Figure 7 Amenah getting around quite well after her operation
Source: World Relief—Deanna Dolan
The day when Amenah and Maha were to get on a plane with Kevin Jarrard’s wife Kelly to make the flight back to Jordan, Deanna said, “It was very emotional. Everybody was crying, even Steve and Sarah’s children were crying. Maha was crying. Maha grabbed Steve’s neck and wouldn’t let go. Now that’s unusual because her being a Muslim woman, she would normally not interact with a man that way. She really loved Pastor Steve.”
Then the plane lifted into the air over Nashville and flew away, taking quite a few hearts tugging along with it.
* * *
On March 11, 2008, President George W. Bush landed in Air Force One at the Nashville airport and met Dr. Karla Christian. He had these words to say to the press about her. “This is Dr. Christian, Dr. Karla Christian, who really symbolizes the best of America. She and a team of hers have performed surgery on a little Iraqi girl who was discovered by United States Marines. People in Nashville raised the money for the family; they were supported by the Marines there in Iraq; some of the Marines raised money; and they sent this little girl, whose heart was ailing, to America, right here to Nashville. And Karla and her team healed the little girl and she’s back in Iraq. And the contrast couldn’t be more vivid. We got people in Iraq who murder the innocent to achieve their political objectives—and we’ve got Americans, who heal the broken hearts of little Iraqi girls. Ours is a compassionate nation that believes in the universality of freedom—and ours is a nation full of loving souls that when they find a stranger in need will lend their God-given talents to help that stranger. And that’s precisely what happened.”
* * *
Kelly Jarrard and Glenn Susskind flew with Amenah and her mother from Nashville back to Amman, Jordan. Then, for the last leg of the journey, from Amman to Baghdad, Kevin didn’t have a female able to accompany the mother and daughter. So, with the surgery successful and her coming home, he had to head back to the family for another powwow with the brothers, one he didn’t welcome, because the last one had nearly led to gunfire.
He told them, “Listen. I have kept my word to you. I promised you that your sister Maha would not be dishonored. And I have her and Amenah in Amman, Jordan. But I do not have anyone who can fly with them from Amman to Baghdad. So you’ve got two options. They can stay in Amman, and I don’t have any way to care for them, or you can permit her to fly the last leg on a Royal Jordanian Airlines unescorted. We’ll fly her home from Baghdad.”
There was a hesitant moment, then they finally said, “Go ahead, proceed.”
Kevin knew he had done his very best to keep his word.
On March 7, Kevin picked up Amenah’s father, Alaa Thabit, and they grabbed a CH-53 helicopter down to the Marine base in western Iraq, Al Asad. There they got onto a Marine aircraft, a C-130 to Baghdad, and landed in Baghdad. They were on the C-130, looking out the windows and saw the Royal Jordanian Airline plane land. Soon, a Blackwater truck came across the tarmac and Kevin and Alaa Thabit stepped out to greet a healthy, pretty, and far happier Amenah who shot across to dive into her father’s embrace. Kevin and Maha joined in what became a tearfully joyful group hug that went on until Kevin told Amenah, “Let’s get you home.”
In the late afternoon, with the sun setting over the Euphrates River Valley, the MV-22 Osprey that took them the final leg back to Haditha landed on a soccer field, once the center of civic life in the area and now a landing zone. A cheering crowd of Iraqis awaited them.
Figure 8 Amenah and her mother on the way to Baghdad when heading home
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
Figure 9 Amenah reunited with her father at Baghdad
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
Photo by Sergeant Shawn Coolman
Kevin was thinking again about how only two years before, the insurgents in Iraq had rounded up the officers of the police force the U.S. troops had supported and brought them to this same stadium and had them beheaded, then gave the order that anyone who touched the bodies would be subject to the death penalty. So, when a helicopter landed to a cheering crowd of Iraqis and little Amenah was carried off, clutching a pink bunny and being touched by her siblings, and the stadium was filled once again with joy, Kevin felt it was the perfect juxtaposition between the al Qaeda and America. Al Qaeda comes bringing death, tyranny, and terror, whereas the United States comes bringing life and liberty.
He let Amenah and Maha and Alaa Thabit go on their own back to the vehicle, and he spent a moment just soaking in the scene. Back at the family’s little home just north of town, where Amenah’s story had started for him, some of the Iraqi businessmen in town had put together a huge feast with tents and celebrations and all the rest, and they all spent the rest of that night really soaking in all that had transpired.
Could he have done it alone? No, he admits. “Every one of those decisions that was made was the result of the totality of my experiences throughout everything that had happened to me up to that point in my life,” he said. “There were many people without whose efforts at any given point this operation would have fallen apart. So, certainly the situation was much bigger than me. I was privileged to play some small part and be glad for that.” As Kevin Jarrard put it to all of them, “Words are inadequate to describe my thankfulness to all of you for your roles in this mission. If you have never previously witnessed a miracle—now you have. Semper Fidelis and God Bless.”
