What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  At the end of the day you feel more like a murderer than a soldier. It’s almost like assassination. I don’t know what was going through that man’s mind other than a bullet. When it comes down to it, I really don’t understand him and why he would want to do something like that. Obviously he was convinced that it was the right thing to do by somebody or by his own doing. I can’t really say that it was the wrong thing that he was doing. I just know that the American soldiers could have very possibly been my friends or somebody I knew, and I knew what side I was on. I was put in a position where I had to take a side. It kind of sucks.

  I don’t think the violence would be the same if the soldiers weren’t there. The insurgents were initially trying to attack soldiers. For the longest time it was just American soldiers that were being targeted. Just as my unit started to leave and get the Iraqis into positions of power, trained up or whatever, did the major attacks turn toward the Iraqi infrastructure that we’re putting into place.

  We had a kid that was carrying a bomb in his backpack, and he just . . . he’s always messing around with the soldiers, and somebody detonated the bomb in his backpack. So you never know, really. There’s a school right near the Joint Command Center, and the kids walk right through the JCC to go to school. They all have the same blue backpack. They come up to soldiers and they beg for stuff: MREs, candy, pens, sunglasses. They crowd around . . . mess around with the soldiers. Half the time the soldiers are kind to the kids, and sometimes the kids aren’t very kind to the soldiers. Soldiers get teased a lot. A lot of the kids quickly learn soldiers’ names, soldiers’ ranks. Some kids in Iraq know army regulations better than soldiers. They’ll call sergeants “privates,” and the sergeants get all upset, you know—I’m not a fucking private, I’m a goddamn sergeant. Some of the kids have little knives and they threaten soldiers with them.

  So the kid with the backpack comes to the Joint Command Center, and he was with another huge group of kids, and sometimes I’ll actually check kids’ backpacks. I was mostly interested in what kind of books they had. One day one of the kids came up and he was playing with the soldiers, joking, and he seemed pretty much unaware that anything was really wrong or going to happen. He was completely at ease. With suicide bombers, we’re always looking for stress in them. They’re extremely focused because they’re going to commit suicide. I just don’t think the kid knew what he had in his pack, judging from what the other soldiers were telling me.

  So the kid was playing around with the soldiers and the bomb detonated. I don’t know who actually triggered the bomb. I mean, that area is just so completely crowded with people all the time that it could have been somebody standing right there watching the whole thing, and we didn’t find any kind of detonation device on the kid. We found car bombers with their feet duct-taped to the gas pedal and then taped to the seat so they couldn’t get out. Whether they originally volunteered to be the car bomber or it was just a guy that got caught up and turned into a car bomber is unknown. It’s obvious that some of these guys aren’t able to get out of the situation that they’re in. No soldiers were killed when the kid’s backpack blew up, but the boy was killed.

  We deal with, like, stress in situations like that in strange ways. This might seem horrible to you, but almost everybody kind of laughed about it. I don’t know, it’s just—Shit, did you see that kid’s arm? That fucking thing went right over the fucking Humvee. In situations that are just so horrible, sometimes all you can do is laugh. I don’t know if you laugh because you’ve survived and it’s ironic or because it’s just so bizarre that you don’t have any other emotion. I mean, sometimes I guess you cry when you’re happy and sometimes you laugh when you’re sad, maybe. I don’t know.

  I think I had been in Iraq about five months when Abu Ghraib happened. I think somebody told me about it over an e-mail. I looked on the Internet and found out what I could, found pictures of it. Then it was all over the place. I was at chow in the cafeteria and we had a TV in there, and they showed pictures of it. Usually it’s Armed Forces Network, but they have Fox shows too. I wasn’t really surprised it was happening, but the extent that it was happening was a surprise.

  In the first Gulf War, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers just laid down their arms and joined the American side. They surrendered. That’s not happening anymore. They’re fighting to the death. No Iraqi, no insurgent, wants to be captured by American forces now because they envision themselves in Abu Ghraib. The general consensus is Guantánamo Bay is equal to or worse than Abu Ghraib. There’s a huge fear in the Iraqi population and the insurgency that if they get captured, they’re going to be treated horribly.

  I knew that the entire Muslim world would just freak out. I knew the insurgency was going to escalate. It recruited tons more people to fight against us, and I knew that there’d be an increase in violence in sector and that I’d have to deal with that. It happened. I mean, the violence definitely increased and people really changed their minds. The Iraqis that were on the fence pretty much jumped over on the side of the insurgency when news of what was happening at Abu Ghraib got out.

  “Some of these people are the

  lost generation”

  EARL T. HECKER

  SURGEON

  MAY-OCTOBER 2004

  LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER, LANDSTUHL, GERMANY

  I think I arrived at Landstuhl on Saturday and I started work on the Monday. We were available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. When a soldier is coming in from Iraq, the information on the injuries is sent ahead to us. They tell us there is an airplane coming into Ramstein, and they list the number of patients who are coming in and the severity of injury and what’s happened to them downrange. We are told to be prepared at a certain time when they’re going to arrive, whether it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, three o’clock in the morning, six o’clock in the morning. I lived only five minutes away, so I took more calls than the other people.

