The roar of the Humvee’s engine changed pitch, whining with the decrease in speed. My eyes flew open and I peered outside.
Through tall, leaning shadows I discerned storefront buildings lining the road. Decrepit and broken, they reminded me of a movie set for an old Western. I remembered our Marines calling the Al Anbar province of Iraq “the Wild, Wild West.” Now I knew why.
My driver called back over his shoulder.
“We’re in Hit,” he yelled, easing on the brake.
A quiver shot through my chest.
The street curved to the right in a half circle around a patch of dirt and a dead tree. The vehicles of our convoy sped up as they rounded the half circle and slowed as they left it. My pulse pounded in my fingertips pressed against the handle of my pistol.
And then, maintaining that perfect interval between vehicles, our convoy stopped — in the middle of the highway.
Our driver dismounted, telling us in a low voice to stay where we were. I remembered his instructions and turned my chest square to the fabric hatch, ensuring that my body armor faced outward. I rested the barrel of my pistol along the edge of the hole in my door.
I watched the lance corporal. He held his rifle at shoulder level, pointing it at the night, moving it slowly back and forth as he gazed through his goggles. I was glad the blackness in front of my eyes was not in front of his.
Our vehicle had stopped beside a small dirt hill, overgrown with desert brush and weeds. Skinny trees peppered the landscape. I squinted past the mound, making out the shadow of a house in the lot behind it, four hundred feet off the road. All the lights were off.
A dog barked in the distance.
My driver froze, his rifle aimed just left of the hill. Moving only my eyes, I focused on his face, waiting for a move from him.
The dog barked again. I heard the distinct crack of a twig under a boot and sucked in my breath. The barrel of my driver’s rifle and of the rifles of the other men who stood on the road beside him moved in unison toward the sound. Oh God, I thought. I cannot believe this is about to happen. I braced myself for an assault of gunfire.
Four or five minutes passed in total silence. My lungs burned with every breath. Each swallow fought with my pounding heart for space to move down my throat. My eyes watered in the cold, dry air.
Suddenly the desert night was shattered by a tremendous boom. I ducked, lowering my helmet below the level of my window. In that same moment, I realized the source of the sound.
They were Cobras, the Marine Corps’ awesome attack helicopters. Their big, beautiful rotor blades chopped the air, flooding the night with thunder as they roared overhead. They flew tight circles over our convoy. Limp with relief, I crumpled at the waist, lowered my weapon to my lap, and rested my helmet on the door.
Our driver got back in the vehicle. The truck in front of us pulled away, and he followed. He yelled back at us, “Well, whoever that was out there, they’re gone now.” He grinned broadly as he looked upward out the windshield at the Cobras.
The muscles along my neck burned as if they’d been seared by an actual flame. I leaned my head so I could see the stars out the window, feeling the wind blast my face. This time I did not reach for my face warmer. My eyes began to water again, streaking my cheeks with cold tears — one after another, in that perfect interval.
The Irishman and the Lightbulb
The tent at Al Taqqadum was pitch-black inside, all hours of the day. The fourteen women who called it home had different schedules, so they had decided that everyone would navigate by flashlight whenever she was inside. My temporary cot was in the middle of the tent, perpendicular to the rest of them, like the crossbar of an H. The other women had towels or personal items, including photos of husbands, children, or Navy SEAL boyfriends hanging above their cots. The air conditioner built into the side of the tent forced most of the women to use thick blankets over their sleeping bags at night.
I lived out of my ALICE pack for the ten days I worked at TQ. Nearby, Fallujah was burning, and casualties were flowing too fast for the on-site Surgical Shock Trauma Platoon to keep up with them. Two junior nurses lived in our female officer tent. Maria and Noelle had been in Iraq for only two months, but they walked with the air of experienced critical care nurses. They also walked with the air of chronic sleep deprivation.
