Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq

by Dave Hnida

  PARADISE

  GENERAL

  Dr. Dave Hnida

  RIDING THE SURGE

  AT A COMBAT

  HOSPITAL IN IRAQ

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Copyright © 2010 by David William Hnida

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  ISBN: 978-1-4165-9957-9

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-0040-0 (ebook)

  To Mothers and Fathers

  CONTENTS

  1. I’m Not a Solider but I Played One in Iraq

  2. Which End Do the Bullets Come Out?

  3. Camp Boring

  4. Paradise General Hospital

  5. First Day of School

  6. Hot Tamale

  7. The Tug-of-War

  8. “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Tears”

  9. Dear Kids

  10. Rebels with a Cause

  11. Anatomy of a Trauma

  12. Sick Call Sunday

  13. Dante’s Infirmary

  14. Death of an American Soldier

  15. Family Ties

  16. Suicide Isn’t Painless

  17. Blursday

  18. The Guns of August

  19. The Wounded Wore Aftershave

  20. Tale of Two Brothers

  21. You Shoot ’Em, You Own ’Em

  22. Dog Kennels

  23. Last Tango in Tikrit

  24. Hero’s Welcome

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  PARADISE

  GENERAL

  1

  I’M NOT A SOLDIER

  BUT I PLAYED ONE IN IRAQ

  THE LAST TIME I talked with my dad was on a sweltering April evening in 2004. It was a lopsided conversation. He had died of a heart attack almost thirty years earlier. But he was one of the main reasons I was hiding in a sandy ditch in the middle of Iraq, and I had some things to tell him before I died. My dad was a good man, although up until a few days before his death, I didn’t always think so. A hard-toiling factory worker, he drank a fifth of cheap whiskey every day, was a mean drunk, and always left me searching for the answer to why any man felt the need to retreat to the safety of the bottle. I had my hints and theories, but never walked in his shoes, or in this case, his Army boots. It took three hours in a ditch to get a firsthand revelation about why the liquor cabinet was permanently open while I was growing up.

  As a twenty-three-year-old infantry lieutenant at Anzio in World War II, my dad sent a number of other young men into battle and could never forgive himself for the ones who didn’t return. This member of the “Greatest Generation” was silent about his war until he abruptly and permanently corked the bottle in late 1975, when I was a senior in college.

  We were driving from Newark to Philadelphia down the Jersey Turnpike when he threw a couple of quarters into a tollbooth, saying, “That’s not much of a toll in this life, Dave.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant until a painful flood of war memories suddenly spilled from a place deep in his soul. He had never told anyone, including my mom, about any of his wartime experiences. I was the typical college kid who thought I could handle anything the world dared throw at me, but was humbled into silence as each mile marker brought a new and horrible description of the savagery of war.

  In a calm and measured voice, my dad told me about being hit with flying body parts as German artillery shredded the men next to him in a foxhole; driving a knife into the throat of a wide-eyed enemy soldier no older than himself; then sending out on patrol a man, no, a boy, really, who had saved his life in an ambush only the night before. A boy whose machine-gun-riddled body my dad dragged back to American lines a few hours later. Finally came the worst story of all: the fear. The fear of failure. The fear of letting your fellow soldiers down. The paralyzing fear of fear itself. Fear was my father’s lifelong bartender.

  The drive ended in exhausted silence an hour later when he dropped me in front my apartment at the University of Pennsylvania. His voice was steady for the entire trip but as the car braked to a stop, his eyes were damp. With the exception of drunken bursts of anger, it was the most emotion I had seen from my father in my twenty-one years. We shook hands, said our goodbyes, and that was it. Almost. As he rolled up his window, my dad quietly said, “I’m sorry, Dave. I hope I wasn’t a bad father.” He died of a heart attack four days later.

  I think my dad died a more peaceful man, but for me, his stories of war delivered anything but peace. I tried to make sense of the things he had told me in the hour-long monologue, wondering how his experiences shaped him and—as a result—me. And I simply couldn’t shake the last words I would ever hear from him, a questioning statement that was almost a plea for forgiveness. How could I think of him as a terrible father after what he’d been through? I saved myself from a lifetime of regret when I answered with a smile and a quick thumbs-up as he pulled away from the curb.

  As the decades following that car ride melted away, the stories did not—they seemed to be on a constant simmer below the surface of my life. I went on to medical school, got married, and started a family. Yet as I watched my own four children grow, there was always a sober thought that the only way to learn what made my father tick was to leave them, and go to war myself.

  NOW, IN A classic case of be careful of what you wish for, I found myself lying in some nameless ditch along the side of a nameless road outside a village whose name I couldn’t pronounce. It was a beautiful desert night, with a sparkling sky and a moon so brilliant it made me the perfect silhouette.

