Paradise General

by Dave Hnida

  We were told we had six days at Benning to get ready for our mission before boarding a flight to Iraq—and sorry, but tough shit, with the Surge we’re running more people through than ever. We medical folks stole quick glances at each other and murmured a few curses. Hell, we shouldn’t have been surprised—not only were we rapidly sending over tens of thousands of troops, we also needed tens of thousands of civilians who would do the jobs soldiers used to do: cook, clean, run recreation facilities, and make sure the laundry got done. And the American contingent would do pretty well for a year’s work: 50—150 grand—all tax-free.

  How times had changed. In World War II, the percentage of contractors to military was 3 percent; Korea 5 percent; Vietnam and the Gulf War saw the number rise to 10 percent. Now with the number of soldiers vaulting to 180,000 in the months to come, the percentage of contractors would hit an identical number—a 50-50 split. Many weren’t even well-paid Americans; it seems we hired a lot of Iraqis, Sri Lankans, Russians, and other “third country nationals” to do the menial work that paid them what would be pauper’s wages in America—but big bucks in their home countries. Talk about the privatization of war.

  The gun to start the race to deploy was fired quickly. Our bloated group was herded, then stuffed like sausages into a hot tent and cooked until overdone. We were subjected to hours of death by PowerPoint on subjects such as: “Be nice to your fellow soldier” and “Don’t get an STD.” We were also given crash courses on the climate in the Middle East (a little helpful), Middle Eastern culture (a little less helpful), and how to pull guard duty (to which I thought, if I’m pulling guard duty, the war is lost).

  The only amusement of the day came when we were fed lunch, one MRE per person, with exactly enough Meals Ready to Eat for each person—no seconds, no extras. Our famished group lumbered up a small hill and plucked the plastic bags containing our meals out of the back of a drab green cargo truck, but some slippery fingers left me with an empty stomach.

  “Dave, where’s your food, dude?” It was Bill Stanton, our newly met orthopedist who was also Tikrit-bound—and seemed like a friendly guy …

  Rick answered for me. “Listen to this. So me and Dave grab our MRE things and figure it’s a good idea to hit the porta-johns before eating. I’m next door peeing when I hear this pinball machine next door. Ping-ping-ping-ping. Then a loud splash … then an even louder “Shit!” Turns out we had one MRE bouncing off the walls and now floating in a sea of blue-coated turds.”

  “Dude, I hope you stitch better than you piss.”

  Bill laughed.

  Both Ricky and Bill then dug through their extras and made sure I at least had something to quiet my stomach. It was the first of many emergency meals they would serve me that summer.

  The war against hunger didn’t get much better on day two. Up at 5 A.M., we trudged to the mess tent where we were greeted by a not-so-cheery bunch of civilians standing behind a steam table doling out breakfast.

  I held my flimsy plastic plate up like a begging child.

  “I’ll take the scrambled eggs, pancakes, and a couple slices of bacon, please.”

  “One entrée and one side.” Scowling, she didn’t give me much time to make a choice.

  The server next to her chimed in.

  “So what’s it going to be? Keep the line moving or get out.”

  “What’s a side? The bacon? Potatoes? That gray stuff moving on its own?”

  Another cold hard stare.

  Well, I guess you’re not morning people, are you?

  “Okay, fill me up with whatever isn’t against the law.”

  One small scoop of rock-hard scrambled eggs and one thin slice of fat impersonating bacon plopped onto my plate.

  Rick stared at my tray, particles of imitation eggs stuck to the corners of his mouth.

  “That’s one deadly coronary artery plaque right there, Davy-boy. That’s if the food servers don’t kill you first.”

  Rick’s quip was washed down with a lukewarm cup of watery coffee mixed with paint thinner. Sons of bitches. I was a coffee addict, and you would think the Army would be coffee experts. Not even close. It reminded me of the sorry days during my first deployment when I would simply spoon out and swallow granules of Taster’s Choice whenever we were on the road and I needed to wake up after a short night’s sleep.

  My stomach was still growling as we lined up for yet another formation—and got a mandatory chewing out for a variety of offenses, real and imagined.

