No Place to Hide

by W. Lee Warren

  Finally able to go back with his parents to Pennsylvania, Paul was home from the war at long last. He was missing a huge portion of the left side of his brain, as well as his left eye. He had pieces of shrapnel still lodged in his neck.

  “As hard as it is to believe that he survived,” I said, “I’m truly astounded that he woke up.”

  Mr. Statzer laughed. “Oh, he woke up all right and started talking, and before very long we knew that this swollen, blown-up man was still our son. Doctor, he’s still Paul. He is absolutely still Paul.”

  And something inside of me said: Lee, you and your colleagues did make a difference.

  Then Mr. Statzer said, “Doctor, would you like to speak to Paul?”

  After several seconds, Lisa nudged me — I was simply staring at the speakerphone. My head was spinning, but I said, “Yes, sir, I would love to.”

  A few seconds later, I heard a voice I’d never expected to hear in my life say the words that made me understand why I’d been sent to Iraq: “Dr. Warren, this is Paul Statzer. Thanks for being there when I needed you.”

  Five years after I met him in his most desperate hour, I was on the phone with the most injured, yet still living man I’d ever met. And I found that I didn’t know what to say.

  “Sergeant Statzer, thank you for your service,” I said at last. “It was an honor to take care of you, but I’m even more grateful to be speaking with you.”

  After we all stopped crying, Paul’s mom, Cathy, said, “Would you and Lisa be willing to come to Pittsburgh to meet Paul?”

  In April of 2010, Lisa and I boarded a plane in Atlanta, bound for Pittsburgh. I was seven thousand miles and five years away from the 332nd Air Force Theater Hospital in Iraq, but as the plane began to roll I felt like I was going to that dusty ICU to check on a post-operative patient.

  I needed to see Paul Statzer, make sure he was okay, make sure I’d done my best. And then, maybe, I could really come home from the war.

  CHAPTER 34

  LONG JOURNEY HOME

  Lisa and I arrived in Pittsburgh at about 1:00 a.m., and I suffered through a few hours of fitful sleep. That night’s dreams contained virtually every horrible thing I saw in Iraq.

  At noon, Lisa took my hand and we walked into the restaurant lobby. As we rounded the corner, I saw a man wearing a patch over his left eye, carrying a plastic helmet, and standing with an older couple. The left side of his head was caved in, and he held on to his dad’s arm for balance.

  I felt as if I was running down the sidewalk toward the helipad in Balad, the first place I’d met this man. Only this time, there was no prop wash from the Black Hawk, no bloody gauze around his head, and he wasn’t half-zipped into a body bag.

  I extended my hand and said, “I’m Lee Warren. It’s good to see you again.”

  He said, “I’m Sergeant Paul Statzer. Thank you for saving my life.”

  We embraced, all of us teary-eyed.

  We sat in the back of the restaurant, and I watched Paul handle a fork and knife while he ate lunch. I had removed more than half of his frontal lobe in Iraq, but here he was, with no discernible weakness or speech difficulties.

  Mr. and Mrs. Statzer told us the entire story of Paul’s recovery, with Paul filling in the pieces of his time in Iraq before the IED went off and picking up after he began remembering things again a few months later.

  When they were finished, I reached into my bag and pulled out my computer. “Would you like to see what you looked like in Balad?” I said.

  Paul looked at Jim and Cathy and then back at me. He slowly nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  I came around the table, sat between Paul and his parents, and opened my Mac. Lisa stood behind me as I clicked on the first picture. Suddenly, all of us were in Iraq on March 29, 2005.

  “This is you coming off the Black Hawk,” I said.

  Cathy squeezed Jim’s hand. Paul’s right eye focused on the screen, and I saw the intensity he must have brought to soldiering.

  “And this is you as they unwrapped your head.” The picture showed a very bloody and swollen man that no one could have identified as the same person sitting next to me. “Let me know if this is too much to look at.”