  We talk about thirty thousand injured coming through Landstuhl, whether they’re badly injured or not so badly injured, that’s a lot of people going through there. When the improvised explosive device came on board, a whole new era of warfare and injuries came with it. Years from now Americans are going to be walking around and seeing these badly wounded people. They will ask, “Was this guy in a car accident?” No, the guy wasn’t in a car accident; the guy was in Baghdad.

  I remember this soldier who had an injury to the neck, and he was responsive but couldn’t move his extremities. They had done X-rays at the battle site and they were preparing to ship him as a “priority one” on board the airplane, so the severity of his injury was a big deal. He needed special personnel and a nurse with him, and he was on a breathing machine or something. We got reports that he couldn’t move his extremities and obviously there may be some paralysis there, quad paralysis. Shrapnel penetrated his neck and his spinal cord. I think he knew all along he was going to be a quadriplegic because he couldn’t feel his arms or legs. Every morning he wanted us to show him his arms and legs. Part of my job was to notify the family, and we have a private line for those calls. I asked him once if he had a girlfriend and if he wanted me to call his girlfriend, but the answer was “No, do not call . . . just call my mother and let my mother know that I’m here.”

  I am a trauma surgeon, so I understand the degree of penetrating and blunt trauma in auto accidents, but this is much more. This is ten times what I’ve ever seen. Soldiers in Iraq are surviving horrific injuries. We see a lot of burns. It can be body burns: 10 percent, 50 percent, 80 percent body burns. We’ve had gasoline trucks blown up and the driver or the support staff brought in. This one individual had a greater than 50 percent burn over his total body. You add the age to that and that gives you an idea of what his mortality is going to be or what his survivability is going to be. If he has a 50 percent third-degree burn and his age is twenty, he has a 70 percent chance of dying. If you have a 50 percent burn and you’re fifty years of age, you’re going to die. Thi
s person had facial burns and body burns. He had his flak jacket on, so he didn’t burn his chest, but he burned his arms and legs and face.

  We had one fellow who had his legs blown off and we had to do further amputation. It’s horrific. The tissue damage was so severe that it became gangrenous. There was no blood supply and we had to do a higher amputation. We had called his father, and his father came to visit him. He died, though. There were a lot of things that went bad.

  These kids are really putting themselves on the line and you feel bad that you can’t do more for them. You do as much as you can and later understand fully the severity of their illnesses and what’s going to happen to them down the road. I’m not talking about this week. I’m talking about a month, two months, six months . . . a year. What’s going to happen to them?

  They deserve a better life afterward and to be able to take care of their families, take care of themselves, be productive, be part of society. I’m not convinced that all these guys are going to be a part of society anymore. I think they’re going to be withdrawn. Psychologically they’ll be withdrawn because of the trauma of what they’ve gone through. I think physically they won’t be able to get in and out of the car. They won’t be able to go shopping. They won’t be able to play with their kids the way normal individuals play with their kids. I don’t know if they’re going to live up to their expectations on what they’re going to do in life anymore. Were they going to be a mechanic? Were they going to be an engineer? Were they going to be a doctor? What were they going to be when they finished the military? Maybe you have to think about a different profession, a different job. Will he ever get married? I don’t know. This is the secret side of the war. Nobody knows about it. Nobody talks about it. Nobody addresses it. Nobody looks at it.

  I’ve been to Normandy. I’ve been to Flanders Fields. I’ve been to all these places. The soldiers are dead. They’re dead. But this is an injury war. This is not so much a death war. Maybe that’s the way we should look at it. Not dead but injured, an injury war. I saw injuries that I’ll never forget. People don’t get that. They really don’t. I don’t know what it’s going to do to our society. If people understood that this is a war about catastrophically wounded young people, then maybe they’ll appreciate what these kids really did for them and for their country. Right now it’s absolutely hidden. I don’t think most people think about these kids at all. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Some of these people are the lost generation. They’re gone. It is a sad way of putting it. I don’t know. Some of these soldiers are never going to be the same again. Ever. I feel bad for them and I get upset. They’re just lost.

  I thought about some of these injuries, one soldier in particular, and thought he should have died. He’d be better off. Is that a bad thing? Yeah, I think it’s a bad thing on my part. I’m not necessarily religious, but I’m also not a person who promotes death. But I’m sure, down the line, he’s going to think about it. I think he will think about it. It reminds me of Johnny Got His Gun. You ever hear of that movie?

  “Shot in the head”

  BRADY VAN ENGELEN

  “THE GUNNERS”

  1ST ARMORED DIVISION

  MAY 2003-JULY 2004

  “GUNNER PALACE,” BAGHDAD

  BRONZE STAR (FOR VALOR)

  When I got shot in the head, it was a typical day. April 6th, 2004, I believe, is the exact date, and if you look back through the records, there were lots of casualties in the month of April. It’s probably still one of the top five months for American casualties.

