Crossings

by Jon Kerstetter

  I moved my pistol ever so slightly off target. I relaxed my finger, released the tension. I looked at the boy. I thought of my son. I then understood that the driver and his truck had already gone through security screening at the gate, that soldiers had vetted him and looked through his truck and under his truck, that dogs had sniffed for bombs and found nothing. Most of all, I understood that the Iraqi driver was just like my son at home, careless about his driving and much too young to die. I moved my finger from the trigger, held it on the side of the pistol, breathed deeply, and lowered my voice. I holstered my weapon and hollered at the boy one more time.

  “You ever do that again and I’ll hunt you down and kick your ass. Now get the hell out of here.” I motioned with my hands to make him back his truck up.

  “Yessir, Yessir, he said. “U.S. Army good,” he added as he grinned slightly and backed his truck up a few yards. He saluted me once more and I shook my head in relief. As I walked back to my vehicle, I realized how the memory of my son had turned reaction to reason and how imperceptibly close I had come to pulling a trigger—how imperceptibly close a boy had come to dying by the hand of a doctor.

  I took mental notes whenever I crossed perimeters and checkpoints in Baghdad. It amazed me how moving beyond physical barriers made me feel vulnerable, yet at the same time powerful. I noted a definite sphincter tightening when moving from the known qualities of a forward operating base to all the unknown possibilities beyond the wire, to the prospect of making enemy contact. There was something provocative and empowering about a chance encounter with an enemy sniper or a roadside bomb. It wasn’t necessarily that the contact provided the means to confront the real and tangible fear of death; it was more that it might provide external proof that I possessed all the toughness and skill that war demanded—psychological, physical, and mental. Two of my medical colleagues had been shot in the first three months of our work in Baghdad. One of the docs returned fire and killed the enemy shooter. After his hospitalization, he told me the story of his encounter and I realized how much I wanted that kind of contact—not the part about getting shot, but the part about actively engaging the enemy.

  Whenever I crossed physical barriers, it evoked a combat mind-set that defined not only my duties as a soldier and a doctor but also my emotional and psychological state, in essence, a sort of chest-pounding bravado anchored by the need to display a tough soldier prowess. That emotional morphing pushed me from a frame of mind of being at war to a deeper understanding of being in war, of being psychologically and soulfully involved. The distinction felt real, as if in one case I participated in war from the sidelines and in another case I participated from the epicenter, shouldering all the substantial weight and complexity of having to perform the duties of both soldier and doctor concurrently. The hard truth of combat medicine was that not all limbs could be salvaged, not all lives saved. Soldiers knew it. Doctors knew it. They spoke little of it, except to say that everybody did the best they could and everything they could. In the aftermath, my fellow medical officers and I had little time for grief or sorrow. We coped as quickly as we could, then we went on to the next case or the next mission, usually stuffing our grief or anger into whatever hiding place we could find. Part of being in war meant owning the combat doctor role without showing weakness or letting grief overwhelm you.

  Iraq had no shortage of barriers and lines to cross. The simplest were lines on maps that separated geography and combat responsibilities among divisions, battalions, and platoons. Each sector was marked as an area of responsibility for some officer’s command—from lieutenant to general. If you crossed into the wrong sector or into somebody else’s area of authority, a new kind of battle often broke out. One of my responsibilities at CJTF involved helping to arrange treatment for Iraqi children with combat-related injuries or untreated childhood illnesses. That created a conflict with commanders of the military hospitals whose missions necessarily focused on the treatment of casualties from U.S. and Coalition forces. Adding Iraqi patients to their patient load stressed the limits of the medical resources. Commanders argued that Iraqis had their own hospitals and needed to seek treatment at those facilities. True, Iraqis had their own hospitals. But also true was the fact that those hospitals often lacked adequate medical supplies. Many of the local hospitals needed massive infusions of doctors and nurses and equipment. A mandate from the Army brass directed that medical units provide appropriate medical care for civilian cases as a way forward in winning Iraqi hearts and minds. Limited medical resources called for reasoned priorities and a strategy for integrating collateral damage and humanitarian care into the military medical infrastructure. Consequently, medical leadership fought a war within a war, doctors fighting doctors, administrators fighting doctors.

