He doesn’t get the message.
Now we’re about fifteen feet apart, and he’s coming closer. The warrior in me says to pull the trigger, not to take any chances. But the human in me is going through a whole bunch of what-if scenarios. We’ve made enough terrorists over here through our misguided actions, and I don’t need to add to that.
Then I remember somebody saying how these guys aren’t afraid of rifles, they’re afraid of pistols. So I put the rifle down, pull out my pistol, and point it at him.
He stops.
Puts his hands around his neck.
Turns and leaves.
We call our compound the Alamo because we all think we’re going to die here.
There are days when the Alamo is manned by different platoons, so there are different officers in charge of it. The day I’m in charge I get a call from a corporal who is a medic. “Sir, I need you to come out front and take a look at this guy.”
He doesn’t tell me anything else—doesn’t have to.
Some of our battalion medics are positioned near the front gate, ready to help our wounded soldiers. Battalion has given us strict orders: under no circumstances are we allowed to see and treat Iraqi patients. Word of medical personnel has gotten out among the Iraqis, and the locals line up in front of the gate, begging for help. When I arrive, the corporal points to an Iraqi man and a boy standing on the other side of the gate. The boy is tall, around five six.
“Kid has a gunshot wound to the abdomen,” the corporal tells me. “Small caliber, 5.56, somewhere in that ballpark.”
“When was he shot?”
“Several days ago. Honestly, it’s a miracle he’s still alive. He’s got edema—his ankles are swollen. I can’t believe he’s upright.”
I go up to the father and, through the gate, ask him what happened to his son. The desperate man tells me the insurgents paid him five hundred dollars to have his son go out and dig a hole for an IED. Just a hole. An American unit saw his son digging the hole, shot him, and left him there. Just left him.
But I know the other side of it. The Iraqis are doing a lot of damage to us. American soldiers are out patrolling, see someone walking with a shovel, and mistake it for someone holding a weapon. I can see how someone could get shot.
“Why did you put your son up to that?” I ask the father.
“It’s easy money—a lot of money. We need to feed our family.”
This kid, his face and eyes—I can tell he’s dying. But my orders are clear: no medical care. Iraqis have their own clinic for that, only we know there’s no trauma care there.
Maybe making an exception is not such a bad idea. That would win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
“I’m sorry,” I tell the father. “I can’t help you.”
I turn around, feeling sick to my stomach—feeling like I’m about to lose my shit.
Don’t you dare, I tell myself. Don’t you dare lose your shit in front of your men. Walk away. You need to walk away from this. You have your orders. That’s it—walk. Now keep walking.
Everyone returns home with something. I’m diagnosed with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and tinnitus. The tinnitus gets worse and worse over the years, and I’ve got all these unwanted memories that keep coming back to me, again and again. I made a lot of decisions as a soldier and a leader in a combat zone; how could I not revisit them?
But the decision I made that day about the Iraqi kid—that one really sticks with me. I had a fourteen-year-old kid standing in front of me, dying from a gunshot wound, his father begging me to save his son’s life, and I said no and turned my back on them. I get emotional every time I think about it, and I think about it every single day.
I don’t know what’s harder: making a decision or being forced into one. I had to make a decision for someone to live or die. I’ve got my own fourteen-year-old boy, and I think about that dying kid, his father begging me to save his son’s life, and I chose death.
SHERRY HEMBY
Sherry Hemby’s father served in the Army National Guard. After working in the civilian sector as a trauma nurse, an emergency room nurse, and, later, as a traveling nurse, Sherry decided, in 1992, to join the Air Force Reserve Command. She is the acting command nurse for the Air Force Reserve Command and is stationed at Robins Air Force Base, in Georgia.
I’m in a lecture room at the hospital, attending a scheduled in-service professional training day, discussing medical care geared to specific cultures in the diverse DC community, when I’m told that my Air Force Reserves supervisor is on the phone.
“A plane flew into the Pentagon,” he tells me. “You need to report to the emergency room stat.”
I’m trying to mentally absorb his words as he explains to me what little he knows about what happened at the Pentagon and what’s going on in New York. It’s the morning of September 11, 2001.
The Alexandria Hospital emergency room, where I work as a civilian, is three miles from the Pentagon. I arrive, get the equipment prepared, and help set up the hospital for mass casualties. We’re not a level one trauma center or a burn center, so nearby hospitals that specialize in those areas will have to handle the critical patients.
None of us are sure if we’re going to be dealing with casualties from a single aircraft. We’re hearing reports that there could be more planes up in the sky. We also don’t know what, exactly, we’ll be dealing with in terms of the incoming patients.
There’s also talk of anthrax.
My roommate, who is also in the reserves, pulls out her deployment bag and consults a medical reference book for the signs and symptoms of anthrax. I write a checklist for the doctors.
By the end of the day, we’ve treated twenty-five casualties from the Pentagon.
My Air Force supervisor calls me again, asks me if I’m okay. I explain to him what I’ve seen and done over the course of the day.
