“Oh, this just gets better.”
“I know. It is what it is. What else?”
Mark said, “You know, they’re going to need passports from Iraq and visas from Homeland Security,” Mark said.
“Jake Falcone’s your man for that,” David said. Jake was the battalion communications officer, who David knew had a Washington, D.C., background and could facilitate clearance and passports, both from Iraq and Homeland Security, for Amenah and her mother to enter the United States—no easy feat, and one that would involve him traveling to meet the right people and move things along.
Mark said, “You know, whenever you ask something like this of me, I think that there is much more. I need to find the why, why, why—to get the big picture. And one of my very first concerns, sir, is about benefits versus risks. This is a very strategic decision with strategic implications if things fail.”
A key part of the big picture included the impact doing this would have on locals. The Marine mission at this time was to help build the capacity of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army so they could assume the role of security—this in a time when it was hard to even keep the markets open so people had a place to sell their tomatoes. “If something goes wrong with this plan, and it easily could, that could jeopardize quite a bit,” Mark said.
“I know,” David said. “This isn’t just about Kevin, Dr. Nadeau, and this little girl. It’s about 1,800 Americans and 65,000 Iraqis. If we get lost in this, or if it goes sideways, we could derail a pretty fragile peace. Also, are we going to suck up assets that we really need to apply someplace else?”
What would weigh a lot is how much currency Lieutenant Colonel Bellon and his officers had built up with their commanding officer.
“All I have to say is if this had come up or if we’d presented it when we first got here, given Colonel Clardy’s opening remarks to us, I think it would have been almost impossible to sell this to him,” Mark said.
“Yeah,” David agreed. “He would have fired us.”
Figure 3 Lieutenant Colonel Bellon and Colonel Clardy
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
* * *
Kelly Jarrard, back in Gainesville, Georgia, got an e-mail from her husband telling her about Amenah. Though she was kept busy raising four small children on her own, she called a family friend, Robin Smith, at the BB&T Bank in Gainesville, Georgia, and started an account to raise part of the money for transportation. The effort could only be a quiet grassroots one at first because any word getting back to Iraq might jeopardize Amenah even getting to leave.
On December 14, 2007, Kevin’s aunt, Janet Jarrard, opened her e-mail and rocked back in her chair for a moment when she found a similar but more complex request. Kevin said he was taking up a collection among the Marines, and had the hospital at Vanderbilt lined up, but he needed her help with a whole lot more. All Janet had to do was help raise almost $30,000 for commercial travel costs for both the mother and daughter to leave from and return to Iraq, ensure the family had a place to stay, that an interpreter could be on hand, find a medical team to get the family to and from America, make sure culturally appropriate foods were on hand, find a female escort, part nurse and part chaperone, and, oh, by the way, do all this quickly please, chop, chop.
Anyone else might have torn at their hair and run screaming into the woods. But not Janet. Time might be of the essence, but she never flinched. His e-mail told her he had begun the necessary steps for documentation, paperwork, clearance, and permission from his superiors. Fund-raising to bring a Muslim child and her mother to the Christian south was going to be no easy feat. Recall Pastor Terry Jones from Gainesville, Florida, the controversial person who burned the Koran in March of 2011, causing riots in the Middle East that resulted in numerous deaths, including UN workers and their wives. His actions marked one extreme of the grassroots mood. There was a lot of confusion and some prejudice about Muslims. Kevin’s appeal to those stateside was that a little girl’s life was at stake. In the face of those who might say, “You can’t save them all,” he said, “But we might be able to save one.” Janet’s first thought was, “Now, how in the heck are we going to do it?” He was asking her to be the point person in Nashville. Then, like her counterparts overseas, she shrugged off the impossibilities and started figuring out ways to make it all happen.
At the time, she was in the middle of redoing her kitchen, but she dropped that and started sending out a flurry of e-mails about an Iraqi child who was dying and they needed funds and logistical help getting her to Vanderbilt. A new kitchen is one thing, she figured, but this was a life-and-death matter. So she opened herself to the tasks, but she also realized she couldn’t do it all. She, like everybody she spoke to, believed this situation was a calling, something God was going to make happen and she was to be one small part of it. As she explained to a friend, “There is a power greater than us that is activated when we open ourselves up for it, uncap our individual wells of creativity, thinking, determination, obstinance, whatever you want to call it. Just opening oneself up to letting that information flow makes the difference.”
And flow it did. Two enormously important things happened as a result of her e-mails. At that time, she was working for Tennessee Donor Services, doing public education and PR for the organ procurement organization for the state of Tennessee. One of the organ recovery coordinators who heard about Amenah’s situation was Jonathan Malloch, who said, “How can I help?” He had a medical background, had EMT experience, and had worked with FEMA during the response to Hurricane Katrina. More important, he had an extensive military background with all the connections that went with that—he was exactly what Janet needed, someone who could speak the military as well as civilian language.