  Beyond the realm of psychological and administrative boundaries, there were plenty of physical lines to cross, barricades and cordons, checkpoints and security zones. U.S. and coalition forces constructed those lines with concrete Jersey barriers, Hesco barriers, and razor wire. The lines defined occupied zones around operating bases, supply routes, key buildings, and hospitals. They signaled off-limit warnings: STOP—DO NOT ENTER—DO NOT CROSS. At the Assassin’s Gate entrance to the green zone in Baghdad, three zones of escalated firepower marked with white chevrons painted across the road formed barriers to protect soldiers from enemy intrusions. When insurgents tried to run those barriers with vehicle or human bombs, soldiers guarding the lines would aim and fire and kill. I was near the perimeter gate one day when a carload of Iraqis neglected the large, red-lettered signs written in Arabic: DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT MILITARY ESCORT. LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED. Maybe the driver got confused about which painted road lines not to cross. Perhaps the soldiers at the barriers distracted him with their yelling and screaming. The car might have carried insurgents transporting bombs. The possible scenarios didn’t matter; crossing the lines mattered. Less than ten feet past the outer DO NOT CROSS line, soldiers fired on the car, killing the driver and front-seat passenger. The dead were brothers, mid-forties, family men, father and uncle to the child in the backseat. The child’s mother, injured in the confrontation, covered her surviving five-year-old daughter with her own body. After the fact, soldiers and interpreters questioned the mother. They discovered she wanted to take her sick child to the Army hospital. She had heard there was a pediatrician there who could treat Iraqi children.

  In 1989, Saddam drew lines of speed bumps in the concrete road under the Swords of Qadisiyah in Baghdad. He had the “triumphal arch” built to celebrate his self-proclaimed victory in the Iran-Iraq War. The helmets reportedly came from the heads of executed Iranian soldiers. Saddam ordered the headless helmets filled with cement and embedded in the road. Thousands of additional helmets lay in cargo nets attached to the bases of two 140-foot metal swords grasped by the forged-metal likenesses of Saddam’s clenched fists. I drove over the speed bump helmets once in a Humvee—like driving over small boulders. I stopped the vehicle to see if they were real. I got down on my knees. Each helmet contained a bullet hole. I touched the edges; some were smooth, others jagged. A few of the holes had stellate edges that showed a tinge of rust. Several helmets contained two holes, entry and exit. Most holes were about the size of a fingertip. One was the size of my hand. As I ran my fingers over the holes, I imagined that the soldiers who once wore those helmets were not that much different from U.S. soldiers. They would have had families at home, perhaps wives and children, maybe even a dog or a garden. Their families and friends would have wanted them to lie in peace. Instead, their deaths were on permanent display as reminders of inhumanity. I was sorry that I had run over the helmets. I wanted to reverse my tracks, remove the dirt my tires had shed. It felt as if driving over the helmets represented a kind of insult to the lives of those soldiers, who, for the sheer barbarity of displaying war trophies, had been executed by Saddam Hussein.

  —

  Barriers in the sand and clear lines of authority gave soldiers a sense of control
over their sectors of combat. But they quickly learned that mere lines did not allow them to control much of anything, not the geography of combat sectors, not the duration of firefights or the tempo of war—and certainly not the random line between those who survived and those who died. Ethical lines governing the rules of engagement sometimes failed to keep soldiers from moving toward unconscionable and unjustified war behavior. And when soldiers crossed those lines, they did so without much regard to the harshness and cruelty that lay on the other side. They crossed, enemy and Coalition alike, as if driving over whitewashed lines where one side contained a perfectly acceptable kind of war and the other side contained a war that pressed against the ribs of the world and made nations hate and wail and gnash their teeth against reason and civility.

