Paradise General (28 page)

“It's 'bout time you showed up. I knew you'd want to watch.”

Me and about twenty others, all stuffed into our miniature OR, shoulder to shoulder, craning our necks to make sure the pooch would be okay. Worried that the pooch would be okay.

Another vet from across the base worked with Rick; she was young, and it was one of her first surgeries. Rick took his time, spoke slowly, and talked the young veterinarian through each step of the surgery. Halfway through, I realized he had done the exact same thing with me all summer. Subtly guiding me through case after case, making me feel like I had saved the patient, when in reality I would have gotten lost in a dark place deep in someone's abdomen. Rick was a good man, and, more importantly, a kind one.

Twenty minutes later, it was my turn to return months of favors. A two-and-one-sixteenth-ounce slightly frayed tennis ball was successfully delivered; Tino was slowly weaned off anesthesia and he
awakened with a soft whimper and a wag of the tail. Then it was time to make a beeline toward HQ and the “meeting.” A few of us saw the boss striding briskly back toward the hospital, with a little steam coming out of his ears. But a lot of small talk, BS, and inane chatter delayed him enough to where Tino was out of OR number 1, placed in a truck, and returned to his worried handlers. And for weeks afterward, every time we'd see any of the administrators, we'd slip one hand behind our butts and wag it like a little doggy tail. It was the best, if not sneakiest, case of the deployment.

The canine surgery was definitely worth the lack of sleep. When 7
P.M
. rolled around, I went straight to the ER, hoping for a stressless shift, but it wasn't to be.

We had a series of soldiers bent and broken by roadside bombs arrives in waves through the night. The surgeons came back to work and I spent a lot of time making sure the brains inside the blown-up soldiers weren't too jarred. The CAT scanner hummed for hours as I searched for subtle bleeds, then subtle signs of brain injury even when the scans were normal.

My worst case of the night, though, wasn't even combat-related. I had stabilized the wounded that eventually made their way to surgery and was numb from the rapid parade of full stretchers that traversed my ER. Feet up, I was glad to look down the room and see a series of empty trauma bays at 2
A.M
. Then I heard a faint noise.

At first, I thought the sound was coming from the medics' movie—an irregular series of soft shuddering sobs. What tearjerker was the pick of the night? Then I realized the sound was coming from just outside the door.

“Guys, something's going on that doesn't sound good.”

My boots hit the ground with a loud thump as I swung my legs off the desk. Before any of us could make it to the door, it swung open, and standing in shadows was the outline of a female soldier straining to hold up what looked like a week's worth of laundry under her arm. It wasn't dirty clothes, it was another female soldier. She was small,
thin, and sagging toward the ground. The sobs were coming from her. We ran to her and half dragged, half pulled the quietly weeping soldier into the safety of the ER.

She was a young girl, with short-cropped brown hair. At first, I couldn't tell if her face was stained or bruised. It turned out to be a combination of the two. We got her to the closest stretcher where she collapsed into a tight ball, lying on her side. The sobbing had stopped, so had the short bursts of muscle spasms that accompanied the tears. Now she just lay in the fetal position, shivering and silent. Her mouth opened and closed rhythmically, but no sound came out. Our eyes turned to the woman who brought her in, now she was on the floor, trying to mouth a few words in between sobs.

“Some … guys … jumped her.”

Shit, it was an assault. A sexual assault. Her clothes were torn, and face bruised and scratched.

Her friend tried to tell us what happened.

“She … was … on … her … way to … the shower.” The friend also began to cry.

My mind flashed to my daughter Katie. God help me here. During my first deployment I put a pistol to the face of some asshole who was sexually harassing one of my female bodyguards. I told him I was just a stupid doctor; everyone would just say it was an accident, that doctors can't be trusted with weapons. And he'd be dead.

It's hard to explain the rage of a father whose child has been violated. Leaving the curtains around the stretcher open, I told the male medics to take care of the friend, call the MPs, get a couple of the nurses from the ICU, and then asked the two female medics on duty that night to help me out.

