Paradise General (2 page)

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.

N
OW 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.

W
HEN 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 and 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.

N
OW
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.

T
HOUGH THE
A
RMY
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.

My new title was “Battalion Surgeon.” I was officially attached to the 160th Military Police Airborne Battalion, a reserve unit out of Tallahassee, Florida, which in turn was attached to the 16th MP Airborne Brigade out of Fort Bragg—a unit tasked with security and detainee care around Baghdad and southern Iraq. I was a little confused about where a battalion fit into the scheme of things, but soon found out that their surgeons were typically young, spry, and sharp in military medicine. I was none of the above.

The night I met my new boss, Lieutenant Colonel Izzy Rommes, the first words from his mouth didn't exactly make me feel like a first-round draft pick. After a full thirty seconds of a cold stare from a hard face, he finally drawled, “You sure are one old fucker for this job.” Then he stuck his hand out, smiled, and said, “Welcome aboard, Doc. We sure need you, thanks for volunteering.”

My new unit quickly took me under their collective wing and led me through the maze of the military, schooling me in the best ways to keep my ass intact. When we arrived in Iraq, their first tasks were to scrounge up scarce body armor, find me an M16 rifle, and make sure I could shoot it without hitting them, as well as teaching me hand-to-hand combat and self-defense.

The war was quiet when our boots first hit the ground, but within
weeks the insurgency came out of hibernation. We were a full eight months from the infamous “Mission Accomplished” moment, now we we had shifted into the “Holy Shit” mode. I spent my deployment carrying an M16 or a shotgun in one hand, medical tools in the other. The months that made up the spring of 2004 were among the bloodiest of the war.

My greeting card to war was a split-second whoosh of air accompanied by stinging shards of glass hitting my face. We were convoying outside Baghdad when someone decided to take a potshot at a moving vehicle. My moving vehicle. We later calculated that the bullet missed my head by little more than an inch. Only weeks before, my biggest enemies in life had been insurance companies who wouldn't approve tests for my patients.

But that was just the beginning. Not only did I get shot at, I was mortared, rocketed, clubbed, and almost stabbed by a group of insurgents, while logging more than two thousand miles convoying the highways and byways of a very pissed-off country. My best stop was Saddam Hussein's palace outside Baghdad; the worst was the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

The palace was massive and gilded with gold, with the pièce de résistance its bathrooms—beautiful rooms with elegant fixtures and real flush toilets. It had been months since I had had the luxury of using real plumbing, and as I stood over the bowl taking a wicked pee, I pictured Saddam reading the Sunday comics while sitting on the fancy porcelain. Ever so grateful for the facilities, I was even courteous enough to put the seat back down when I was done. But I got a post-pee shiver when I walked over to another structure on the palace grounds—Saddam's so-called party house, a building with a stone etching of Saddam's face on the head of the serpent, handing Eve the apple of sin. The man was truly nuts.

He was also our most famous, and secret, prisoner. Captured a little over a month before my arrival in Iraq, Saddam was hidden away at the High Value Detainee Center at Camp Cropper. As the world was
playing a game of “
Where in the World Is Saddam?”,
he was right under everyone's nose at a camp in Baghdad just a few miles from the Green Zone. Like many older Iraqi prisoners, this self-proclaimed strongman wasn't very strong when it came to health: Saddam suffered from high blood pressure, a chronic prostate infection, and was the owner of the largest inguinal hernia in the Middle East (which the Army fixed months later). He was also an obsessive neat freak with a fanatical love of Cheetos and Doritos, neither of which helped his blood pressure.

Abu Ghraib was a creepy place filled with ghosts of the tortured. The prison was best known for the detainee abuse that had taken place less than a year before, yet it was hard to ignore the souls of the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens murdered at the prison by Saddam and his henchmen. The soldiers and marines manning the prison lived in the old cells behind sliding bars. Decorated with American flags and posters, it was impossible to hide the Saddam-era bloodstains on the walls or the hooks once used as tools of torture. Whenever our unit stopped at Abu, I begged off the offer of a guest cell, choosing instead to sleep under the chassis of a truck parked in the courtyard. It wasn't the most comfortable place to spend the night, especially when a rocket landed and bounced me into the undercarriage, but it was still better than sleeping inside the house of horror.

T
HE EXOTIC VOICES
from the fields were getting louder. Too many voices. I took a quick look at the fuel trucks, knowing they'd be hit first, and wondered if I'd get a shot off before being burned to a crisp. Whispered orders made their way among us. Lock and load. Safeties off. Here we go. I thought of my family, my dad, my stupidity.
Had I really accomplished anything?
Without warning, a growling thunder erupted from down the road, steadily overtaking the noises from the hedge. The ground began to shake and I thought my world was coming to an end. I was wrong. While it wasn't a true John Wayne moment
with gunshots and fireworks, it was John Wayne enough for me. Our cavalry came rumbling to the rescue: a half a dozen heavily armed gun trucks with a massive tow truck bringing up the rear. We cautiously got up and moved toward our rescuers, grins of relief splitting our faces. I was scheduled to go home in three days and now it looked like I'd live to make the trip.

T
HE CONVERSATION WITH
my dad that night took place in bits and pieces over the course of three long hours, more time than I had with him on the ride to Philly. The words were never spoken aloud, yet I felt sure that he knew that I had just learned his bitter lesson of war: fear. Sure, I was scared of dying—it's hard not to think that way when you are lying in the dark … waiting.

But worse was the fear of leaving my loved ones behind and the pain they would feel with my death. Then came the fear of screwing up and causing the deaths of my fellow soldiers. Unforgivable.

As I walked with shaking legs to my Humvee with my wiry young sergeant, I apologized repeatedly for screwing up as we'd hid for our lives in the ditch.

“Hell, I didn't know what I was doing back there. I could have gotten us all killed. Man, I am so sorry.”