No Place to Hide Read online

  I looked at the tanker, a staff sergeant. His tight face and narrow eyes said he was one serious soldier. He took off his helmet, ran his gloved hand over his high-and-tight hair. “We just came to tell you all thanks,” he said.

  “Thanks for what?”

  “Just for being here. None of us would be able to go out and do what we do if we didn’t know you all were here for us.”

  After we spent a couple of hours playing with the tanks, posing for pictures, and talking to the crews, the soldiers climbed back into their machines and rumbled back into the war. We watched them drive away, all of us wearing the kind of smile that’s only partly happy. The kind you find on your face when there’s so much sadness you don’t think you can bear it, but somehow something hopeful finds its way into your mind.

  And that’s what I felt. We’d lost that soldier, unable to use any of our fancy technology or skill to overcome the damage done by one projectile. But instead of being angry at us for our inability to save him, the tank soldiers wanted us to know they still believed in us. Even while they were hurting over their fallen comrade, they took the time to say thanks. Our collective morale, which had been plunging for the past few days, improved tremendously.

  After they left, I found myself thinking that, first, you should never be so wrapped up in your own situation or problems that you fail to take the opportunity to help others. And second, the show must go on. The tankers knew they were still at war, still in Iraq, and still had jobs to do. They’d lost their friend, they’d grieved, and now they had to stay alive.

  The war had taught me more about life in one week than I’d learned in thirty-five years before it.

  CHAPTER 9

  “DADDY, COME HOME RIGHT NOW!”

  I began to change my behavior in the days following the visit by the tank soldiers. Pete and his colleagues were preparing to go home in a few days, and I would be the most experienced trauma surgeon in Balad for a while. This was laughable and also terrifying to me, since by the time they left I would have only about three weeks of combat surgery experience. The new people coming in would be scared, homesick, and worried — just as I had been. The last thing they would need would be an emotionally wrecked neurosurgeon, holed up in his room crying and yelling at God.

  The injured translator named G had a lot to do with my attitude change. In spite of his injuries, his spirit and his smile were indefatigable. Every morning on rounds he greeted us in very pleasant English, the product of a British education. Amazingly, he never once complained about his wounds, his pain, or the heinous attack in which his daughter was also seriously injured. Instead, he focused on asking each of us how we were, smiling his frail smile, blessing and thanking us for taking care of him.

  Other than bright spots like G, the days seemed to blend together into one long, repetitious scene. Someone said that life in a combat hospital could be summed up as “hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror,” and he was right. Car bombs, IEDs, gunshots to the head, and mortars became routine parts of my life. I was no longer shocked to see someone’s frontal lobe before I even picked up the scalpel, or to see empty eye sockets, missing limbs, burned-off scrotums; in our ER, these were the sore throats and bellyaches that could be triaged to wait a while longer than more urgent matters.

  I was getting a great education. My rapid immersion into the practice of combat medicine had allowed me to weigh the medical evidence supporting Pete’s early surgery ethos, which we’d argued about when I first arrived. One morning as we made rounds in the ICU, I noticed that the brain pressures of several of our craniectomy patients were reading very low. It dawned on me that in the twenty or so operations I’d done since I arrived, I’d never had to fight ICP after surgery, and we were almost always able to get people out of the ICU quickly.

  I pointed at one of the monitors, a big green 2 displayed on the screen. “Look at that, Pete. I need to apologize to you.”

  Pete looked puzzled. “What for?”

  “For doubting you. I thought you were way too aggressive with surgery when I first got here.”

  Pete waved me off and smiled. “That’s what I thought at first too. The Army guy I took over from taught me what I taught you. He said he found a paper from Vietnam explaining that they learned the early surgery lesson there also. Hey, you hungry?”

  “Starving,” I said. Pete apparently didn’t need the apology and wouldn’t take any credit for the lessons he’d passed on to me. More people should be like that, I thought.

  “Let’s hit the DFAC before we finish rounds,” Pete said.

  “Sounds perfect.”

  We sat down to our usual breakfast of cereal with runny powdered eggs. “I would kill for a banana or some fresh fruit,” I said.

  Later, while we were making rounds, we came to G’s cot. There on his bedside table, shining yellow like twenty-four karat gold, was a perfect, unbruised Ecuadorian banana.

  “Are you going to eat that, G?” Pete asked.

  “No. Why do you ask?” said G.

  “Because Lee here’s been dying for one.”

  G smiled, rolled over onto his fractured hip, grimaced as he reached for the banana, and lifted it toward me. “I insist that you take it. You are my dear angel who saves me.”

  As I took the banana, he grabbed my head and pulled me into a hug.

  I was very touched, surprised at how much this little gesture of grace moved me.

  My perspective shift came in stages, starting with that first Sunday church service, then the loss of the young soldier and the visit by his brothers with their tanks, and then the way observing G helped me to see how small my troubles really were in relation to his.

  The final piece came when I realized that I wasn’t alone there in Iraq after all.

  When I checked my email on day eight, something remarkable was waiting for me: dozens of messages, from at least ten states.