The Marines had come and awakened Maria and Noelle at 0200 on my third morning there. In the few days that I had been at TQ, I had seen both of them sleeping whenever they could catch an hour. This particular night, they had not slept for one minute.
After eating breakfast, I returned to the tent. It was 0800, the sun was bright, and the air outside was heating up. Inside, it was cold and dark, a true sensory-deprivation chamber. I fumbled through my pack for the notebook I used when I saw patients. The fabric door at the opposite side of the tent was lifted, allowing a flash of blinding light, and dropped again. Noelle and Maria entered silently. Maria didn’t even take off her boots but collapsed on her cot and pulled her blanket over her head. Noelle undressed in the corner of the tent and changed into sweats that said U.S. NAVY on the chest and right leg. She sat on her cot, sighed deeply, and lowered her face into her hands.
I waited.
A few minutes later she came over.
“How are you, Noelle?” I asked quietly.
“We lost one on the table,” she replied, obvious fatigue in her voice. “It just sucks to lose one on the table. I hate it.”
“Was this a first for you guys?”
“Yeah. Everyone’s wasted, but it probably wasn’t as much about losing him as it was about the whole last couple of days. It was bad. There are a couple I can’t get out of my head, you know?”
“A couple of patients?”
“Yeah. A group of three of them came in, with their corpsman. The captain was dead; he’d been shot, in under one arm and out under the other. I swear, I think that corpsman probably could’ve used you, Doc. He had been out there, applying pressure under both the captain’s arms. I have no idea how long, but it was a long time. He honestly really believed that if he let go, his captain would die. He didn’t realize the guy had probably bled out a long time before he came to us. The corpsman just sat there, in the corner, staring into space. He wouldn’t even answer our questions.”
“Yeah, that might have been a good person for me to see. Is he still here?”
“Nah, they took him back with them at about zero-five this morning.”
“Oh.”
“Probably best.” She started kicking the wooden floor of the tent, looking at her flip-flop-clad feet. “There was another one, though, that came in with them.”
I watched her eyes. She avoided eye contact.
“He was a Gunny. Triple amputee. Triple. He’d lost one leg below the knee, one at the hip, and one arm below the elbow. He came in with the corpsman and their captain. He was amazing.”
She took a deep breath in and exhaled through pursed lips. “Captain M. had to do a rectal on him before we sent him on the helo to Baghdad . . . you know, checking for internal bleeding. He told the Gunny that he was sorry, that he knew he was dealing with enough, but he still had to do it. The Gunny was cool about it, saying he understood. When the captain was in the middle of the exam, the Gunny yelled out, ‘Hey, Doc, don’t I at least get a reach-around?’ ”
I laughed out loud. She smiled. “All of us looked up. We couldn’t believe it. Then people starting chuckling and it spread throughout the room. And suddenly we were all cracking up. And the Gunny just had this smile on his face. Can you believe it? They finished his exam right about the time we had several more come in, so we moved him to holding to wait for the helo, and we started working on the others.
“Things were getting pretty tense in there for a while. I guess the look on my face must have been stressed. I was running by him once, getting some supplies, and he said, ‘Hey, ma’am —’
“I felt horrible, thinking that he might have needed more morphine
and I was so busy I’d missed it. I went over to him and said, ‘You okay, Gunny? Do you need anything?’ He said, ‘I need to ask you something.’ I leaned over him.
“ ‘How many Irishmen does it take to change a lightbulb?’ he whispered to me.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘What did you just say?’ He smiled at me, and he said, ‘It’s just far too serious in here, ma’am. You guys need to lighten up.’
“He told jokes the entire time we worked in there. It was like a stand-up routine. When the helo landed, and they came to get him, he waved at us with his one arm and gave us a thumbs-up. We all just stood there like idiots and stared at them loading him in. We’d been laughing so hard for the last half hour, and then they shut the hatch, and it was like opening the fucking floodgates,” she said. “We all started crying. A few people even fell to their knees.” She rubbed her eyes. “I wonder how he is now. Well, anyway, I probably should hit the rack.”