  “Doc!” The voice came from behind in a stern whisper.

  “Get your ass down and make yourself small!”

  A wiry young sergeant had silently wiggled up beside me.

  “You’re going to get us all killed unless you get the fuck down and eat some sand, sir.”

  He was right. Here I was, a forty-eight-year-old doctor, well schooled in medicine but clueless in the ways of war. And fortunate to be getting lessons from a twenty-three-year-old tutor carrying an oversized M4 automatic rifle. Christ, this kid is the same age as my father when he crawled around Italy in 1943.

  My night in the ditch had actually started hours before the sun went down. We were on our way back from convoyin
g a wounded Iraqi insurgent from our aid station to a British combat hospital. I was nearing the end of my deployment and had been through a few close calls. Now I needed my luck to hold out for just one more ride. I stared out the small window of our Humvee as we weaved and dodged well-hidden IEDs, trying to make sense of why we were risking our skins to save the life of an insurgent who had cursed and spit on us as we loaded his stretcher into the ambulance.

  Along the route, our convoy picked up a number of stragglers, vehicles whose drivers knew there was safety in numbers. Among the group of wheeled hitchhikers were a number of fuel trucks, appetite-whetting targets for anyone with a rocket-propelled grenade. The convoy hauled ass toward our base, making good time until one of our Humvees unexpectedly let out a series of groans and weakly chugged to a halt in the middle of the road. The breakdown left us no choice but to sit and wait for help. And wait we did, watching the sun disappear, and darkness creep up.

  It didn’t take long for word to make its way to the wrong ears that an American convoy was stranded on an isolated road. At first we could vaguely see, then only hear, scrunching footsteps in the darkening fields and groves that ran along both sides of the road. The contractors from the fuel trucks huddled as the soldiers set up a protective perimeter around the dead convoy. I settled into my spot in a ditch that was two feet deep, cradling an M16 rifle, and waited. And listened as the scrunching slowly and steadily got louder. I’m a doctor. What the hell am I doing here? And what will my kids do when they get the news I was killed?

  AS MY FOUR children grew, I made sure their world was different from the one where I grew up. They would never never worry about their father stumbling around drunk in public or throwing an empty booze bottle at their heads. And they’d never cower in a corner waiting for the alcohol to trigger an artificial slumber.

  Though I worked hard, I tried to make it home early every day to have a catch in the backyard or help with homework. And despite offers of more money to work in New York or L.A., I realized the way to have more was to take less, and the best place to raise a family was at the foot of the Rockies in the tight-knit community of Littleton, Colorado.

  Life in Littleton, in fact, seemed to revolve around kids: My family medicine practice was more pediatric than grown-up; I coached Little League baseball, basketball, and football; and I volunteered as the team physician for so many schools, there were days I didn’t know who to root for. Life was good and I was content. I had even made peace with my children’s grandfather—telling my kids the stories of the good times of my childhood, while leaving out the bad.

  Then came two events that shattered my world, and started the wheels that would take me to the ditch.

  The first happened in 1999, a seismic blast that shook the country, as well as my life—the Columbine High School shootings. My office was literally a stone’s throw from the high school; I knew most of the students, parents, and teachers; and most importantly, of the thirteen who died in the shootings, nine were patients of mine, some of whom I had cared for since the day they were born. And as they fell, so did I.

  Soon after, my daughter Katie made history at the University of New Mexico as the first woman ever to play and score points in a major college football game. But her groundbreaking journey was a long and painful one. Katie was originally recruited as a placekicker by the University of Colorado, but a coaching change right before arriving on campus abruptly chilled the atmosphere for a female playing a traditionally all-male sport. It was clear the new head coach, Gary Barnett, didn’t want Katie around and a few of the players picked up on the unwelcome message. The harassment started the first day she stepped onto the field, and never let up. She was cursed, groped in the huddle, and had footballs thrown at her head as she practiced her kicking. Soon after the season ended, the nightmare of every father took place: Katie was raped. He was a teammate she considered a friend, the last guy she ever thought would harm her.

  It would have been easy to quit, but she never considered it. Katie left Colorado and found a home at the University of New Mexico where she played for a team that accepted and encouraged her to make history. I was proud beyond words the day she trotted onto the field to kick against UCLA on national TV.

  She had accomplished her goal, and went on to play in another game the following year at New Mexico. Despite her successes, Katie still had days of darkness, and with them came a struggle I woke to each morning—one inner voice goading me to kill the guy who had raped her while another mocked me as a failure for not protecting her.

  My life became a bottomless well of guilt and it seemed the only way to lift myself out was to serve penance: do something to protect, help, save the young people of the world. Memories of my dad’s experiences resurfaced, and suddenly I knew where I was needed, where I could help, where I might find peace. That place was war. Tonight, though, I wondered if I was just plain stupid: dying in a ditch wasn’t going to fix the world or explain the meaning of life.