It took three minutes of soft gentle questions to realize there would be no replies. I stepped away, asking the females to take over.

She thought she had been in a safe place, the fifty-yard walk from barracks to shower. Fully clothed, she walked alone in the dark. Just before opening the door, three guys grabbed her from behind, threw
her to the ground, and started to pummel her face and stomach. Clothes were pulled in an effort to rip them off—but they didn't tear. Instead, there was a nasty ring of torn skin in a perfect collar line around her neck where her top caught while being forced over her head. Hand over her mouth, she kicked, punched, and bit. We'd be on the lookout for a male with an infected hand over the next few days.

Rape, sexual assault, and harassment were raw wounds for me after what my daughter went through. Hearing the story I felt maniacal, wanting to stick my pistol against the attackers' heads, then realized I need to quash my own feelings and remain calm: revenge wouldn't undue tonight's damage. This young soldier's needs and well-being came first.

The MPs were good; especially a female from CID, or criminal investigations, whose job it was to deal with victims of assault. The young woman finally let me back into the bay, allowing me to look and examine her beaten body. I needed to document every little piece of evidence I found. It was tough to consider her body as “evidence.” I wondered what her father would think, if she ever had the strength to tell him.

Done with our medical role, we stepped away and let law enforcement do their job. But it was so hard to watch the evolution of looks on the soldier's face. Terror, anger, sadness, a quick hint of a smile, then eyes sinking deep into darkness. The pain would never go away, even on good days. I knew that personally.

We sat and talked among ourselves about the statistics—we didn't know the rate of assault in the military compared to the real world, but the Army was doing a better job in at least attempting to acknowledge there was a problem. Then I told them about my Katie; it was painful even years later, and would be painful until my last day on this earth. It was a wrong that could never be righted.

Although the assault took place somewhere else on the base, well away from the hospital, over the next few days we were told to be extra careful as we walked, that females needed escorts every time
they showered or needed to go out at night. Even the males should be on the alert, as there had been a few robberies.

What the fuck kind of place was this? I guess like any community in America—nowhere perfectly safe—no place perfectly secure. But how could we possibly be afraid of our own soldiers? I thought the enemy was on the other side of the fence. Yet from that night to the end of my deployment, every time I wandered in the dark, my pistol was unholstered and ready to use. And it wouldn't take me a second to pull it out and squeeze the trigger.

I had changed over the years, there was now a hurt, angry man deep inside who occasionally bubbled to the surface. I didn't like him, and didn't like seeing him around. Fortunately, the kind person who lived with him kept the angry one at bay. The kind man was the one I liked living with.

W
E LONGED FOR
a beautiful sunrise or sunset, yet on most days in the desert the sun either rose or fell like a window shade—rapidly, with little time for enjoyment. This day would be no different. When we stepped out into the swirling wind called the Tongue of Fire, we couldn't see three feet in front of us. The floodlights were still on and would remain on through most of the morning, at least. Bad dust storms, so Paradise General would be on flight condition red until the haze evaporated.

I'd been in desert sandstorms before, but few like this. I felt like I inhaled a playground of sand before we'd walked halfway to the chow hall. And my face was raw as the fine particles blistered the skin from my face and blasted their way into every crevice of my body. Rick and I didn't even bother to try to spit a few syllables; we just tucked our chins and forged onward, heads down into the wind until we eventually reached our destination. We stood for a few minutes, shaking our bodies of sand like a wet dog that has just come out of the rain. But all the gyrations in the world wouldn't get rid of the fine particles that made their way into butt cracks and groins, and every step I took for
the rest of the day felt like I were wearing sandpaper underwear.

Most of the guys were already eating by the time we walked into the cavernous hall. Checking the menu we saw tonight's fare would include stir-fry along with the usual alleged beef dish, baked potatoes, and soggy salad bar. Although our meals could be as bland as wet straw, we ate better than any soldiers in history. It's true that an army travels on its stomach, and with a short three-minute walk from chow hall to hospital our stomachs couldn't complain.