She got up and staggered back to her cot, fumbling through the darkness and trying not to wake Maria. She looked back at me. “Thanks for listening, Doc.”
“That’s what I’m here for. What an amazing story.”
“Yeah,” Noelle said, lying back on her pillow. “We all sure are lucky that that Gunny came in and took care of us today.”
I got up to leave. “Hey, Noelle?” I whispered.
“Yeah?”
“How many?”
“What?”
“How many Irishmen does it take?”
She smiled. “Twenty-one. One to hold the lightbulb and the other twenty to drink till the room starts spinning.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
Fallen Angel
Every day is Monday in Iraq, we used to say.
Even Good Friday, it seemed, was Monday — although it did end up being my last day at TQ, which was good. My forty-five-minute helicopter flight back “home” to Al Asad was scheduled for the next evening. I decided to attend a Good Friday vigil at the makeshift wooden chapel at TQ. That night, it just seemed the right thing to do.
At least thirty men and women in identical desert utility uniforms crammed into that tiny room, sitting hip to hip on pieces of lumber with makeshift wooden legs. The Protestant chaplain and the Catholic priest held a joint service, trading Scripture readings, sermons, and Communion. A corporal with a guitar sat on a box in the corner. Illuminated only by the light of a single candle, the room smelled of sweat and freshly cut wood. Shadows from the candle danced across the sleep-deprived faces of Marines and Sailors who might have prayed that night for a few moments of quiet amid the mortars and casualties.
I certainly did.
At one point in the service, I lifted my bowed head and caught a glance of Petty Officer Blythe standing in the open doorway. The moment he caught my eye, he gestured for me to follow him. I knew it was urgent.
We ran through the darkness together without saying a word. A waiting ambulance idled near the battalion aid station, and we jumped in the back. The Humvee rumbled through the black night, toward the Surgical Shock Trauma Platoon.
“I just got the call from the SSTP, ma’am,” Petty Officer Blythe yelled over the noise of the vehicle. “They said they had an emergency and they needed you ASAP. Sorry.”
“No problem,” I yelled back.
The Humvee jerked to a halt in front of one of the four surgical tents. We jumped out and waved our thanks to the corpsman who had driven us, then lifted the fabric hatch of the tent and looked inside.
Halogen lights, suspended by a strong, light multipurpose rope we called 550 cord, hung from the metal tent frame over two makeshift operating tables — gurneys on tall legs. Ten or fifteen masked people in bloodstained scrubs moved around the room, keenly aware of one another in the small space. The intense, crowded feeling in the room made sense to me only after a closer look. Standing at the heads of both of the operating tables, wearing surgical masks but not scrubs, two Marines with loaded M16s hovered over wounded enemy prisoners of war (EPWs). One of the SSTP corpsmen met us at the hatch.
“These guys came in from a firefight in Fallujah,” he explained. “The three injured Marines in the ward tent next door have no idea these EPWs are here, and we need to keep it that way. They lost a fellow Marine in that battle.”
I swallowed hard.
“Petty Officer Blythe said you guys called for me?”
“Oh, you’re the shrink.”
“Right.”
“Yes, ma’am — let me grab the chief.”
Blythe and I waited a few minutes, stealing occasional glances into the OR. One of the EPWs began yelling in Arabic and thrashing on the table. The Marine aimed his rifle at the man. One of the nurses added something to the patient’s IV, and the thrashing stopped. The Marine lowered his rifle.
“Commander Kraft.” The CO of Med Battalion, the man with whom I had taken my convoy, approached me.
“I was the one who asked to have you called. Walk with me.” We left the main surgical tents and walked along a dark pathway. After a minute of silence, he stopped and turned to face me.
“I need your help.” The CO’s face appeared translucent in the moonlight, and dark rings circled his eyes. He clearly had not slept in some time.