Even though he wouldn’t be free to go along himself, he knew how the military worked, could assemble an extraction team of capable medics, could arrange for their diplomatic clearance, and he even said he’d see to the logistics of getting the mother and daughter out of Iraq into Jordan for their commercial flights. The second extraordinary event that happened as a result of Janet’s reaching out was hearing from Deanna Dolan of World Relief, a nonprofit organization.
Deanna spoke some Arabic and was willing to help provide a full-time interpreter, Zainab, a woman whose life had been threatened in Iraq because she had translated for the U.S. troops. Deanna was also a member of the Grace Chapel Church in Lieper’s Fork, Tennessee, just outside Nashville, where Steve Berger was the pastor. The church at once started a collection to help bring Amenah to America for the operation, and Steve and his wife Sarah even agreed to let mother and daughter, as well as Deanna and Zainab stay at their home to help provide orientation and help with planning culturally appropriate food.
Well, that was falling into place nicely, Janet thought. Because a female traveling chaperone was necessary, she also lined up her nurse friend, Lisa Van Wye, from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to make the trip to Jordan along with the extraction medical team to escort mother and daughter to America.
With funds slowly trickling in because they couldn’t make a public call for funds until Amenah was safely out of Iraq, Janet had to go ahead and pay for the commercial flight tickets with her own credit card, trusting that the $7,000 she was laying out could be returned, and it soon was. Other than organizational meetings with Jonathan and the PR people at Vanderbilt, most of her frantic involvement was over by December, so she could take a deep breath and begin to relax. Somehow, getting that kitchen redone didn’t seem quite so pressing at the moment.
* * *
“Good news,” Jonathan Malloch said. He sat across the conference room table from Glenn Susskind and Gary White, two colleagues of his on the Disaster Medical Assistance team who had agreed to fly to Jordan to act as the extraction team. Outside, flecks of snow swirled down from a pensive sky over Chattanooga, although the drive to the D-MAT building that morning had been through fairly clear streets.
Glenn arched an eyebrow and Gary fiddled with hi
s pen and pad.
“You saw my e-mail to Kevin Jarrard that we weren’t going to be able to help like we’d hoped—that it was a ‘no go’ for us. Right?”
“Yeah, and we saw his reply to keep trying,” Gary said.
“He sure does seem a man on a mission,” Glenn agreed.
Jonathan nodded. “Kevin says arrangements are already in place at Vanderbilt. You’ve seen how he’s keeping us up on everything over there. I take it that their regimental commander, a full bird colonel named Clardy, was visiting so Lieutenant Colonel Bellon arranged for Kevin to ask him for a helicopter to get to the Jordanian border. Clardy told Kevin that if everything comes together, the regiment would give him a helicopter. Now it’s up to us to make sure everything in our piece is ready. That brings me to the best news yet. Blackwater Worldwide has agreed to help with the extraction, on their dime. This is huge. They’ll escort you to the Jordanian border and back to Amman. They just want to vet you, and that’s okay. You’ll both stand up to that. You may even get briefed about everything, and I mean everything, even how to comb your hair.”
“No problem,” Glenn said. “I’m glad it’s back on. I was really hoping to help see this through.” He looked toward Gary.
“That’s great,” Gary agreed. “But I’ll let Glenn go first. You know how I am when I get talking.”
“Well, I’ve been going over all we need to pack, how much we can carry,” Glenn said. He was the medic of the team, who’d also been with FEMA at Katrina and had recently gotten back from Haiti. His background included work in Arizona doing a lot of fixed-wing transports of moving patients over quite long distances. “I’m still running down what we can get in Jordan, and what we can bring or take out. Oxygen is going to be an issue.”
“I looked into the cost for chartering a Galaxy 6,” Gary said. “Way out of reach. An air medical agency is a quarter of a million for just one way. Scratch that. We’ll have to figure out how to do this as best we can on a limited budget.”
“We’ve both gone through the briefing material on Muslim-American relations, any cultural issues, the tribe this mother and daughter are from, so we should be okay there too,” Glenn said.
“I appreciate you guys going, because I can’t go, and Kevin Jarrard is still in theater over in Iraq, and Vanderbilt has no means of getting them here. The safety of you two is my top concern, which is why I’m glad we were able to get Blackwater involved. It looks like we’re going to have to go with Royal Jordanian Airlines, though. It’s all we can afford considering what’s been gathered so far, and their chief medical officer has to approve the girl for travel or she’s not getting on their planes,” Jonathan said.
“Then we’ll need a Plan B if we have to go by ground transportation,” Gary said.
“And a Plan C if she gets worse, or dies,” Glenn said.
* * *
Jake Falcone handed Kevin Jarrard the small pile of passports and visas. “This should be everything you need,” he said. I don’t mind telling you that I had to grease the occasional palm here and there on this side, and getting the stuff from Washington, D.C., well, it’s D.C. after all. That was six weeks.”
Kevin grinned. He knew how the State Department and Department of Homeland Security worked. “Thanks for all your travel and help on this.” He was leafing through the documents as he spoke. “Oh, my gosh.”
“What?”