  Paul said, “We want to see all of it, Doc.”

  The next photo showed Paul and me in the operating room, me with a scalpel in my hand and the wounds that earned him his Purple Heart medal very much in evidence.

  Cathy’s fingertips were just touching her lips, which were moving without making a sound. She shuddered, then reached around me to touch Paul and said, “How did you survive that? How could anyone survive that?”

  “Because of the medics,” Paul said. “The docs, like Doc Warren here, Mom. Everybody worked hard, and I made it home.”

  Lisa squeezed my shoulders.

  I shook my head. “Paul’s recovery is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. “We did our best for a lot of people who weren’t hurt as badly as Paul was. Not all of them made it.”

  Jim said, “Doctor, it’s all by the grace of God.”

  The last slide was a picture of Paul being wheeled out of the ICU, on his way to Germany. “That’s all of them,” I said. I closed my computer.

  With her eyes wet and makeup running down her face, Cathy said, “Doc, you’ll never know how much this means to us. We’ve always known that God had faithful people in place where Paul needed them, and now we’ve met one of them.”

  It was time to go. Paul hugged me, and we both cried. He smelled like a regular person, with none of the char and blood and antiseptic he’d smelled of the last time I’d touched him. I touched his collapsed head and the scars from stitches I knew I’d placed in March of 2005. He was so alive, so happy, and so normal after all he’d been through, even though anyone who looked at him could see the external effects of the war. But both of us, I knew, carried wounds in our lives from the events we’d lived through in Iraq that were less visible, yet every bit as real.

  “Goodbye, Paul,” I said. “God bless you.”

  “He did, Doctor, by making sure you were there when I needed you.”

  Lisa and I got on the plane, and as the miles between Paul Statzer and me increased, I felt as though I was getting farther and farther away from the war also. I’d gone to Pittsburgh not knowing how it would feel to meet someone I’d taken care of there and hoping it would answer some of my questions. I got more out of it than that. After months of nightmares, daydreams, and an inability to escape the war’s memories, seeing Paul Statzer alive changed my perspective.

  Listening to the jet’s radio station, I heard one of those cheesy country songs about the red, white, and blue. I wondered if the singer had ever been in the military. I thought about how we live in a country where a song about the war can make somebody millions of dollars, but our injured soldiers struggle to make ends meet. There are people who lost limbs and eyes and private parts for the cause of Iraqi freedom. What type of accounting can make a soldier who has lost his ability to walk with, see, or make love to his wife feel like the country has repaid him adequately for his service?

  I thought about Paul. For the rest of his life, he will bear the scars given him by a bomb in Iraq and a bunch of surgeons trying to save him. And despite his faith and his positive attitude, some of his scars resemble some of mine. You can’t ever really leave the war behind, but you can come home stronger for having lived through it.

  I asked myself a question: Did I do my best?

  I did for him, I answered.

  We were probably over Virginia or North Carolina by the time I got around to understanding why, after all that time, my one hundred twenty-five days in Iraq continued to have such a profound effect on my life. After all, in the final telling of the history of the war, my small role will likely go unmentioned. And yet the war had changed me — the bombs and bloodshed had pushed me to the point of surrendering to the truth that I was a control freak hopelessly unable to control anything at all. Perhaps I was so hardheade
d that God had needed to radically alter my environment to get my attention. Or maybe he just saw an opportunity to fix me while providing someone to take care of a few hundred soldiers, dozens of terrorists, and a few Iraqi children who needed a chance.

  I had come home from Iraq with no idea what I was going to face but believing in my heart that it would all work out. Of course, it hasn’t always been easy — our family has had to deal with the realities of life like any other has. But like the biblical Job, I’ve been given back more than I ever lost. It’s unlikely that Job’s renewal erased all the memories or pain from his mind, but it did teach him that as long as you’re breathing, you can survive.