  NOW WE COULD hear whispering and muffled voices in the fields around us. All of the noises were magnified, and my heart thumped like a runaway bass drum. How long was I in this same spot? The cramps in my legs answered forever. It was time to move. No one had ever taught me the proper Army techniques of a “low crawl” or “high crawl”; I just slithered along the sandy ground in a way I remembered seeing in war movies. I was surprised at how hard and rocky the ground was; I thought sand was supposed to be soft and friendly, just like at the beach. Jesus, I miss the beach. Every year or so we took the kids to Disneyland and the beach in California, but that was the extent of our travels. Not much of an adventurer, I had never even been out of the country until my plane landed in the middle of a war zone just months before.

  An odd light caught my attention as I settled into a new position. A red beam from about thirty yards way—it had to be from one of my guys. The beam narrowed to a dot and danced back and forth across my face, then slowly moved to a spot directly over my heart. Shit, was I a target? The dot then jerked back and forth from me to the ground. I flattened my body like a pancake into the hard sand.

  This time I heard the young sergeant’s movement before his voice.

  “Sir, you’ve got to move. You’re right between that .50 cal and the hedge. They come through there, your head is going to get blown clear off your neck.”

  I swung my head around and saw a .50 caliber machine gun on top of a Humvee pointed directly at an opening to the fields. And I was exactly between that opening and the gun. I murmured a sorry and asked where I should go.

  “Back to your position, sir. We need you there. Not here.”

  So much for knowledge of defensive perimeters and tactics. This wasn’t what I had in mind when I joined: I was expecting to take care of soldiers, not be one.

  WHEN THE WAR erupted in the spring of 2003, the decision to join was far from automatic. I was not some Yankee Doodle doctor who wanted to make the Middle East safe for democracy. I possessed no secret clues about elusive WMDs. And though I loved my country, the start of the conflict didn’t infect me with a sudden bout of acute patriotism. But when I heard the Army needed doctors, the deal was clinched. It was all about the kids; maybe not my kids, but someone’s kids. Across America were families who went through the motions of life by day and paced the floor by night while their imaginations terrorized their hearts with worry.

  So at an age when people retire from the military, I pulled the trigger and became the Army’s newest recruit. They even handed me the rank of major, pretty good I was told for a forty-eight-year-old whose military experience consisted of watching Saving Private Ryan.

  I should have known better. The transition from a comfortable civilian life to instant soldier was my personal version of shock and awe. I was simply too old to enter a world of saluting, marching, or giving orders. And I really hated being ordered around, especially when that order was punctuated by a raised voice. I realize a fighting machine isn’t built on etiquette, yet I never yelled an
d expected the same courtesy in return. I got pissed when a pimple-faced instructor more than twenty years my junior called me a “clueless asshole” during basic training. The fatal infraction: a loose thread on the shoulder of my uniform. Christ, the way he screamed you’d have thought I had left a scalpel in him during surgery. When I flicked the thread in his direction and told him a deep, dark anatomical place to stick it, I thought his head would explode. And was disappointed when it didn’t.

  The brave new world of military courtesy was especially foreign to me: I liked to be called “Dave,” not “Sir.” Plus, I preferred a “hi” and a handshake when I met someone—a neighborly friendliness that didn’t go over very well the first time I met a general. My outstretched hand was greeted with a stunned look, then livid laser beams shooting from his eyes.

  NOW I CAUGHT a whiff of tobacco smoke from beyond the hedge. They were closer. Would they try to kill us or capture us? An intelligence briefing said there was a price on our heads—the insurgents were offering cold hard cash for an American taken alive: a captured enlisted soldier was worth $2,500 cash; an officer, $5,000. My crew had made a death pact weeks before during a road trip to Baghdad: we’d fight to the next-to-the-last bullet, then use that last bullet on ourselves to avoid capture—there was simply no way we were going to become stars on an Internet throat-slitting video. As the highest-ranking officer, I would make sure the deeds were done, and then pull the final trigger. I wondered if it would come to that tonight.

  THOUGH THE ARMY was quick to snatch me up and start yelling at me, it took more than eight months to get my orders to Iraq. It was January of 2004, less than two weeks before my newly assigned unit departed—and I only got the job because their doctor dropped out at the last minute. Things happened so quickly, there wasn’t time to reconsider the leap to war. My kids were torn; on one hand worrying I was going to be shipped home in a casket, on the other, proud I was taking the risk to help soldiers who were, in many cases, the same age as they. We talked a lot about the importance of serving others—being a doer, not just a talker. I hoped I was setting a good example instead of playing the over-the-hill fool.