makes me nervous when we do it in a real hospital. I can’t believe we’re doing it in a tent.”
Just as Chris said that, an explosion shook the operating room and the lights went out. The Alarm Red siren wailed, and we stood there in the darkness. I had been placing a stitch in the baby’s nerve sack when the darkness came, and I knew that any possibility that this kid would someday be able to walk would be jeopardized if I made the wrong move.
“Hold on, everybody,” I said, “stay calm.”
A few seconds passed. Then the backup generators kicked in and the lights came back on. We finished the case as quickly as we could and got the baby to the ICU before the All Clear sounded.
We all shook hands and took a picture together, partly because we knew we might never be together again, and partly because we were pretty sure that operation had never been done in a military hospital in Iraq before.
That night, Tim walked into the surgeons’ lounge with a goofy grin on his face and handed me a cigar. “I just got off a webcam call with my wife and watched her deliver our little girl.”
I gave Tim a hug. But just as he started telling me all about his daughter, a tech ran in from the ER. “Docs, there’s a guy in the ER with a huge brain tumor.”
Tim and I looked at each other and shook our heads. What else would this war bring us?
“I’m too psyched to sleep,” Tim said. “Go get some rest and finish packing. I’ll take care of getting him to Germany.”
My attempts to sleep that night were interrupted by more mortars and by a dream that was like a slideshow of every dying and dead person I’d seen in Iraq. A singer provided a soundtrack to my dream, a heavy-metal song with only one line: Lee, you didn’t do enough for me. Didn’t do enough for me.
The next morning I awoke to a mortar attack not far outside my trailer. After the All Clear sounded, I dressed and walked to the hospital, starting what I expected to be another Groundhog Day in Iraq. But when I entered the surgeons’ lounge, there was a message waiting for me from the commander.
I walked down the hall to Colonel H’s office, where I found him sitting at his desk. “Sir, you sent for me?” I said.
Colonel H looked up, took off his reading glasses, and asked me to sit. “Lee, you’ve done a great job here. I know it was hard for you to come early and be part of two different teams, but you handled it well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He pushed a couple of sheets of paper across his desk. “Take a look at these,” he said.
I looked down at the papers, silently reading them but not believing what they said. They were my orders to go home.
“Just came in,” he said. “You’re leaving tonight.”
I couldn’t believe it. After all this time in Iraq, it almost felt as if I’d always been there. And the reality of what I would face in the “real world” struck me cold and hard. Whatever I thought was going to happen, whatever I might have thought I could control or anticipate would be proven to be fact or fiction, starting tomorrow.
I stared at the orders that would spring me from this place of death and pain and screaming and explosions. A simple piece of paper had the power to send me back to the real world, to normal life. Only I wasn’t sure it would ever feel normal again.
“You going to say anything?”
I startled out of my thoughts. “I’m sorry, sir. This is great. It’s just that I thought I was here for at least a couple more days. My replacement isn’t here yet.”
“That’s okay, Lee. You’ve done your part. You survived over a hundred rocket and mortar attacks, and you saved a lot of lives. We’ll get by for a couple of days without you. You’re dismissed.”
I shook Colonel H’s hand, saluted him, and walked out into the hospital to say my goodbyes.
I stopped by the physical therapy clinic and found John. His musical talents and love of worship had made him an integral part of the team, and we’d spent a lot of time talking and in prayer together. I’d grown to respect his professionalism as a therapist and his advice as a man. It hit me for the first time then that I would probably never see him again, since he was early in his Air Force career and I was at the end of mine.
“I’m leaving in a few hours,” I said.
John turned and said what I’d expected he would say: “Well, then, we need to pray.”
In the surgeons’ lounge, I found Todd, Augie, and Tim watching television. A story was on an American news channel about how US forces had mortared an Iraqi school in Balad.
A soldier sitting on the couch said, “That’s terrible, dishonest reporting. We got permission to fire at that schoolhouse, which was abandoned, because the insurgents were mortaring us from the roof for eight days. We even sent scouts out there to verify there were no civilians around, and they faced enemy fire to get that intelligence. And our news media only reports that we shot at a school! I can’t believe it.” The soldier stood, shouldered his M – 16, and stormed out of the room.
The biased and inaccurate reporting reminded me of the mural in Baghdad showing Iraq’s fictitious triumph over America in the first Gulf War. I wondered how many people in America bother to verify what they hear on the news. How often do we believe something just because we read it or hear it on the news? Where did the American news media get this story — Al Jazeera? Or worse, was the media biased to report on us as the bad guys?
We watched the soldier leave, and then I extended my hand to Todd. His excellence and determination to save limbs and lives had been inspiring to me, and I hoped that I would see him again someday. Augie’s technical expertise was impressive, and he’d saved the eyesight of dozens of people there. His intellect made for fascinating conversations, although he’d destroyed me in chess more times than I could count. And Tim had been a steady partner and friend, even under the strain of missing his first child’s birth.
“It’s been an honor working with you men. I’m leaving tonight,” I said.
We talked for a while, and then Tim borrowed a car from the command section to help me get my things together. We had dinner at DFAC II, where I bumped into some of the chaplains and Shauna and Andre from the worship team. We cried and prayed and hugged, and Chaplain W said a special prayer for my trip home and my future life: “Lord, bless Lee in his travels, in his reconnection with his family, and in the healing of his heart no matter what he has to face in the coming months and years. And let him remember to let go of worry and hold on to you.”
After we finished our goodbyes, Tim let me off at the hospital, because there were two things I still had to do. I hadn’t said goodbye to Chris, and I ha
d one more email to send.
EMAIL HOME
Thursday, April 28, 2005
My dear friends:
Good news: I just received my orders to come home! For security reasons, I can’t say exactly when I’m leaving, but it’s soon.
Last night we had the final installment of Movie Night with me as the “Morale Officer.” We watched Napoleon Dynamite, and it was as stupidly entertaining as always. There were two highlights of the night. First, Todd came. We’d begun taking bets on whether Todd or Elvis would show up at Movie Night first, but since he knew it was probably my last one, he came. He’s always been too busy or tired before, but tonight he came, and I have pictures to prove it.
The second highlight was that a mortar round actually hit the roof of the tent during the movie, indented the canvas, and bounced off into the air before it landed by the door of the ER. It didn’t detonate, but it scared the dickens out of all of us. EOD came and picked it up, but since they wouldn’t let us leave the tent, we finished the movie anyway.
When I actually have time to sit and look back on my experiences in Iraq and write the postscript, I’m sure that some of the things I realize will surprise even me. I am already struck by several things that I never thought would be a part of this, or any part of my life:
I am not a soldier, but I’ve been attacked and I’ve been afraid.
I am not a diplomat, but I have been asked to represent my nation and its values.
I am not a man of great power or influence, yet I have had the opportunity to talk to thousands of people daily about whatever is on my heart, via these emails.
I am not a callous man, but I’ve been asked to face unspeakable horrors and carry on unaffected, and at times to ignore the terrible tragedy of one person’s injuries in order to attend to another person who may have a better chance to survive.
I am not a chaplain, but I have held the hands of dying men as they took their last breaths. I’ve shed tears and prayed with colleagues who felt they could not take another step, and they have done so for me.
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