“What’s up?”
He exhaled. “Okay. Well, today the medical crew here got slammed with multiple incoming wounded Marines, as you know.
“Apparently one of the men had a serious head injury and showed no signs of recovering. When he died, the call was made to MA [Mortuary Affairs].” I nodded.
“MA came and got this kid — I say kid because he was eighteen years old. Anyway, they came and got him. And then about an hour later, the chief here at the SSTP got a call. It was the OIC [Officer in charge] of the MA unit. He said to the chief, ‘It looks like our fallen angel hasn’t fallen.’ ”
My eyes widened.
“Apparently, MA did their usual processing for about an hour after the Marine arrived and then got the flight surgeon on call to come and officially pronounce the patient dead.”
I nodded. We had a similar procedure at Al Asad.
“The flight surgeon got there, and when he felt for a pulse, the Marine’s heart was still beating. He had to explain to the MA guys — who had all gathered around the patient by then — that the patient was going to die, that his brain had died, but his heart just hadn’t given up yet.”
“Wow,” I breathed.
“Right. So they all sat around the patient, mesmerized, hopeful even — according to the OIC — for many minutes. Until finally he died.”
I looked at my boots, closed my eyes for a long second, and allowed myself to exhale the breath I realized I had been holding. I looked back at him.
“Would you go talk to the OIC? The officers at HQ who talked to him say he’s sounding pretty upset.”
“Sure,” I said.
“So — I understand you’re leaving tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir. On a Fifty-three.* No more convoys for me.”
“You have to admit, though — our convoy was fun.” He smirked at me.
“You have a skewed idea of fun, sir.”
I spent most of the night looking for the OIC and the men of MA. I spoke briefly to a few of the Marines involved, and they told the same story the CO had related to me, seen through the eyes of young warriors who had allowed themselves to feel hope.
“I really thought he might make it.”
“We were all so excited when the doc said he wasn’t dead. We really wanted him to be alive.”
“It might have been the worst moment of my life, when they pronounced him.”
I never did find the OIC that night.
Sometime before dawn, I trudged back through the thick sand to the female officers’ tent. I lifted the canvas hatch and ducked inside, illuminating the path to my cot by blue flashlight.
Far away, at the edge of the desert, the sun rose on Holy Saturday. The
wave of casualties receded. Good Friday was over. It would be etched in my memory for years to come as the day of the fallen angel who had not fallen.
Crumpling to my cot, I pulled my sleeping bag around me in the cool darkness. In the distance, a succession of at least ten mortars boomed, shaking the ground. Even they could not keep me awake.
HOME
While I was at TQ, Alli — my best friend from college — visited Mike and the babies in Florida. Her daughter Leilani is six weeks older than my twins. She and I often laughed as we remembered our late-night talks during freshman year in the dorms at UC San Diego. We had actually fantasized back then about our adult lives, and about our future children — who would, of course, be born only weeks apart — exploring, playing, and growing up together.
On Easter Sunday, the day I returned to Al Asad from TQ, an e-mail from Alli awaited me.
I am just missing you so much. Tears are streaming down my face as I read your e-mail. There is no way to express my gratitude for what you are doing for our country. You have so much support. Yesterday at the post office I had filled out the wrong type of label for priority mail. The postman was ready to send me to the back of the line until he saw it was a FPO AP address. Then he said “Oh . . . anything for our boys, let me help you fill out the right tags.” Of course I had to tell him that you weren’t a boy.
Leilani and I had the pleasure of spending a few days with your amazing family. I felt so close to you being in your house. The twins and Leilani were great together, like we knew they would be. Megan is so thoughtful. She loves discovering and then picking up very small things to give to Grandma. She is so calm and sweet, stopping to investigate, smell and pick every flower she sees. Brian loved to pick up, shake and throw the larger items, and then turned to give us all a big grin. All three kids took a bath together — we all ended up wet, too.
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