Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  Anyone who has spent time with Zubaida Hasan would understand that whether or not she is listening to the music inside of herself at any given moment, it is fair to picture the tiny dancer singing along now and then while the world whirls by in front of her.

  Epilogue

  Every single human link in the chain had their own long list of Perfectly Good Reasons why they could not, should not get involved. And the constant theme played out by each one isn’t that those reasons were not perfectly good, it’s just that sometimes there is truth that goes beyond the force of rules. As a thing made out of nothing more than individual acts of personal conscience, it was a fragile chain, thinner than smoke rings, but it held together well enough to reach halfway around the world and back again.

  At the moments when each one of the people chose to get involved, they did so without having any idea of the sprawling tree of connections they were joining. They simply found something inside of themselves that was compelled to reach out in an extraordinary way to help, to make something decent and good come out of one very large tragedy for one very small person.

  They were living out the answer to the question of whether or not there is such a thing as the American heart.

  The Staff Sergeant who headed the Civil Affairs Team who took on the responsibility of keeping Hasan and his daughter supported through the long process of finding a doctor in America and getting approval to travel, later went to Officer’s Candidate School and graduated as a commissioned officer, to serve a full career. One of the men on his squad described him as “a big guy, capable of being fierce when he needed to, but friendly by nature. He tended to be kind of quiet. And in spite of his size and his lethal occupation, he was known among all of his men as having a good heart.”

  Dr. Michael Smith, the military physician overseeing all of Zubaida’s medical care from the U.S. Army, went onto reserve status with the military but continued to live overseas. He also remained active in the field of medicine, in both civilian and military affairs. Smith was the first one to write about the appearance of “divine coincidences” that seemed to run all through Zubaida’s story, in an early note to Peter Grossman. His viewpoint was eventually shared by many of the people who were directly involved with the story; this was something that traveled under its own power. It is something that was compelled, no matter how the nature of that compelling may be explained.

  The force began with Zubaida’s stark refusal to die, in spite of all the professional opinions, then it moved to her father’s persistence in finding help for her, and then on to the very first American soldier who could not let Zubaida and her father pass in the marketplace without inquiring and, once he had heard their story, was compelled to bring them with him. He had to tell dangerous stories to get them past the sentries and onto the base, then into the medical unit and under a doctor’s care. The risks to his professional life and future weren’t enough to stop him.

  The military doctors who agreed to take her into their system, and who were well schooled in all of the Perfectly Good Reasons, surely had enough medical training to see that the amount of scarring over Zubaida’s injuries proved that they pre-dated the American presence in Afghanistan. They could not possibly have been caused by American “friendly fire.” Even so, her case didn’t quietly disappear as it should have. Mike Smith spoke of how he never liked the political risks of this endeavor, but he kept the medical side of her care in Kandahar organized for months, anyway. Then he followed through by personally flying to America with Zubaida and staying the week in Los Angeles with Mohammed Hasan, so that he could personally fly him back home.

  Also of special note on the military side is Robert Frame, the commanding military officer in Kandahar. His story typifies the mindset of every soldier involved with Zubaida’s story. Frame was in charge of all of Mohammed and Zubaida’s military contacts and clearances. Once Zubaida was into the military health system, everything that happened to her came through his office. Frame moved on to become chief of the Public Health Team in Baghdad, a reserve army officer in his mid-fifties with 25 years of service and numerous deployments.

  But on April 27, 2003, he and his Public Health Team were en route to the Ministry of Public Health to meet with representatives of the provisional administration, and they were ambushed while driving a small convoy of two Humvees through the main marketplace.

  The trouble began when the traffic abruptly ground to a halt, all around them. Everyone in the two-vehicle convoy became alert to the possibility of danger, but at first there was nothing overtly threatening about the scene. Unlike many ambush situations, this particular area hadn’t been cleared of the local people; the marketplace was crowded and activity appeared normal. Things remained quiet in that way, for the first few moments.

  They could the problem see up ahead; a stalled bus had sealed off the road, choking traffic in both directions. That seemed to be reason to hope for the best. In the next moment, when two shots came from somewhere nearby, the men flinched. Still nobody panicked and started firing; a couple of random shots weren’t necessarily abnormal, in a land where almost anything can be considered an excuse to celebrate by discharging weapons into the air.

  Since the team was stalled in the middle of confused surroundings, they began to set up a defense perimeter according to their training. But while they were still trying to determine where the shots came from, there was a direct bullet strike on the Humvee. Frame was shot through his left upper arm by a rifle round of such power that his arm was almost completely severed from his body. Within a blink, the left arm was motionless in his long sleeve and everything around him was transformed into noise and motion. He and his team were being ambushed by organized shooters, firing from somewhere up at rooftop level. There wasn’t time to get help for his massive injury; he secured the end of his sleeve to the belt clip on his gas mask to steady the useless arm, then returned pistol fire with his right hand whenever one of the ambushers stepped into range.