  I was in a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad that had a lot of ties with what was going on in Falluja. They felt that Falluja was kind of their rally cry, more or less. I don’t know if the Sunnis really have one strong defining leader, but there are imams all over. There’s a mosque on about every third or fourth block over there. That imam had said that it’s time to rise up against the Americans, and he’d been saying that for a few days.

  The night before I got shot, we were getting hit constantly with mortars all night long. No one was sleeping. We had a unit outside the FOB helping out at the police station, making sure it wasn’t overrun by insurgents. And the next night, the mission changed, and it was my responsibility to be with the unit supporting the police station. I decided to take a two-man sniper team and a four-man security team with me and set up about a half block down from the police station on top of the three-story building. We had a view directly down to the mosque, so if they decided to attack us, we’d have a pretty good idea that they were coming.

  It was getting pretty dark by the time we left the unit, and we’d already started taking mortars, so the evening’s activities had already started. The radio was going crazy with the stuff going on in the neighborhood and throughout Baghdad. It was chaos and we were stuck out there in the middle of it.

  The sniper team was set up a little lower than I was, and I had a wall that I was peeking over every once in a while to see what was going on. It was an overlook on a roof, and it was about chest high, so I could stand up and peek and sit back down to call in on the radio what I was seeing. The police station was to my left and the mosque was straight ahead. I was looking around like a groundhog, pretty much just looking around and seeing what’s going on.

  I guess I’d peeked up for a little bit too long, and I think the only thing that could have hit me was an insurgent sniper. I heard the crack of the gunfire and then I could feel my heels kicking against the ground. I was lying there and I can hear all the soldiers running around and going crazy. The radio was sitting right next to me, and I could hear them yelling, “Lieutenant’s been shot, Lieutenant’s been shot!” I was shot from below so the bullet went underneath my helmet and kicked out the back. To this day, I have yet to see the helmet. I know that if the bullet had come from any other angle, I would be dead. I was lying on the ground, kicking my heels uncontrollably against the ground. I don’t know why. I had no clue what was really going on.

  Schemerhorn leaned over me and I could tell that he was freaking out—his eyes were the size of dinner plates. I could tell he was scared shitless, but I didn’t really know it was that bad until he was putting the bandage on my head and his hand was shaking and the bandage was like a wet piece of toilet paper falling across my face. I’d been bleeding so much that part of the bandage was like a wet rag. I thought, Oh shit, and just looked at him and said, “Well, tell Anne I love her.” I thought I was dead.

  They dragged me downstairs from the roof and I could see that one of the other guys got shot in the ankle. I knew it was bad and I thought we’d be lucky to get out of there alive. It sort of felt like Custer’s last stand. I was making sure I had all my ammo and stuff, and they just kept firing RPGs at us, pounding the building from the outside. By that time, I guess they’d called in to our unit and told them that I was down.

  Things were going crazy all over the sector, and they were rallying everyone to see who they could put together for a medevac. The unit to our right was getting hit pretty hard. Another piece of our unit was getting hit at the same time, and also we were taking mortars back at our command center. I’m trying to stay awake the best I can, enjoy what time I’ve got while I can . . . that’s pretty much what I thought. We were probably there for half an hour before anyone picked us up.

  Our Paladin vehicles are really thin-skinned. If they would have taken an RPG, it would kill everyone inside it and would turn it into a giant flaming metal ball. So they had to come up with another tracked, heavy-skinned vehicle. They ended up using an M88; it’s like a huge, gigantic tank they use to tow tanks. The M88 was getting hit by all these RPGs, three or four in a row, and the Humvees were behind it, basically taking cover so they weren’t getting shot. The Humvees are the ones that pulled through, extracted me and the rest of my team, and got us back onto the compound.

  I think I passed out on the helicopter. I was kind of in and out at the CASH hospital in Baghdad. I remember talking to them and they’re trying to k
eep me awake by talking and asking me questions: “Oh, you’re a ranger, huh?” And I thought, Where the fuck did that come from? I got a hole in my head and you want to talk about ranger school? It was weird. I think that’s when they drugged me up on morphine.

  I was kind of wary of calling my folks at this point, but the commander pretty much came into the room and said, “Here’s the phone,” and he started dialing, asking, “What’s your parents’ number?” I was kind of hesitant at first, and then he said, “You don’t even have a choice in this. You’re calling your parents. They’re going to hear it from you before they hear it from anyone.” So he put me on the phone, and I said, “Well, Mom, good news and bad news. The good news? I’m coming home early.” She asked what the bad news was. I told her I got shot, and she got quiet for about two minutes.

  That’s about my last memory from Baghdad. After that I had a craniotomy—they removed a small piece of skull fragment in my brain and installed a metal plate in my head. I was at Walter Reed for about nine months. They did a bunch of neurological tests and they said that I’m fine. The doctors there said I’m pretty lucky, and I guess I am.