As I stood in line, I eyed the group huddled together at one end of a long table, pointing fingers and slapping knees with laughter. Jokes, insults, and BS were flying like the sand on the other side of the walls. We'd been together for more than two months, and were getting along well. No one wanted to kill each other, at least not yet, and I didn't think we'd ever see the day we would. Each of us knew we were in a fix, and unconsciously recognized the only way to survive our time here was to hold each other up. Left alone, we would become the walking psychologically wounded.

Even better, we genuinely liked each other. So much so, it was time for a nickname.
M*A*S*H
had the Pros from Dover; we had to become the pros from
somewhere
. The eight of us were reservists from all over the country with little in common except for one locale: Newark, New Jersey. Rick Reutlinger once worked in Newark. Bernard Harrison had done his residency in Newark. Ian had flown through Newark. I grew up just outside Newark. And the rest had at least heard of Newark. So Newark it was.

That morning the Pros were hammering at each other over the latest trivia—it was a double bonus round:

Where are Panama hats made?

What are the Canary Islands named after?

We had all day to ponder the questions, and hopefully we'd have time to sneak on to a computer and Google the answer.

We talked as the group left the chow hall, noticing the wind had calmed and the sky was breaking. As always, Bill and Rick stopped
and checked on the guards who stood for hours in the whirling sand and intense heat, making sure they had bottles of water, Gatorade, or a couple of cookies snuck from the chow hall.

When we crossed the gravel-strewn field to the hospital, we heard the crackled sound of “Big Voice.” Just like on
M*A*S*H,
there were giant loudspeakers attached to poles high above the ground: it's how we got announcements and important information. However, our Big Voice was hoarse—we couldn't understand a word coming from it. It sounded like a broken drive-through speaker at a fast-food joint.

“Vvvvepppmgrrrrrrrrrssvava. Hhhhhhhhwwwwwwchchchvavava.”

We stared at the pole, then each other.

“I think either we are about to get mortared … or salsa lessons have been pushed back half an hour tonight.”

Nonetheless, we quickened the pace, eyes and ears peeled to the sky. The only things we saw were unexpected patches of blue. That meant a day of work. It turned out to be one filled with some of the oddest cases of my war.

The first was a nineteen-year-old soldier with a cough that just wouldn't quit. Ordinarily we'd have told him to shove off and go to sick call; the ER wasn't the place for him. But something just didn't look right. A pleasant cherubic-faced kid with the weak sprouting of a grown-up mustache, his skin carried a paleness that shouted serious illness.

A chest X-ray, then a quick CAT scan of the chest gave us the reason: the huge clusters of lymph nodes signified cancer, in this case, a lymphoma.

He took the news he'd be flying to Landstuhl then the States within twenty-four hours, without much change in expression.

“Sure beats hell, doesn't it, sir? Here I am in Iraq, and I got cancer. Wait until my mom hears this one. At least I ain't going to get blown up. That'll make her happy. But Jesus, cancer?”

I'd sat and had “the talk” with dozens of patients and their
families when bad news needed to be delivered, but this was a first for me. You simply don't think cancer is going to attack in a war zone. And this young man needed the same tender kid gloves any wounded soldier would get. We talked for more than an hour as we waited for the travel arrangements to be made.

As we finished, I felt the vibration of our first incoming of the day. A chopper was furiously beating the air as it hovered over the helipad. I scooted inside and quickly donned a pair of goggles and gloves. Our patient was an Iraqi soldier, and he left a trail of blood as he was wheeled in.

The flight medic told me the soldier had been in a complex IED attack—first blown up, then shot as he crawled and squirmed out of the smoking vehicle.

“He's got open wounds all four extremities, facial lacerations, and multiple puncture wounds to the torso. And double-check the groin—it's starting to seep blood. Ten milligrams of morphine on board.”

Ten milligrams and still moaning, to the point no one could hear themselves think.