What Is a Miracle?
When we think of a miracle, in a medical context such as this, we often think in terms of something like a magic wand or divine intervention—one minute you are very, very sick and the next moment, POOF, you are better. A miracle is also sometimes thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature. That is more the case here. A little girl would have died, but she didn’t.
A miracle can be a fortuitous event, which includes finding Amenah in time, assembling the means and people to move a Muslim child from a war zone almost halfway around the world to stay in a Christian southern setting, fixing her, and bringing her back to Haditha, Iraq, ready to live a healthy life.
This epitomizes a miracle as any statistically unlikely but beneficial event, such as surviving a terminal illness and “beating the odds” while doing so. Just think of all the factors involved: local Iraqi prejudice against allowing women or children to be alone with strangers, the difficulties of transporting a terminally sick child out of a war zone and such a long distance, the risk if she died in transport or during the operation, the need to raise money for travel because the military couldn’t foot that bill, the need for an interpreter to bridge the language gap, a place to stay in America, people to escort the child and mother to and from Iraq to commercial flights out of Jordan, and many more bumps and curves in the road.
But the real miracle here is the orchestration of people and resources all to save the life of one little girl from a country where thousands had died. Moreover, all of the people involved on both sides of the ocean in making this happen were different, thought differently, and went about their lives based on varied thinking styles and approaches. That’s what we are about to explore in greater depth—the kind of thinking that you can use in your own life. You will find that when you change your thinking, you can revolutionize your career...and that’s a miracle worth desiring and looking into, as you will here.
Chapter 1. How Your Mind Works—Some Assembly Required
Thinking is something we all do, so you might have assumed others just do it better than you, or at least differently. Well, you might be partially right—for the moment. But here’s the really huge thing. You can get better at it. Thinking is a skill, not an inherent gift, so it’s something you can improve upon. That’s right. You can get really quite good at it. People who you admire—like those in “Amenah’s Story,” who step up and take action based on taking careful and considered steps, who can weigh risk, and who live fuller, richer lives
as a consequence—represent the kind of person you can become.
Take, for example, the medical people. When Captain John Nadeau, Dr. Karla Christian, or Dr. Thomas Doyle leap to action, they do so by studying everything they can learn about a patient or a situation. They proceed with haste when they must, but with caution when they can. Yet each has a different background, home life, and, for that matter, way they go about thinking. John is a hypertension specialist for adults, whereas Karla is a pediatric cardiac surgeon, and Thomas is a pediatric cardiologist. In Nashville, Karla and Thomas faced surprising challenges in fixing Amenah, but they were working within the groove of their specialties, the core of their practiced expertise. John, on the other hand, is used to having to make do in quite diversified settings—one minute attending to the needs of adults in a combat setting and in the next minute, figuring out what is wrong with a little girl and what to do about it. He has the kind of mind that says, “Hey, if every Marine had some of the life-saving techniques of a medic, more lives of American Marines could be saved. How do we go about making that happen?”
Consider also that the contexts of the problems needing resolution were quite different. John had to decide: What’s wrong with this child? Can it be fixed here? Where can it be fixed? How do we go about that? Karla and Thomas, at Vanderbilt’s Children’s Hospital, had a different situation: How do we repair this girl’s heart and body so she can live the best life possible in a place where ongoing or future medical help won’t be available?
Whether you think life in the medical field is outside your grasp, or even if that’s exactly where you are headed, you will need to hone your thinking skills to be, as John is, ready for anything. If you are like Glenn Susskind and Gary White, the medics in the extraction team who escorted Amenah to America, you are going to have to face situations where multiple scenarios are possible, and you have to be prepared for each. Or you might even be like Janet Jarrard, Major Kevin Jarrard’s aunt who was peacefully minding her own business in Tennessee when she was suddenly called upon to make numerous and complex preparations in a very short time frame. You might even be in a managerial role and ask yourself, as Lieutenant Colonel David Bellon did, “How can I work within a system that has a rigid hierarchy and established protocols and give those who report to me the opportunities to sparkle at what they do by testing the barriers of what can be done and what should be done?”
The thing you can take away from all the stories of the varied participants in “Amenah’s Story” is that they all put their minds to work, and their quite different ways of going about that thinking and doing is what wove the tapestry that made a miracle happen. No one of them could have done this alone, and they all had to work in their unique ways and to their own strengths. These were people like you performing extraordinary feats by working together, using their minds to achieve a greater good.
You think all the time, and whether you know it or not, you have a distinct thinking style, a way of going about what you do. If you’ve ever thought you’d like to better understand how that works or, more important, improve upon your thinking abilities in a way that can transform your life, you are taking the right step seeking to explore your possibilities for becoming the best thinker you can be.