  Those moral crossings reduced war to an instrument of the unforgivable. One side crossed into Abu Ghraib. The other side crossed into the Canal Hotel bombing. One side—the torture of Iraqi citizens; the other side—the dragging of burned and mutilated American bodies through the streets of Fallujah. The crossing dragged minds and morals into the darkness of humanity where frayed and savage logic permitted beheading and torture and indiscriminate targeting. At the core of it, the crossing taught us how to hate with a deep, visceral, and unrelenting kind of hate, the kind that thrived on the hard and jolting edge of war, like the hard and jolting edges of the holes in the helmets under the Swords of Qadisiyah.

  —

  Identifying the finite moment of that crossing was elusive, if it was in fact a singular moment. It wasn’t something that played out like a superhero transformation where in one moment you were a mild-mannered kind of person, and in the next you were totally and radically changed. The crossing took hold on soldiers in different ways and different degrees. One soldier I knew wanted to make sure he killed an insurgent before his tour was over. The chance to kill became his main deployment objective. Several doctors pulled high-risk force protection duties as a way of increasing their probability of enemy contact. I was one of them. A few docs channeled their rage against God or faith or politics. In all of the crossings, whether doctors or infantry, armor or aviation, enlisted or officers, one thing embedded itself in the minds and spirits of the soldiers—hate. It was visible and hard. Some learned it gradually, insidiously, after the accumulation of too many battles or too many patients. Some learned it rather suddenly, often at the death of a fellow soldier and friend. The crossing changed them. It made them hate, even if they weren’t hateful people by nature.

  A large part of my own crossing occurred during the Canal Hotel bombing. The Canal Hotel housed the headquarters of the United Nations Special Commission under the leadership of Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, an Iraqi insurgent drove into the alley next to the hotel and detonated a truck bomb. The blast was heard across Baghdad. At the time, I was getting ready for a battle update briefing. Before entering CJTF headquarters, I paused near the steps to chat with one of the ops officers, just casual stuff about the August heat and the weather back home and a bit about our families. It was just before 1700 hours. We took casual puffs on our cigars as we talked. We both looked out at the parking lot watching soldiers come and go. I had just mentioned how quiet the day had been when we both heard the thunderous explosion across the Tigris River.

  “Time to go to work,” I said.

  We turned and headed into the ops center. Within the next minutes and hours, details of the attack flooded in. A quick-response force was dispatched to the bombsite, where soldiers performed an initial assessment, then sent updates and requests to the officers in the operations center. Thirty minutes into the response, Colonel Gagliano came to my desk and asked me for an update. The only information I had at that early point was that the Canal Hotel had been bombed and the total numbers of injured and killed were unknown but certainly enough to initiate a hospital disaster response. In the final count, more than one hundred people were injured and twenty-two killed, including the high commissioner. A U.S. forensic team was flown to Iraq and assembled to identify the remains.

  The bombing occurred on a Tuesday. During the initial crisis response, a tent near the mortuary affairs unit at the Baghdad International Airport was designated as a temporary morgue. On Wednesday, I accompanied Colonel Gagliano and Ambassador Kennedy to the morgue to help with identifications. The ambassador was interested in speeding up the process in response to Iraqi requests. The morgue was a large tent and had been equipped with three stainless steel worktables and boxes of exam gloves and supplies of body bags. Outside the tent were rows of aluminum transfer cases used to transport the bodies of war casualties back home. I counted at least fifty cases. Inside the morgue tent were two folding chairs for anybody who wanted to or had to sit down; otherwise, the only other items present were some large wooden tables on which incoming body bags were laid.