“When you get home,” he tells me, “please call me immediately.”
Okay, here we go. I take a deep breath. There’s no doubt in my mind we’re going to war. It’s not a question of if; it’s when.
The Air Force activates my unit a few months later, in February of 2002. We’re going to Afghanistan, into a war zone, to bring out our wounded.
The guards salute me as I come through the gate. I tear up a little, feeling so proud to be here, to actually do this. It makes me think of my father, who served in the Army National Guard for twenty-three years. He taught me about patriotism—to think of others. Service before self.
My dad stood six foot three. When he put on his uniform, he stood taller. I was a little girl, and I’ll always remember my mother standing at the ironing board, making sure his uniform was perfect. Dad was so proud of his service. We all were.
As a flight nurse, your primary duty is to give each soldier the best care possible. To do that, you have to focus on the tactics—what medicines the patients need, how you’re going to deal with the effects of altitude during treatment. You need to make sure they’re stabilized, and you need to be constantly vigilant, watching for any signs or symptoms of possible adverse reactions.
To do all this effectively—to really focus—you need to put your feelings in a box. When I see how mangled the soldiers are, I remind myself not to let it get to me. If I do, I can’t be effective. I can’t do my job properly.
The C-141 aircraft is configured with stanchions in the middle and seats down along the sides of the fuselage. We place litters on each side. Each litter goes four high, and I have to climb over the ambulatory patients in the seats to check the patients on the fourth litter.
One fella looks like Radar from the TV show M*A*S*H. One arm is pretty mangled, so I put the IV with his antibiotics and pain medication into his other hand. I show him how he has to hold his hand a certain way.
“It’s to make sure the IV fluid’s going in properly,” I explain.
“Yes, ma’am.” Like the other soldiers on board, he’s young—nineteen, maybe early twenties. I’m t
hirty-two, and what these young soldiers deal with in the war zone totally amazes me.
I make my rounds, see nine other patients, and also check in with the other medics to make sure they’re eating and drinking plenty of fluids. If they don’t, they’ll physically crash, and they won’t be able to take care of the patients.
When I come back to the patient who looks like Radar, to make sure the pain medicine is working effectively, I see he isn’t holding up his hand the way I showed him. The IV fluid isn’t really running.
“You’ve got to hold your hand like this.” I demonstrate, and then I flash him a really big smile and decide to tease him. “Oh, now I get it. You just wanted me to come back and hold your hand, didn’t you?”
He gets this sheepish little grin on his face.
The teasing, the joking, holding a soldier’s hand—these soft moments make for more human interactions. It’s important, too, because every single one of these young men and women want to know how long it’s going to take for them to get better so they can get back to their troops. They still want to fight. Some of them feel guilty they got hurt. They feel like they’ve left their troops behind.
“Ma’am?”
The voice belongs to one of my critical care nurses. She’s got what I call the caregiver-fatigue look written all over her face. I know what’s coming.
“I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” she says. “I don’t know if I can handle three more months of seeing the same people hurt over and over again.”
I tell her I’ll do my best to find a replacement once we get home.
Shortly after we arrive at the base, I get a call from my husband’s friend, who was the best man at our wedding.
“My neighbor’s son was injured and put on an Air Evac that’s coming to your base,” he explains. “Can you please look in on him, make sure he’s okay? His parents are worried sick. And his fiancée.”
He gives me the soldier’s name. I promise to check in on him and I hang up.
Getting this call has broken the barrier I’ve put in place. Knowing the patient’s name, who he is, makes him very real to me.
I can’t go to the hospital.
I go to my room and cry. I need to cry and then catch my breath before I go over and see the patient.
JOHN WALL
John Wall was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but grew up outside Birmingham, Alabama. A lot of men on his father’s side of the family attended West Point. He is named after his great-grandfather, a West Point graduate (class of 1911). John graduated from West Point in May of 2006 and served with the 82nd Airborne as an infantry platoon leader. He got out in January of 2012, with the rank of captain.
Our job is to deliver food and medicine and perform pop-up medical examinations for the locals—all without getting blown up.
Killed.
And that’s a really hard thing to reconcile: risking our lives to help people who also want to kill us.
It’s 2006, and the IED threat here in Afghanistan is massive. The thing that scares me the most—scares my men—is the actual driving when we go out of the wire. The uncertainty of what might be waiting for us on the road, the randomness of the attacks—you know it’s going to happen to you at some point; you just don’t know when.
Helmand, the largest province in Afghanistan, is a well-known Taliban stronghold. For the past twenty days, instead of doing humanitarian missions, we’ve been traveling in a huge armored convoy running resupply missions and providing combat support to our other line companies who are fighting to take control of the province. We’ve taken over the city, and the Taliban has fled to the nearby villages.
Now we’re traveling from village to village, performing dismounted operations where we get out of our vehicles and go look for the bad guys. The people who live in these villages are supposed to be gone, but we find out that a lot of them stayed behind, making it really difficult for us to differentiate the Taliban from the civilians.
