Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq

by Dave Hnida

  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.

  THE 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.

  THE 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.”

  It wasn’t until our Humvee was headed toward the safety of our base that it hit me, three long decades after a car ride down the Jersey Turnpike. The young sergeant had answered with a smile and quick thumbs-up.

  2

  WHICH END

  DO THE BULLETS COME OUT?

  THE FIRST CASUALTY of the deployment took place eight thousand miles away from the war zone. I was tiptoeing and stumbling around in the dark at three in the morning, making sure I had packed all the civilian luxuries necessary to survive life in the desert when I rammed my little toe into the edge of the couch. A few curse words went flying, along with two huge armfuls of nonmilitary essentials such as an iPod, laptop, razors, toilet paper, and a mini-library of paperbacks. I silently gathered up the scattered pile, hoping the computer and the toe weren’t broken, then limped outside and sat in cool predawn air, taking in the sweetness of the freshly mown lawn whose blades I had trimmed the night before. No yard to worry about for a while—instead of crabgrass, I’d be battling dust and sand.

  It had been three years since my tour in Iraq, and the war continued to go badly. The Army still needed warm bodies to fill its medical needs, but since I had already done time in the “Sandbox,” they offered me a comfortable stateside slot doing routine physicals. I turned them down flat. It wasn’t bravery or bravado; I simply needed to go back. I wish I could explain why. And my family wished I could explain why. They’d been through hell during my last deployment, especially after seeing pictures of me cradling a rifle. This time, I assured them, I’d be safer. I had grabbed an assignment to a CSH, or combat support hospital, today’s equivalent of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH. No more rifles; no more convoys; no more face time with crazed insurgents.

  The nature of the war had changed, with IEDs becoming the co
nflict’s four-letter word. Just thinking of an Improvised Explosive Device sent shivers up my spine; we’d dealt with them in 2004, but the ones hidden on the roads these days packed a more powerful punch, enough to blow a five-ton truck ten feet into the air. I simply didn’t want to picture what something that violent would do to a delicate human body, but would soon find out. From what I had been told, we’d see fewer gunshot wounds and more blown-up bodies. A voice on the phone from Medical Corps Headquarters said, “Be ready, Major, business will be booming.” The horrible play on words made me grimace.

  The truth was I would be busy. The timing of my deployment meant I had volunteered to be a part of the next great military campaign that sounded suspiciously like an energy drink: “The Surge.” I didn’t know what exactly I was getting into, but at least this time I’d be with a group of doctors rather than running around with a bunch of young, savvy combat troops. I prayed my new colleagues would be capable and easy to work with, but I wasn’t overly hopeful. Doctors, as a rule, tend to be big on ego, short on social skills.

  As I put my feet up on a lawn chair, my mind wandered back to the office and the last patients of the previous day, one an overweight smoker with diabetes who couldn’t find time to exercise because he was too busy. But he was remembering to take his medicine … most days. Hell, man, I thought, I’m going to war tomorrow to take care of people who don’t have choices about their health—you do. Yet I simply shook his hand and told him to keep up the good work … and please try not to drop dead before I get back.

  The other patient on my worry list was a four-year-old with a fever and an ear infection. He seemed a little more listless than he should have been. Maybe I should have done some tests. Maybe I was just fretting like a grandmother. Either way, I wondered if people realize how often we doctors worried about the decisions we made, carrying our worries home to spend the night. Maybe I could call from Fort Benning later and find out how the kid was doing.

  I watched my wristwatch sweep away the minutes—cursing it for not hurrying so I could get my journey started, yet at the same time swearing at it for racing too rapidly. As the sun peeked over the horizon and reflected against the foothills of the Rockies, I realized I was lonely and scared, and hadn’t even left my driveway. My orders didn’t say exactly where I was headed; simply iraq in small letters—as if I wouldn’t notice—but the grapevine hinted my destination was going to be some ramshackle combat hospital near Tikrit, hometown of Iraq’s favorite son, Saddam Hussein. My new unit would be the 399th CSH.

  The neighbor’s dog trotted over and smeared a good-luck slobber across my face, then promptly turned and scooted across to a nice green patch of turf, where he squatted and dropped a big turd. All I could hope was that his steamy dump wasn’t an omen.

  We decided the whole family would drive me to the airport and attempt to perform an artificially cheery goodbye. Then I’d head off east while they’d head back for a family breakfast, all of us pretending the next few months would speed by like a meteor.

  The flight from Denver to Atlanta was a quick one—too quick as I thought about how I would spend the next several months in a life foreign to what I had lived for five decades. Instead of privacy, I would spend every hour surrounded and suffocated by others—in a noisy, chaotic, and often bloody environment. Toeing the line, saluting, acting like an officer, and making sure my monotonous uniform fit proper regulations—with no loose threads. No matter how hard I tried, I still had trouble adjusting to the fact I was a soldier.

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out, after my official orders, the most important papers I would carry this deployment: my dad’s wallet and logbook from his days in World War II. I read the names of the men he commanded: White, Murphy, Kuel, Rizzi, Stein—more than three dozen in all—and wondered how they, and their families, felt on the day in 1943 when they reported to duty, especially the ones whose names my dad had crossed out by a single line. These were young men who died in combat, and in small letters next to their crossed-out names and lives were the penciled-in names of their replacements. Some of those names wound up being split by a pencil stroke, too.