  I was startled from my thoughts when the wheels hit the runway in Atlanta. We drove back to Auburn, and the next day I started writing.

  It has taken me a long time to find the right words to tell my story, but it took George W. Bush and God sending me to the desert for me to understand it. I had to go off to war, experience horrible things, and be bombed almost into oblivion to learn the simple truth of what Chaplain W said: Pray more, worry less, and let God handle the rest. It would have been simpler if I had just believed it when Jesus said it in the gospel of Luke: If you cling to your life, you will lose it, and if you let your life go, you will save it.

  Despite our promises to keep up with each other, those of us who fought our war together really haven’t. Pete and Chris came to my wedding, and I hear from John and Shauna and a few others from time to time, but all of us have moved on into our “normal” lives now. I still think about them frequently, and I am proud to have served with all of them. I fly the flag outside my home, carry the VFW card in my wallet, and still cry on Memorial and Veterans Days or when I see the red poppies bloom in the spring that remind me of those who fell for my freedom and those who died in front of me. War is never really in your past; it just stays with you.

  The last American combat troops left Iraq in 2012. That war is over, officially. But it still rages in the minds of the thousands of soldiers with PTSD, and in the bodies of the amputees and injured on both sides. And part of it will always be with me.

  As I write this in 2012, it has been seven years since I set foot on Iraqi soil. The seven thousand actual miles I traveled to get back here took only a few days. But it took every moment of those seven years, plus telling you this story, for me to finally be able to say I’m home from the war.

  PHOTO INSERT

  AFTERWORD BY PHILIP YANCEY

  Like schoolteachers or police officers, doctors slip into the role society assigns them, and we can hardly imagine their lives apart from that role. Do they yell at their teenagers? Fall in love or out of love? Do they ever think about their patients after hours or perhaps discuss us over coffee with their colleagues? Do they laugh at us behind our backs? Cry when treatments fail and we die? Do they feel anything? What goes on behind that professional mask?

  Soldiers are more transparent. Scores of memoirs reveal in chilling detail what it’s like to kill an enemy, lose a comrade, order a drone attack, interrogate a suspected terrorist. We learn the lingo of abbreviations used ubiquitously in the armed forces. We listen in on soldiers talking casually about everyday encounters, any one of which would be the most dramatic event of our lives.

  I have read accounts of war, and I have read (and even written) accounts of medicine from the doctor’s perspective. But when I saw an early draft of No Place to Hide, I got a new set of eyes, the raw vantage of a brain surgeon working in the midst of hellish combat conditions in Iraq. Outfitted in body armor and a battle helmet, operating in a tent with minimal surgical equipment, Major Warren pieced together fragments of skull and brain from Allied soldiers and terrorists alike, sometimes with rocket fire whistling overhead and mortars thumping around him. In one day of mass casualties he treated injuries that would have kept him busy for a month in a calm, sterile hospital back home. He was going about the daily business of reassembling human beings.

  War is hell, especially this war. Few Iraqis greeted their American “liberators” with flowers. They were more likely to fire at them or bury IEDs in hopes of killing them. Historians will debate the merits of an invasion that spilled so much blood and treasure. Warren’s account leaves those issues to others and instead gives the view from the ground up, by a specialist who, devoted to healing, found himself plunked down in the vortex of destruction. Iraqis as well as GIs come to life, their lives intertwined in the terrible dance of war. As another soldier explained, “We treat everybody. We’re Americans.”

  I came across Lee Warren quite by accident. He had read books I had written with the good and great doctor Paul Brand and rather sheepishly sent me a collection he had self-published, a loose compilation of emails, articles, and miscellaneous reflections on his time in Iraq. A lot of self-published books come my way, few of which merit attention and investment from an established publisher. As I read Warren’s, I knew it was different. Like Dr. Brand, he treated persons, not bodies — a trait rare in neurosurgeons, who specialize in sifting through data and then barking orders to their assistants. Through Warren’s eyes we observe not only the delicate mechanics of brain surgery but also its lifelong effects on real people and their families, both when the surgery succeeds and when it fails.