  Human remains from the bombsite were brought to the morgue where soldiers offloaded them onto the wooden tables. When I walked into the morgue tent, I was almost overwhelmed by the sight of body bags and the iron smell of blood. If it had not been for the presence of Colonel Gagliano and Ambassador Kennedy, I think I would have left. I worked with the forensic team to sort body parts into different piles based on their likelihood of belonging to a single person. I would unzip a body bag, reach in with my gloved hands, and lift those pieces out. Some of the recovered pieces were as small as a pack of cigarettes, some as large as a whole leg or half a torso. We analyzed them by matching their edge fit and anatomy and moving the pieces around as if we were working a jigsaw puzzle. As I slid the remains across the stainless steel stable, the sharp edges of bones and the tiny rocks embedded in the tissues made a scratchy, metallic sound. I felt the sound in my teeth. I could smell the smoky residual of charred flesh. When I zipped a body bag closed, I felt the vibration of its zipper, and that was the last thing I felt or heard with each set of remains.

  The whole task of fitting parts together for identification made me feel distant and inhuman, as if overtaken by a certain dread and hopelessness that all of human life was reduced to the emptiness of gritty sounds and the mechanical vibrations of a body bag zipper. I think those sounds and sensations were what got to me. Anger and hatred welled up in me in a way that I had never felt before—hard-edged, biting—and I directed it toward the truck bomber and a universal Iraqi enemy and at the horrific and tragic ways that people died in war.

  As the team made identifications, most of the dead turned out to be Iraqi civilians who worked on reconstruction projects managed by the United Nations. They hadn’t signed up for war. I had. Other soldiers had. Soldiers expected to become targets; it was the core principle of war. But targeting civilians violated that principle, wasted lives, and wrought suffering on those who could not fight back. I hated that insurgents and truck bombers could strap on a bomb or drive a vehicle loaded with explosives and detonate themselves without regard to who they killed. I also hated that war created collateral damage. Some of those explosions killed and maimed children and old people. I saw those cases even before the Canal Hotel bombing: a child with her face blown off, a ten-year-old with burns so severe that I viewed her death as merciful, an old man with one arm torn off at the elbow and shrapnel embedded in his eyes. Did those innocents ask for war? Did they pose a threat?

  After two days of working in that temporary morgue, I developed a judgmental attitude that seemed to find reasons to hate Iraq and hate my enemy. Bleeding became more than a clinical status; it meant that Iraqi insurgents destroyed lives without regard for the ethics of war. The char of flesh represented not just a burn but evil that occupied every thought and action of the enemy. Even the way I spat took on a defiant and aggressive demeanor. I had a more vivid sense of mortality and a clearer sense of my personal vulnerability and my absolute need to fight. I was crossing. I could feel the tension, one side pulling against the other, an internal battle with its own unstoppable momentum, humanity versus i
nhumanity, healing versus killing, doctor versus soldier.

  During that internal battle, a strange thing happened. Aside from my secret desire to run from the repulsiveness of piecing human bodies back together, I wanted to get as far away from Iraq as I could. I wanted to be near my children. I needed their presence to sustain me. I needed to touch their skin and see that they were safe. I thought of my kids so often during the Canal Hotel experience. They would just pop into my consciousness. While I was working on a body part, trying to make it fit together, Justin or Darren, Katelyn and Jordan, would just appear in my thoughts, sitting at the dinner table or going off to school, laughing at something I said. I wanted them to leave me alone, because it felt like they were watching too closely. I wanted to shield them from the things I saw, but they kept interrupting me, as if pulling me back from the inhumanity of the bombing. They were like a counterbalance to the emotional maelstrom of the work I was doing. While the Canal Hotel bombing pulled me closer to the horrible aspects of war, my children pulled me back toward the beauty and meaningfulness of fatherhood. Even in the midst of the hellishness of war, I could see, and perhaps escape back to, the love that grounded me as a person. I needed my family; they needed me. And that was sustaining and simple and uncompromising. It reminded me that I was their dad and I needed to go home.

  —

  The crossing defined a new way of reasoning, one that stood upon a kind of super-rational logic that allowed me and other soldiers to view our enemy as rabid animals, incapable of human emotion or decency, incapable of feeling loss or tragedy or the need to act within the parameters of the military profession. Embedded in that crossing was a mirror that reflected back all the inhumanity of war, and at times, if you dared linger in that reflection, you could see yourself rendered savage.