  When one of the officers in the second Humvee opened fire with an M-16 rifle, it immediately drew return fire in a fusillade of bullets that rained down from the overpass and onto both of the Humvees. The men could see at least five attackers overhead. Within seconds, every one of Frame’s team took hits to various parts of their bodies.

  He quickly lost so much blood that he began to get light-headed. He saw that one of the men, a major, had been shot in the chest and was slipping out of consciousness; he could also feel that it wouldn’t be long before he followed. His senses were overwhelmed while his vision cut in and out and his hearing echoed after all the gunfire. He could smell the strong odor of gunpowder.

  In the midst of the confusion, Frame slipped in his own blood and fell under the Humvee. Murphy’s Law being what it is, just at that moment the vehicle jolted forward a couple of feet and the wheel pinned his leg down. While he struggled to pull himself out from under the wheel, two young Iraqi males, maybe 18 or 20 years old, bolted out from the protection of the crowd and ran toward him.

  This, it seemed, was to be the place where he died—at the hands of young attackers. Instead, they ran to him, bent down and began to pull him free from the weight of the thick Humvee wheel.

  ”I had no idea why they were putting themselves in harm’s way. Bullets were flying all around us, and I couldn’t even give them any cover fire, since I was already out of ammunition and couldn’t reload with one hand.”

  The two young men managed to get Frame to his feet just as two of his own soldiers hurried over to help him into one of the vehicles. The Team broke out to make their escape. By the time he got oriented again, the young Iraqi men were gone. He had no chance to thank them or to learn whether or not they ever suffered reprisals for helping a man they didn’t know, an American soldier.

  The first to treat Col. Frame was the deputy team leader, an old school warrior who knew of a treatment that was seldom prescribed anymore because it was so difficult to apply, but done ri
ght could save Frame from bleeding to death. He tied a tourniquet around the underarm area and over the upper shoulder. The method was questioned by many physicians because of the risk of causing massive circulation difficulties, and because of the challenge of properly tying such a tourniquet. But Frame had already lost so much blood that any sort of risk-versus-benefit analysis would reveal that “potential risks” were the least of his problems.

  The deputy team leader was right; the radical tourniquet slowed Frame’s bleeding and ultimately saved his life. He and the other injured men were MEDIVAC’d to the U.S., while another colonel took charge of the Civil Affairs Team and the rebuilding mission continued.

  Following Frame’s hospitalization and surgeries, he was discharged in partial recovery to finish his healing at home. Despite the loss of the use of his left hand and some functional deficits, he returned to work at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington D.C. as Assistant Under Secretary for Health and Dentistry.

  The NGO that worked so hard to serve as liaison between the military and the doctors and hospitals is still quietly operating just below the radar. There are a host of other such NGO’s in operation around the globe, never enough of them. The thing that these Non-Government Organizations share with the Civil Affairs branch of the U.S. military is that they both struggle to do their restorative work in places that are almost always environments of high risk. They are staffed by people with the same kinds of sensibilities as teacher Kerrie Benson—who continued her work with third grade students even after the birth of her first child, and Patty Moayer, who has worked as a special education nurse for many years even though she could have a lifestyle of idle wealth if she were so inclined.

  The Children’s Burn Foundation continues to work on behalf of children who suffer catastrophic burns but whose families can’t afford the needed care. They ultimately contributed nearly half a million dollars to Zubaida’s case; even though Peter and his father volunteered their services, there were still mountains of costs created by the fees of the many other doctors, nurses, staff, medical supplies and diagnostic procedures that were necessary to the process.

  Peter Grossman, his father Richard Grossman, their entire staff and all of their families know that Dr. Peter dodged a bullet with the case of Zubaida Hasan. He asserted himself as an independent surgeon within their practice, a place that his father had started and Peter had later joined. It would have surely dealt a deep blow to his relationship with his father, as well as his standing in the medical community, if things had gone off-kilter with Zubaida. The memory of a little girl taunting her nanny by pretending to jump out of a moving car was enough to drive that risk home. Even if she had mistakenly fallen out of the car while playing around like that, the tragedy to her, to her family, and to virtually everyone in Peter’s life would have been incalculable.

  Instead, in addition to the maintaining the connection with his successful patient and surrogate daughter, his continued interest in the medical plight of Afghan women and of burn victims in that part of the world was acknowledged by the U.S. State Department when they asked him to become a member of their Department of Global Affairs Health Advisory Committee for the U.S.- Afghan Women’s Council. He returned to Afghanistan again in 2005 as part of his ongoing efforts to support the establishment of a fully operational burn center there.