  World War II was the “good war,” but I wondered just how good it was to those families who received the dreaded telegram from the War Department, saying their husband, son, or brother wouldn’t be coming home. And now more than fifty years later had still not come home. How was life for those families in the decades since? And how would life be for the families of the more than four thousand Americans who wouldn’t be coming home from my war? Could I and would I make a difference? My mind and heart argued the question. I thrust the thoughts and numbers from my brain, wondering as my plane began its descent whether I was equipped to prevent any more patriotic deaths in a controversial war.

  In Atlanta, I made my way to the connecting gate to Columbus, home of Fort Benning, where my father had spent the first months of his war attending infantry and officer candidate school.

  At the gate, I caught more than a few soldiers staring at me. Most were sharply dressed in creased and pressed battle uniforms and there I was, slouching against a wall in faded jeans and T-shirt—a pretty cool T-shirt actually, with a silk-screened picture of a surfboard cutting through a curling wave. Oh man, here we go. I didn’t need a bunch of hard-asses giving me the look. Worse, what if the gawkers were the doctors I’d be working with? Shit. I needed relaxed, not rigid. Pranksters, not pricks. As we boarded our puddle jumper for the flight down the road to Columbus, all I could think of was how I could survive life with a bunch of industrial-strength douche bags for the next four months.

  The first thing to hit me when we landed at the small Columbus airport was the thick Georgia humidity, the second was the piercing screech of a wide-brimmed sergeant yelling for everyone to get on the buses after grabbing our bags.

  “How quick we leaving?” I asked.

  “Quick. Real quick.” He scowled.

  “I gotta pee, Sarge.”

  “Make it quick. Real quick. Buses wait for no one.”

  Big Hat finished his sentence with a face-shattering grimace, but since I wasn’t in uniform, he didn’t know whether to yell at me or play it safe and treat me like an officer. My advanced age probably tipped the scales toward courtesy.

  One empty and happy bladder later, I left the bathroom and was met with an “Are you by any chance a doctor … uh, sir?”

  Big Hat must have figured an unkempt, shuffling guy like me could be nothing but a doctor, and his tone downshifted from gruff to soft when I answered a wholehearted “Yup.”

  “Sir, please hustle out to bus number two, that’s the bus for the medical people. If you need a hand with your duffel I can rustle up some help.”

  I grinned and said thanks, I could handle my gear by myself, and I solemnly promised I would go straight to bus number 2 and not wander off and get lost.

  “We roll out in three minutes, sir.”

  In typical Army efficiency, bus number 2 didn’t roll out in three minutes, five minutes, or even fifteen minutes. An hour was more like it, with forty of us getting to be closer friends than we wanted, sitting on top of each other in a muggy vehicle built for twenty-four. As I swung my head around scanning the bus, I realized everyone wore jeans and casual clothes. No starched or even unstarched uniforms in sight. Thank you, Jesus.

  On half of my lap was an older blond, brush-cut guy who told me he was from Okinawa … or was it Oshkosh? After seeing my confusion, someone who knew him spoke up from the row behind and translated.

  He said Oklahoma.

  “Oh. Nice to meet you. Dave Hnida from Colorado. Family doc.”

  “Rick Reutlinger, Muskogee, Oklahoma. Surgeon.”

  “Isn’t that a song or something?”

  “You bet, the ‘Okie from Muskogee,’ by Merle Haggerty.”

  Haggerty? I’d heard of Merle Haggard …

  “So, Rick, where you headed?”

  “Tikrit.”

  “Me, too. How many
of us are there?”

  “I think eight docs. But have no idea who the hell all these other people are that are trying to feel each other up on this damned bus. They’re all medical people but headed someplace else. Sorry about my ass, by the way.”

  “No problem. It’s nice and soft.”

  “Fat and spongy is more like it.”

  I learned Rick Reutlinger had never been to Iraq but had served a tour in Afghanistan in late 2004. He spoke in a rapid-fire drawl—I only understood about half of what he said, but was able to decipher that, besides being a general surgeon, he was a huge Texas A&M fan, had been a veterinarian before going to medical school, owned a farm, and drove a pickup truck. A bus of sardined soldiers had given me a chance introduction to the mumble-mouth surgeon who would go on to be my colleague, cheerleader … and most importantly, my best friend during the next four months.

  As the rust-coated bus chugged along I-185 doing a rickety 30 mph, I stared out the window at the thick Georgia pines, grateful to have made a buddy so quickly, and hoping the rest of my group would be just as friendly. I didn’t realize at the time some of the men on this bus would go on to become the best friends I’d ever had.

  We were deposited in front of the CRC, otherwise known as the CONUS Replacement Center, a cluster of World War II—era concrete buildings painted a nauseating shade of sinus infection yellow. We lined up in a formation that looked like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, and were told to wait for the rest of the people who would be joining us to train for our mission overseas. With our small group, we calculated we could blow through the process and be on our way in a day or two. Then we heard our delay before we saw it: more than 350 civilian contractors who would swallow us up and slow us down. They came from everywhere, scurrying in a confused frenzy like someone had just stomped their anthill.