  My initial emails had been retrospective, covering the first few days in small detail. Those emails took a few days to pass through the military screening system, and my family received several days’ worth at the same time. The first replies came on day eight, and by then people had begun forwarding the messages around the country to their friends and families. I heard from my parents, my siblings, most all of my extended family, and many people I’d never even met. Some of them told me they had begun anticipating my daily “Warren Report,” which due to the difference in time zones usually arrived after they’d gone to bed and was waiting for them when they arose each day. Since I was writing about the previous day’s events, it felt to the readers like they were experiencing the war in real time, one day at a time.

  Also on day eight, I received my first care package.

  A cousin mailed a cardboard box full of cookies, candy, toiletries, and a card. I took it back to my room, squirreling away the goodies like a starving man. It felt so good to have something homemade and to know that someone out there was thinking about me, here in the war; I wasn’t forgotten or discarded, as I’d begun to feel. I was connected.

  Over the next few days, more packages arrived, filling my trailer. I started opening the packages in the hospital, allowing anyone passing by to take what they wanted. It became a daily ritual: around mail time people would wander into the surgeons’ area to see what Major Warren’s network had sent that day. Cookies seemed to work magic for people, and giving them away made me feel better about my personal troubles. None of the things I’d left in turmoil at home were different, but I didn’t have to wallow in them.

  Many of the care packages contained movies. Before long, I had quite a collection of DVDs, but only my laptop to watch them on. Pete and Brian became regulars in my trailer, crowding around the small screen for the short respite from the war. They would knock on the door and ask if it was movie night. The answer was always yes.

  I was cleaning my room one night when I heard a knock on my door. On my doorstep was the captain from the next cube over. She was going home t
he next day, she said, and offered to let me purchase the television set she had in her room. I bought it from her, and Pete helped me to connect the computer to the television. Movie night was in business.

  One morning, I used my morale call to try again to reach my children. I heard the clicks and connections of several thousand miles and numerous operators in three countries, and finally ringing, ringing, ringing, and then my wife answered. She put the kids on speakerphone.

  “Daddy!”

  The three voices in unison bandaged my wounded heart. The conversation went pretty much as I’d expected.

  Kimberlyn, the twelve-year-old: “Daddy, I’m proud of you for helping in the war.”

  Mitch, almost eleven: “Where are you, Dad? Are you safe?”

  Kalyn: “Daddy, come home right now. It’s my birthday next week!”

  We talked for what seemed like only seconds before another person nudged me, needing the phone. I said goodbye to the kids after saying I love you more times than I could count.

  I hung up the phone, grabbed a Tupperware container full of homemade candy from my cousin’s care package sitting on the desk, and walked across the surgeons’ lounge to the old sofa. I felt a weight settling onto me, as if I were wearing two sets of body armor, but I wasn’t wearing any. I sank into the couch and felt myself being pulled toward the edge of an abyss of depression and misery. I wanted to go to my room, hide under the bed, and wait for the war to be over.

  “Mind if I sit here, Major?”

  To my left stood a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, in full battle gear.

  “Of course not, sir.”

  The colonel sat next to me, leaned back into the sagging cushions, and dropped his helmet to the floor. He smelled like smoke, and had a few scratches on his face and hands. His skin had the leathery look of someone who’d spent too much time in the sun; I noticed a twitch in his eyes.

  The colonel had a cut above his right knee that had bled through his uniform pants before clotting and stuck the fabric to his thigh; the stain was covered with dirt and debris.

  “You should get that checked out, sir.”

  “I’m okay, Major. The lead vehicle in our convoy hit an IED about a mile outside base. One of my guys was killed, another is in surgery right now. I think both his feet are gone. The rest of us have cuts and scratches, but we’re all right.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Since none of his troops needed neurosurgery, I had nothing to offer this man professionally, which was the manner in which I typically was able to help people. Yet here he was, hurting, scared, smelly, dirty, and human; he wasn’t a faceless United States Marine, he was a man same as me. I offered him a piece of candy.

  When the colonel looked down at the praline-molasses candy my cousin calls “Aunt Bill’s,” his eyes widened slightly. He took one of the squares in his hand, then carefully brought it into his mouth. He closed his eyes as he chewed, then looked at me with a tight grin.

  “My mom used to make that. Thank you, Major. I better go check on the rest of my guys.”

  The colonel walked away, shouldering his gear and the memories of what he’d just been through — standing, I thought, just a little taller. I sat for a few more minutes, thinking of how it seemed that every time I was about to bottom out emotionally, someone else would arrive whose problems were much more life-threatening. Here I was, watching as other people’s kids came in with disabling or fatal injuries, shedding tears over only being able to talk to mine for a few minutes a week. Although after the war I was certainly going to have another battle on my hands, at least I was most likely going to get there alive and have a fighting chance to repair my relationship with my kids.

  I stood and walked out of the hospital, lugging the unwieldy cardboard care package along with my backpack and body armor for the walk back to my room. A group of several Humvees and trucks was parked just outside the ER. The colonel I’d just met was standing in the middle of a circle of young, scared-looking Marines.