  “You people need to step it up a notch. Our EDD is now five days. Your LO for the day is gear, then you’ll head for FAC and issues about EPW at the ROC. Remember we’re just a MAT for you people and we need your help. Your POC is Sergeant Smith if you have questions.”

  Holy smokes! What was that alphabet soup of instructions? I felt like I needed to watch “Army Sesame Street” so I could decipher the acronyms.

  I turned to Rick.

  “Did you get any of that?”

  “Nope, but I think we showed up at the wrong army. That’s Chinese or something coming out of that guy’s mouth. Well, let’s just follow everybody else, like always.”

  We stood still as the massive formation dissolved into small groups and finally spotted a few of the doctors collecting near a doorway. We headed in that direction and soon were bused over to an acronym that I knew, the CIF or Central Issue Facility—a giant three-block-long dull brick warehouse bursting with equipment. We were handed four duffel bags in which to stuff five duffels’ worth of gear including Kevlar helmet, body armor, mosquito netting, and the all-important shovel and entrenching tool—what I was going to shovel and entrench at a hospital, I didn’t know.

  Three hours later, we thought we had everything we could possibly need—until we hit the last station where we were issued winter jackets, fleece parkas, long underwear, and cold weather gloves. We were now officially set for a trip to Antarctica, where to the best of our knowledge, there were no active ongoing combat operations.

  Later that day we were issued our weapons, an M9 automatic handgun. Veterans mockingly called it the popgun, yet it was better than throwing stones … a little. Popgun or not, it was a valuable, and expensive, weapon being placed in our care. For the rest of the week, every time I went into the porta-john—aka the blue canoe—I held on to that pistol like it was a million-dollar winning lottery ticket. Drop that baby into the blue canoe and I’d have to go fishing.

  That night we sat in our cramped room assembling gear—

  stuffing heavy armor plates into the lining of the combat vest, and trying on uniforms, which came in the two standard Army sizes, too large and too small. As I surveyed four duffelsful of junk dumped on the floor, I realized we were now an army of Velcro. Grenade pouches, ammo holders, and holsters were all attached by Velcro instead of snaps. I had Rick help attach my Velcro helmet liner and webbing since I had no clue which tab stuck to which. At one point my helmet Velcro got stuck on my crotch Velcro and I couldn’t pull it loose. Some guy walking by our open door looked stunned as he watched me frantically pull, yank, and punch at my helmeted groin.

  An experienced soldier could have assembled everything in thirty minutes; it took me more than four hours, even with help. But even then, I wasn’t done—it all had to be stuffed back into the duffels. That exercise turned into a game of mulligans and do-overs: fill up the bags—then, in anger, kick the leftovers still on the floor—dump the bags, then try different combinations in different duffels. It was like a game show, guessing what would fit where. I finally fell asleep one pissed-off civilian in an Army costume.

  We were greeted the next morning by a foul-looking breakfast of some dark, shiny material dumped on top of a stone-hard biscuit (Rick swore it looked like something he removed from an old lady the week before), then headed out to the morning’s formation. It was scheduled for 0600, but Rick scurried at a pace worthy of an Olympic race walker.

  As he puffed up a small incline he said, “If you’re not ten minut
es early, you’re five minutes late.” It was the debut of a phrase that would attack me every morning in the months to come. I was joined at the hip to a new best friend—but a new best friend who was also an obsessive, anal-compulsive surgeon who loved to be early. It was a sharp contrast to my “the war will still be there when we get there” attitude. But since he helped me with the major construction project called my equipment the night before, I was obligated to scurry along like a kid late for school.

  We arrived before the rest of the crew, which turned out to be a great way to attach names to the faces of the people we would be working with—I had met everyone the first day yet still mixed up names and jobs. The obsessive-compulsive Rick was like human Directory Assistance as the docs made their way up the small hill.

  “Now, you know Billy Stanton, right? Ortho. He’s from Florida. That big black guy with the giant muscles is another surgeon. Bernard Harrison. Nice fella. Minnesota.