To understand how, let’s take a look at three important areas of your mind: dreams, feelings, and thinking. This trinity of the mind is like a three-person rowing team. You have dreams calling out direction while thinking and feeling do the rowing. When all three are in sync, you glide through life. Of course, they are not always in perfect synchrony, so let’s look more carefully at the role each plays.
Dreams
The hospital’s walls leaned or had fallen into the structurally risky shambles of a building in the burned city, with no linen for its four or five beds, no monitoring equipment, and no heating or cooling system. When sick babies came in, the ICU was a room with a small heating/air conditioning unit in the window. Patients had to bring their own linen and food. Medicines and supplies came from Ramadi and often didn’t arrive at all. There were no immunizations and some patients could be seen in the plaza getting their chests listened to and having prescriptions written. Most of the public health clinics had been bombed and lay in rubble, and where the shells of those existed, people had stolen the toilets, the electrical wires, everything that could be stripped out of the buildings. That was the medical system Captain John Nadeau saw when he arrived in Haditha, Iraq. But that’s not what he saw in his mind. He could picture a functioning system, able to deliver far better health care in clean, functioning environments. He had a vision, a dream, and he decided he would do something about it.
The hospital had been right in the middle of the fighting in the days of Saddam Hussein. “The wing of the hospital that held their kitchen, their laundry, their pharmacy had been blown up and burned during the war,” John said. Where they did their surgeries, “the cement from the roof was falling into the operating theater.” When he met with the people there and asked how he could help, they told him they wanted office furniture. John told them, “We’re not buying office furniture.” They wanted a CT scanner. He said, “Look, you are in the middle of nowhere, and you need a basic hospital, not CT scanners. Number one, you don’t have a radiologist to read CT scans. You don’t have any technicians to run them. You don’t have anyone who will support them and they break down all the time. Siemens is not coming to Haditha where their technician might get killed. You don’t need a high-tech machine that you can’t use.”
Just before the war, a high-tech sterilizing machine had been delivered. But it needed compressed air, which they didn’t have, and it needed water under pressure, which they didn’t have—water came down from the roof by gravity. John would walk the doctors down to the sterilizer that couldn’t work. He would point at the nice but useless-in-its-context machine sitting there and he’d say, “This is what your CT scanner will be like. You’re not ready for this. Why don’t we talk about what basic things you need to get your hospital up and running so you can actually look after people and provide basic health-care services?”
You no doubt get the impression that John was a “keep it real” sort of dreamer. He says, “We, in fact, designed a basic, no-frills hospital, and spent a lot of time with the doctors working on the blueprint.” As for the clinics, he left Iraq a better place there, too. “I went out and hired an Iraqi engineer, and he and I went out and we built two clinics before I left,” he said, “we got them running, we got the watering system to work, we got electricity, we painted them, we cleaned them up, and we got them working again.”
There you have it, from dream to completion. It was the same for Major Kevin Jarrard, who saw a little girl turning blue, gasping, who could barely make it across the room. Yet he dared to picture this terminally ill child well, and between the span of December of 2007 and March of 2008, that happened. A healthy, mischievous, grinning girl came home to Iraq. It was that image that drove him to send a flurry of e-mails to Kelly Jarrard, Janet Jarrard, and Jonathan Malloch when hope for getting Amenah to America sputtered at times.
The depth of dreams has inspired individuals, nations, and generations. Most famously, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream, which became a powerful vision and changed the behavior of an entire country. We all have dreams, goals, and aspirations that motivate us throughout our lives and determine the path we take. These dreams guide us in what we choose to do and when we choose to do it.
Your dream might be better work-life balance, financial security, or a genuinely happy family. Think about dreams that are important to you, get some paper and a pen, find a quiet place, and ask yourself why. For example, if you are highly motivated to be successful in your career, ask, “Why is this important to me?” Write down your answers, then dig a little deeper, and ask again. Your answers might center on financial needs, recognition, achievement, helping others, or the ability to see the world. Don’t filter what you write because the answers are important only to
you. The point is, if you are spending 60 hours a week at work (your behavior) and you are doing it because you want a successful career (your dream), make sure you know why you want a successful career.
Getting clear about what matters most to you, really understanding your dreams and your values, is essential because dreams determine the direction of your behavior. The ability to step back and take perspective is possible only if there is a solid bedrock of values and vision to stand on. If your dreams aren’t clear, your direction won’t be clear. It will be left, right, no left again. To fully leverage your thinking skills, you need to know, at the core, what is important in your life and what’s not. Thinking and feeling work better together when your dreams are clear and consistent.
Feelings
Ah, emotions. How they make your life worth living! And how they can just as readily get in your way.
You have probably experienced the emotional reaction of losing your cool or blowing up, and then after calming down saying to yourself, “What was I thinking?” The answer is that there probably wasn’t much thought going on at all because feelings were in your driver’s seat.
Now You're Thinking!: Change Your Thinking...Revolutionize Your Career...Transform Your Life Page 5