  With some coaxing, in subsequent drafts Warren shed the military doctor’s normal reserve and turned the spotlight on himself. He tells of the toll of war on his family. On return to the US he faced the ordeal of reentry. He had to learn not to duck every time a helicopter flew overhead and not to cower at a state patrolman wearing a weapon. Battle-hardened, after daily enduring experiences no one should have to live through, he gradually slid back into the routine of a high-tech hospital with picky surgeons working to address patients’ lower-back pain.

  Thank you, Lee Warren, for letting us see the world through your own unique vantage point. Thank you for the lives you saved, for the compassion you showed, for the faith you rediscovered, for reminding us of the precious gift of life. May you find the second chance at life that you gave so courageously to others.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  That you are holding this book in your hands or reading it on your screen reflects the kindness and extraordinary help I received from many people. For me to simply say “Thank you” would be wholly inadequate. And yet I must try.

  God has been so faithful to me, and so patient with my many misguided efforts that got in the way of this story getting out. His grace and mercy have led me safely along the long road home from the war. I pray that reading about my journey will help you with yours.

  Several groups and individuals deserve recognition for their roles in bringing this story to the world:

  The professors who trained me in neurosurgery each had a hand in saving every life I was a part of saving, and even the people we lost had a better chance because of them. I am so very grateful to have been given such a great education.

  To the hundreds of American troops I treated in Iraq — those who survived, those who perished, those who came home whole, and those for whom the war still rages: May these stories help people know what you’ve done for all of us, and impart a little of what you went through.

  To the Iraqi civilians and children I cared for: I pray that my impact on your life was more than the stitches and staples and prescriptions I provided.

  To the insurgents, the terrorists, the enemy I treated: I hope that at least some of you have thought, “Those Americans treated me better than I would have treated them.” You see, we fight only when we have to, but we would rather reach out, help you up, and befriend you.

  To my colleagues at the 332nd Air Force Theater Hospital in Iraq: Your service to our country and to the patients we treated together was inspiring. We went to war together, and all of us came home. I pray that all of you know how much your service means, to everyone.

  And to Lisa Warren: When I couldn’t sleep, you said, “I’m here.” When the nightmares came, you sang to me. When the tea
rs flowed, you shed yours with me. And when it was time to write this down, you demanded that I tell the story of my war. You did it with an iron hand in a velvet glove, and I needed both. Thank you for not letting me quit, not quitting on me, and for loving me through it all.

  When I first saw the sunlight flickering in Lisa’s hazel eyes, my war-wounded, fibrillating heart began to beat more steadily. For seven years now, I’ve found something else to love about her every single day, making me excited about spending the rest of my life discovering all the treasures of knowing this one person so completely. I never thought, when I stepped off that plane on American soil, coming home from the war, that I would someday be able to say, “I am so happy.” But I am. Loving me back hasn’t been easy, I know, but I’m alive and mentally healthy today because Lisa keeps doing it.

  Poets and songwriters have been writing about love since God gave us language. Lisa, I will be writing about ours until I take my last breath. Your love is everything to me. Everything.

  Lisa is also the primary reason this book exists, because until she demanded that I start typing, these stories were trapped in my head, coming out only in the nightmares and daydreams of post-traumatic stress disorder. And so what began as therapy for me is now hopefully helpful or at least interesting to you. Thank you, Lisa, for everything.

  Keith Leslie, editor of the San Antonio Christian Beacon, gave me the first outlet for my Iraq stories, which ultimately led to the decision to turn them into a book.

  The actor and peerless artist Darren LeGallo, whose encouraging feedback made me believe that someone other than my wife would want to read my story, extended himself and passed it along to his fiancée, Amy Adams. Darren and Amy, your friendship to us is invaluable, and your belief in this work means more than any business transaction ever could.