  When Peter and Rebecca decided to take Zubaida in, they did it fully aware that they would be pilloried in the media if their gamble on Zubaida’s behalf failed in some way. But the compelling force that seemed to congeal around her was already underway in their lives. The part of her journey that led through Peter’s career, their home, and their hearts was something that had to happen.

  Rebecca found that in Zubaida’s absence, the process of keeping in touch with her and helping to guarantee her a chance in life also served to keep Rebecca motivated to continue working on behalf of Zubaida’s Foundation, as well as the Children’s Burn Center.

  At the end of June, 2004, she gave birth to a healthy and beautiful daughter, and the parenthood that she and Peter had desired for so long finally arrived to stay. They named their girl Alexis, and began a sustained campaign to pack the email addresses of everybody that they knew with pictures of Alexis doing a hundred variations on being a perfect baby girl.

  IN THE END—any miracle that may have taken place in this story only began with Zubaida’s surgical transformation; it moved through the transformation of her heart from its trapped condition in a prison of despair, through the return to its former state as a beating channel for the music she loves, and ultimately led her to an entirely different way to live her life as a young woman in the newly emerging society just beginning in her homeland.

  The unyielding grasp that she maintained on life from the moment that the fire took her compels the question of how hard we are grasping our own lives as they speed by us. If we were somehow boiled down to our most basic desire to live, as Zubaida was boiled down to her love for rhythm and music, what essential things would define our own struggle to exist?

  There are still levels of humanity and decency that are recognized all over the world. By engaging one another at that level, beyond the reach of armies and politics and religious debates, we may stitch together whatever future lies ahead for us. If Western society is not witnessing its own implosion, as some people see its plight today, then we are left to ask ourselves specifically what human asset it is that might prevent us from going in that grim direction.

  People of every political persuasion already carry the sinking feeling that military action can’t do it, and that globetrotting freelance murder can’t do it, and that the passing of laws won’t do it, either. Religions have never come close to doing it and politicians don’t even know where to start.

  But everyone who has followed Zubaida’s journey knows how. They have watched her “hopeless” case get carried by one concerned hand after another, across barriers of race, language, religion, politics, the dangers of professional losses, personal embarrassment, and opportunistic lawsuits—all Perfectly Good Reasons why nobody should have gotten involved.

  The players in her story were struck by the need to help her because, like the rest of us, they are out there in the world among the Others, each in their own way. As the Others were described to Zubaida, they were people with no respect for another’s values and the strong desire to spread toxic energy. A person may sidestep the despair that the Others work to inflict, and perhaps dodge the scarring effect of their cynicism, but it takes a steady force of will to go on and carve out a full life despite their debilitating presence. Since the Others are never going to disappear, we are left to build those full lives in spite of the recurring images and ideas of failure and conflict that the Others are always eager to cast onto us.

  Leaving them behind only requires movement of the mind, not the body. It involves living out the personal, day-to-day reality of what to do about the human condition.

  That full life calls out to us because we are all aware of places where we can do great good even when we have Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved. When and if we step up, we do so knowing that in the long run this is simply how we make things better for ourselves.

  The ride that we take when we follow Zubaida’s long journey leads us away from a storybook mirror showing her restored reflection. It leaves each one of us alone in front of an internal mirror, challenged by our own.

  Photo Gallery

  Zubaida and her best friend, Emily

  This is how Zubaida looked when she arrived in Los Angeles.

  The one-year transformation

  Robert Frame (in black vest) helps Zubaida’s father, Mohammad, deal with the Americans’ baffling love for signing pieces of paper.

  Zubaida with Peter Grossman and his father, renowned burn surgeon Richard Grossman

  The return of the tiny dancer

  Zubaida and her friend with Rebecca Grossman and a secret a
dmirer

  The father-daughter dance at school cemented her relationship with Peter Grossman as “Dad.”

  Things get better.

  There are also good days.

  Hear no evil… see no evil… I’m not playing… speak no evil

  Embraced by friends from her American school

  Zubaida is on her way home after a year of surgeries in America

  First day of school in Herat, with her two younger sisters

  Acknowledgements

  The bad guy in this story was a can of flammable liquid. Everybody else who came in contact with Zubaida willingly gave up some part of their time, effort, and energy.Some went far beyond that, getting involved at considerable professional and personal risk.

  I personally owe deep thanks to Martin Literary Management for believing in this book, and to my longtime screen agent Lew Weitzman; their faith has sustained me.

  Deep thanks are due to those military personnel who can’t be identified, as well as those who were able to speak for the record with permission from military CentCom: Col. Robert Frame, Dr. Mike Smith, Major Raymond Short, and Sgt. Benjamin Abel.