  I adjusted my load and turned to walk around the group, but the colonel saw me and waved me over.

  “Major, let me introduce you to my guys,” he said.

  I stepped into their circle, warriors being comforted by their chief. When I set down the box and my backpack, the colonel shook my hand and addressed his men.

  “Marines, this is Dr. Warren. He’s one of our protectors.”

  The Marines showed me their vehicles, pointing out several shrapnel holes, broken windows, and burnt paint from the IED and the fire it started as they passed through. I could smell the smoke on their uniforms, and several of them had cuts and bruises. It was easy to imagine the hell these boys had driven through.

  One of the Marines, a lance corporal, showed me the armored door he’d been leaning on when the IED detonated. The door was dented in and had a quarter-sized hole in the window. He showed me a similar hole in the right shoulder of his uniform blouse where a piece of shrapnel had torn through, just missing his flesh.

  I put my finger in the hole, thinking of the damage that burning piece of metal would have done to this man’s arteries, muscles, and nerves had its trajectory been a half-degree lower.

  “You’re pretty lucky, Corporal,” I said, in the understatement of the war.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he replied. “The vehicle in front of ours was cut in half. When we got out, we started taking small arms fire from the buildings nearby. It was an ambush. My buddy was driving . . .”

  I squeezed his shoulder as his voice trailed off. He looked past me at the hospital, tears welling in his green eyes. In that moment his humanity broke past the hardened shell the Marine Corps provides its people. He seemed to shrink like a balloon with some of the air let out. I’d seen it a few times by then, how these troops wear their duty and their toughness like an alter ego. When they’re in battle mode, Marines take on a persona that seems more machine than human. But in moments like this, the reality of losing a friend or coming close to death brings the human out for a while. I could almost hear his thoughts as he stood there in the desert: He was thinking about his friend, and realizing how close he had just come to being inside my hospital instead of standing in the parking lot.

  Then, just as quickly, the Marine in him came back. His eyes narrowed, his height returned, and he looked very much like someone you would not want to have to fight.

  “Colonel, we gonna go get those guys, right?”

  “Roger that, LC,” the colonel said. “Soon as I know about the rest of my Marines.”

  “I better be going, sir. Thanks for introducing me to your people,” I said. “You think they would want this box of homemade cookies and brownies?”

  The colonel reached into my box, took the rest of the Aunt Bill’s candy, and put it into his pocket. Then he looked up at me and smiled. I could see the anticipation on the Marines’ faces as they let their eyes fall into the box, but they held their positions, waiting for the command.

  “Major, you’re a good man. Marines, help yourselves.”

  The box was empty in about three seconds. Their smiles lasted a lot longer.

  And so it went. From small acts of kindness performed by people in the throes of serious pain, unsolicited encouragement and confections from people thousands of miles away, and in the sharing of a two-thousand-year-old communion ritual, I began to see outside my own problems, outside myself. The kindnesses I was shown made me begin to seek to provide the same for others, and, as getting outside yourself is prone to do, I think it benefitted me the most.

  One day, G’s father arrived. It was easy to see where G got his attitude; the gregarious nature, huge smile, and loving heart were present in both men. G’s father was a wealthy man who had connections in the old Saddam government. He told us that he had arranged for G to be treated in Jordan, at a hospital that specialized in complex spinal injuries but that it would take a while to work out the details of his transfer.

  As I grew more accustomed to the constant noise, dust, and danger, a
s well as the frequent exposure to horrifically injured people, I also became much more aware of the beautiful things around me. Though they were harder to see, they preserved sanity and peace of mind when I remembered to notice them: a nurse tenderly changing the bandages of a severely burned man, a tiny flower somehow managing to grow through a crack in the sidewalk — and G’s daily greeting.

  One morning, when I stopped in to see G, another patient was in his bed. His dad had taken him in the middle of the night, the nurse told me, leaving unannounced in case any of the Iraqi hospital workers were connected to the terrorists who wished G dead. They didn’t want to risk driving into an ambush. I understood — still, I wished I could have said goodbye. How had I grown so close to a bed-bound Muslim man I’d only known for three weeks that I missed him so acutely as soon as he was gone?

  As January drew to a close, my newfound resolve to maintain a good attitude and be there for others was tested mightily. We had entered the rainy season, and there was mud everywhere. A several-hundred-yard section of my walk to work was covered by six inches of standing water. For ten days, the temperatures at night dipped into the thirties, and it rained almost every day. And I’d thought deserts were supposed to be hot and dry!

  The enemy did not seem to mind the weather. Mortars and rockets landed around us almost every day, and as Iraq’s first democratic elections approached, the intensity of those attacks increased. The incessant stream of brokenness in the hospital never slowed, but fortunately my skill level at handling the stress and chaos was growing, along with that of the team I’d been working with for a month.

  One night I sat in my room, sorting through DVDs to figure out what movie we would watch that evening. I looked at my watch; it was pretty late, and I hadn’t yet heard from Pete. I sat on my bed to read as I waited for him, and before I knew it I was asleep.

  Sometime later I heard a knocking on my door, and I startled awake.

  “Lee, it’s Pete.”