  “Mike Barron is like you. A family doc who is supposed to work in the ER. The flat head comes from him being an ex-marine. From St. Louis.

  “The husky one with big glasses is the other ER guy, Gerry Maloney. I think from Ohio. The short guy behind him is our other surgeon—Ian Nunnally. He’s from Ohio, too. Kind of quiet. The older guy with the gray hair yapping away is Colonel Blok—anesthesia gas passer from I don’t where. Then all of those others, hell, I think they’re doctors or anesthetists or something. But they ain’t going to Tikrit. I just heard they’ll train with us this week.”

  Close to forty in all, only eight of us were doctors who would head off to staff a little hospital sitting smack in the middle of the Surge.

  As others fell into formation, we murmured his and good mornings. Except for Billy, who already knew Rick’s obsession with the clock.

  “Dudes, when did you guys get here, last night?”

  His answer was an interruption from the front of the formation, a squealing “We’re still not getting done fast enough, people—what’s wrong with us?”

  Hell, we didn’t know what was wrong with us, and I don’t think we really cared, but we did learn we were heading over to “Medical” to make sure we were fit enough to deploy.

  We all thought it common sense the medical screening would be the most thorough of all the things we did that week. After all, you wouldn’t want to send a soldier with a hidden medical condition off to the war zone. It turned out the screening did wind up taking a lot of time, but it was anything but thorough. Out of the four hours we spent at the medical station, a grand eight minutes was spent on actual screening. The essentials included making sure our vaccinations were up to date, we weren’t carrying HIV in our blood, and that we could hear little toots and beeps in a soundproof booth. My shots were still good from my last deployment, my rapid HIV was negative, and my hearing test was a pass. Then it was my turn for a face-to-face meeting with the physician: How are you feeling? Okay. Any medical problems not listed on the form? No. Great, you’re good to go, and thanks for serving our country.

  No blood pressure check. No listening to my heart. No vision test. Not even a hand in front of the face and guessing how many fingers I could see. As far as the Army was concerned, I was good to go.

  But Rick wasn’t. He had failed his hearing test—badly—and needed an MRI of his head before deploying. The test was scheduled at 9 A.M. the next day, so he’d miss the fun of a group of forty doctors and anesthetists playing soldier, the big event on the schedule of day three at Benning. It was a day that would highlight our cluelessness.

  Out on the makeshift training grounds, we shimmied under and caught our pants on barbed wire, pushed the overweight docs by their butts over not-so-Himalayan three-foot walls, and threw fake hand grenades, which more times than not hit the instructors rather than the targets.

  We then were sent to an adjacent field, handed dummy M16 rifles, and practiced turning and firing from different postures and positions. We were all supposed to turn in the same direction, then rapid-fire a series of blanks. Sounds easy … except for a group of civilian doctors. Typically, half of the group spun one way, the other half the other, and we wound up blasting each other with surprised wide-eyed looks painted on our faces. The only true casualty was one doc who bloodied his lip bringing his weapon to the ready position as we sidestepped down a make-believe alley in a wide-open grassy field. (“Use your imagination, people!”)

  The afternoon, however, brought a true adventure in terror: taking our M9 pistols apart and cleaning them. Some of the younger doctors had never handled a weapon before, and since we were given no formal instruction all we could do was try to help each other out was offer a few words of encouragement as the instructors raced through our section of the tent.

  The M9 pistol has a thick, dangerous spring hidden deep inside, and before you could say “Incoming,” there were springs rocketing like missiles through the tent, striking people in the head, face, and neck. We could only hope the remaining two days would be casualty-free.

  The following morning started with a smattering of catch-up paperwork, followed by a mandatory course on first-aid. Mandatory meant everyone, even physicians.

  The instructor stood with his hands on his hips as he blared instructions in a wailing monotone.

  “If someone’s bleeding, what’s the best way to take care of it? You put pressure on it, people. And if someone’s in shock, elevate their legs above the level of their heart. Then wait for the experts. It’s not that difficult, people.”