“This passport is for Fatima. That’s Amenah’s seven-year-old sister!”
“Well, that’s the information you gave me.”
“I know. It’s not you, Jake. I don’t speak or write Arabic. What am I going to do? Their flight’s in 72 hours!”
“I wish I could help, but I can’t get away. If you can take them over to Baghdad, they could straighten it out in time over there.”
“I’ve got a river clearing operation on the Euphrates. I can’t do it.”
“Well, call a cab then.”
That’s what Kevin did. First he called some of his Iraqi friends who had friends in the Department of the Interior in Baghdad. He would have to make one last gamble. He had less than 48 hours to get them to Baghdad, get an Iraqi passport, get them back to Haditha, and get them on a helicopter. He was not panicked, but he did not see how it would be possible. He raced to their house after midnight, woke up the mom and dad and Amenah, and said, “Look, I’ve got to get you to Baghdad tomorrow, we’ve only got one shot to make this happen.”
Still before daylight in the morning, he loaded mother, father, and Amenah into a cab, paid the driver, and sent them hurtling off toward Baghdad.
Whew. Well, he’d done all he could.
After that chaotic start to what turned out to be another chaotic day, Kevin came back to his command post very late in the day. He was listening to reports and talking to some of his leaders when he got a frantic call from one of his checkpoints, “Sir, it’s Captain Semir”—one of Kevin’s Iraqi friends—“he’s got to see you now, there’s been a terrible emergency.”
Kevin ran over to the checkpoint. Captain Semir said, “Sir, Amenah and her family have been shot up, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding out on the highway.”
The friendly fire incident happened five or six kilometers from town, so he scrambled vehicles and they raced on out. The sun had gone down. It was dark. They were on the highway heading out, and in the headlights of the Humvee Kevin was traveling in, he saw the taxi that he sent them out to Baghdad in that morning. They had been in that taxi at his orders. He was responsible for their lives. He saw bullet holes in the front windshield.
He was going to have to arrest some Iraqi soldiers. Everyone was shouting, waving arms, and rushing around. His vehicle stopped. He ran to the car, thinking, “I have killed an Iraqi mother, father, and daughter.”
He ran to the side of the taxi, and there in the ditch is Alaa Thabit, the father, and Maha, the mother, with Amenah in her arms, rocking back and forth. They were okay.
The Iraqi army had received a report about some bad guys in a vehicle of similar description, and had shot the vehicle thinking it was the bad guys. Miraculously, no one was harmed. The bullets had passed through the top of the car and missed them, and nobody was harmed. And...they had the passport. They had managed to get Amenah’s passport. Kevin was on his knees in the dirt with his eyes closed, thinking, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, for preserving the lives of my friends.”
* * *
With 12 hours to go before getting them onto a helicopter, Kevin got called to a tribal “powwow” with all of the mother’s brothers, all of the male members of her family. He took his interpreter and a couple of Iraqi friends, but soon found himself sitting across the room from them; they were armed and didn’t look happy.
He knew when he walked into the room that this wasn’t good. He could sense that there was some tension here, and couldn’t figure out why until they started talking. They said, “Listen, we’ve decided that we’re not going to allow our sister Maha to travel to America without a male member of her family. That would be dishonoring to our family.”
Kevin said, “So, wait a minute, you would prefer to see your niece die than allow your family to be dishonored?”
They said, “Yes, exactly.”
Kevin told his interpreter to tell them some things, and the interpreter said, “Sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” So, he had a moment to reconsider. It was a good thing, he thought later, that he didn’t speak good Arabic or it might have just turned into a shooting match. They looked ready for it. Their hands rested ready by their weapons.
What he told them was, “Listen. You know me and I know you. And I’m going to give you my word of honor that your sister will not be in the presence of an American male without a female escort. I will ensure that she has a female escort wherever she goes, and that’s the best I can do. I’m giving you my word. I’m just simply asking that you trust me.”
They chattered among themselves, often with the heated waving of arms.
Eventually, Sheik Said Flayah Othman from the al-Jughayfi tribe, who spoke for all of them, said, “Your word is enough.”
Figure 4 Major Kevin Jarrard, Sheik Said Flayah Othman, tribal chief from the al-Jughayfi tribe, Lieutenant Colonel Bellon
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
* * *
Before morning, Kevin had arranged to have one of the female Iraqi interpreters travel with them to the border checkpoint. She was along when Kevin picked up Amenah and her mother, who had never been out of Haditha, Iraq, in her life. As the CH-53 helicopter they would travel in landed, Kevin watched the mother’s eyes get big. She must have thought this was like something from outer space.
Figure 5 Major Kevin Jarrard holds Amenah before she leaves Haditha, Iraq.
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
Their destination, hours away, was where Highway 10 crosses the Iraqi-Jordan border at Trebil. As they flew west, a blinding snowstorm developed. It doesn’t snow in western Iraq very often. If that helicopter had been 10 or 15 minutes late getting into Haditha, they wouldn’t have made it to Trebil before the whiteout hit.
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