We’ve taken a lot of fire, a lot of casualties. My men are tired and keyed up as we head into another village. Coming in as their platoon leader two months ago was overwhelming. I didn’t have any credibility as a young lieutenant, and that can create some adversity—even more if you’re a West Pointer like me. All these guys had combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I didn’t. Fortunately, I had a great platoon sergeant, a multiple Silver Star winner, who took me under his wing and smoothed the transition.
We’ve now been involved in multiple firefights. I’ve earned their respect, and they’ve come to trust me as their platoon leader.
When we started out that morning, it was dark. Now it’s light. Up ahead, I can see a bridge going over a small creek. We can’t drive over it because there might be an IED. The only way forward is to drive down into a wadi, which is basically a dry riverbed.
The vehicle I’m in, an armored Humvee, goes first. As we drive down, I’m scanning the area for the enemy, any threat. I’m waiting for the sound of gunfire. In those moments, ten seconds seems like ten minutes. It’s almost like watching a movie in slow motion, frame by frame. It’s the most surreal thing when—
BOOM.
The explosion comes directly behind me. I turn and see the armored Humvee carrying our interpreter and our FSNCO (fire support NCO), Sergeant David J. Drakulich, being pushed up into the air.
The convoy comes to a full stop.
Our interpreter and a few soldiers riding inside the Humvee are wounded.
David Drakulich, my good friend, is dead.
An IED explosion affects everyone differently—even more so when guys get hurt and killed and you can’t find who’s responsible for the bomb. And then there’s the fact that you still have a mission to do. The mission must continue.
When we get back to the base, I address my men in a group and then try to talk to them individually. I try to figure out their needs, whether they’re angry or extremely sad, if they were scared when it happened and if they’re still scared now. I’ve got thirty-five different people, with different backgrounds and different feelings, and the hardest part is figuring out how to motivate and take care of each soldier. Everyone looks for leadership in a crisis.
Drakulich, I’m told, wasn’t killed by an IED but from an anti-tank mine. I could have just as easily driven over it.
I’ve been struggling with undirected feelings of aggression, and now I feel an enormous sense of survivor’s guilt.
I’m also told that Drakulich’s parents have already been notified through the proper channels. As his platoon leader, it’s my job to call and explain, to the best of my ability, what happened to their son. I’ve never met his parents, which is going to make this phone call even more difficult.
The hardest part is answering their questions. Because a lot of information is classified, I’m only allowed to say certain things. I have to work hard to find a middle ground that will give them the closure they need without overstepping my bounds.
It’s the first of many such phone calls I’ll make over the course of my military career.
Talking to families who lose loved ones, trying to comfort them—it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I did a great job with some. With others, questions will always weigh on me. Did I handle the situation appropriately? Am I doing the best I can to take care of them? Do they want to be called on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, anniversaries, and so forth? I want to be respectful, but I never want to reopen the wound.
No matter what they teach you at West Point, in basic training, at Ranger school—none of it ever prepares you for how to handle these situations in the moment. Or how to go on living with them.
PART FOUR:
ON THE HOME FRONT
TOM
Tom served in the Army for twenty years. He started out in communications and worked his way into special operations. He retired with the rank of master sergeant.
Dad, what’s this?”
I turn around and see my sixteen-year-old daughter stan
ding next to a group of dusty boxes in our tiny attic. We came up here to look for some old Christmas decorations.
She’s holding my old field jacket, which she has taken out of a box.
“That,” I say, “is my chocolate chip uniform.”
“Chocolate chip?”
“They called it that because that camouflage pattern, those pale-brown shades there and the black spots, it looks like chocolate chip cookie dough.”
“Yeah, it kinda does. Where’s it from?”
“Desert Storm.”
“When was that?”
“A long time ago. Before you were born.”
Memories, most of them good, wash over me. I was a young soldier, all of twenty, when I showed up in Iraq in August of 1990. I was tasked with carrying the radio for the operations guy, Major Rod, who controlled all the battalion assets. The radio, all the other stuff I had to carry—I wore probably the heaviest rucksack on planet Earth on my back. People would sometimes have to help me get up and they’d walk behind me to make sure I didn’t tip over.
“What was it like over there?” my daughter asks.
“Hot. Really, really hot.”
“Were you, you know, nervous?”
“Maybe. Probably.”
My daughter places the uniform on the attic floor and then turns her attention back to the box. “Was it scary?”
It occurs to me how we’ve never really talked about this. Desert Storm. My time as a Ranger, my Bronze Stars, with combat V device, which is awarded for valor in combat. Truth be told, I’ve never been good at talking with anyone, really, about any aspect of my twenty years of service in the Army. It’s hard, talking about the stuff I saw, what I did. It seems braggadocious or something. I’ve boxed away my stories like my old uniforms and moved on with my life.
Walk in My Combat Boots Page 21