  Our eyes rolled like bowling balls. Thanks for the instruction, I was sure we were heading over to Iraq because they needed doctors to elevate legs, then call for help. People.

  The final task was to qualify with our pistols, meaning we had to hit a certain number of targets before we’d be allowed in hostile territory with a loaded weapon. The course was a series of plastic targets that sprung up in a random sequence at distances of anywhere from ten to fifty meters. I thought the green targets were shaped like little Iraqi women in robes, which was a little freakish. When my turn came up, I walked down the firing line with a group of ten other shooters and punched a magazine of ammo into my pistol. At the order of “Fire,” the first “little woman” sprung up and with it a sensation of being in the middle of a bag of microwaving popcorn. Pop-pop-pop. But while my body was holding my weapon at Benning, my mind was in Iraq. In 2004. Outside Baghdad. And the pops were real gunfire. I just stared at the first several targets as they sprung up, then down—I was unable to squeeze off a single shot. Then just as suddenly, the time machine dropped me back at Benning—and I hit the next thirty silhouettes in a row. Sharpshooter. Not bad for a doctor. But I had never frozen in any situation before. Bad for a doctor. What the hell happened? And would it happen again?

  That night, we sat on the grass and drank our one-night-only treat of a final beer, celebrating the news that Rick was medically cleared and able to deploy with the group. We had already started to bond as a team, and worry over our ability to work together slowly dissolved. The only thing left was the anxiety over how I personally would perform.

  As I tossed and turned in my bunk that final night, I flashed back to a time more than sixty years earlier … My dad had spent his nights at Benning with a flashlight under his covers—surviving on an hour or two of sleep as he studied for officer training—afraid he would wash out or miss an important point that might cost a life in war outside a lesson plan. How would I do? Did I know enough? Would I freeze? A part of me dreaded the answers. It made no sense; I’d already been in the war and didn’t run away, but this time was different. I’d be on the other side of the helicopter; instead of sending wounded to the experts, I was supposed to be the expert saving them.

  The next morning we bused to the airport and were stuffed into a plane that was retired from commercial service in the 1970s, and before entering the cockpit, the pilot went from soldier to soldier thanking each for our service. I thought it was a nice gesture, until it was time for takeoff and h
e got on the intercom saying, “Don’t you listen to what the media has to say. We are going to win this war. Ignore CNN, the Communist News Network.”

  Shit, I didn’t need a lunatic flying us over the ocean in a duct-taped aircraft. But at least I was stuffed into a middle seat between two overweight contractors who would provide great padding if we crashed.

  3

  CAMP BORING

  IT TOOK EIGHTEEN hours for DTA, or Duct-Taped Airlines, to deliver us to the Promised Land. The good news: the flight was free. The bad: I drew the middle seat for the marathon journey and was surrounded by the enemy for a nonstop nightmare. Such as the guy who sat in the row in front of me, you know, the one who cranks his seat back until your knees greet your throat. In the window seat was a rustic fellow who decided it was okay to chew tobacco as long as he spat its tarlike residue into a handheld paper cup. The problem, though, was a mouth with the aim of a drunken garden hose. I watched stringy lines of black goo fly onto my uniform and coalesce into the solid patches of a malodorous pothole repair. As I dodged the liquid bullets from the left of me, I was trying to figure out why the guy to the right of me smelled like a commercial for lactose intolerance. It suddenly struck me six hours into the flight—a momentous revelation, in fact—that the Army did this on purpose to make soldiers want to get to Iraq.

  Blessed respite and fresh air came with a short fuel stop in Budapest. It was mid-afternoon local time and we were allowed to wander the crowded concourse for the one-hour refueling. Rick and I meandered through the terminal, watching the locals scurry to board flights to wherever Hungarians travel. As we watched them, they watched us—a huge mass of American soldiers in uniform strolling through their airport—and gave us a wide berth, pulling their gawking children out of the way. Although we were now allies, it seemed the oldest Hungarians stared at us as if we were Germans or Russians from decades past. We grabbed a sandwich and a Coke, snapped some pictures, and generally wasted time walking cramps out of our legs.