Iraq's Hidden
War
By Rory McCarthy
The
Guardian
13 October, 2003
The
first they hear of Specialist Brian Wilhelm is an indecipherable crackle
over the walkie-talkies. It is an early October afternoon and the Black
Hawk pilots and paramedics of the 54th Medical Company, one of the US
army's medevac units, are lounging in a small, chilled wooden hut. A
camouflage net shades them from the relentless sun and the comforts
of Gatorade and chocolate snacks tempt the young soldiers to forget
for a moment the bloody trials of postwar Iraq. On a small television
the medics are watching re-runs of Scrubs, an US sitcom about overworked
junior doctors. The helicopter pilots, with a swagger all their own,
are playing Black Hawk Down, a shoot 'em up computer game based on the
infamous American military operation in Mogadishu a decade ago which
left 18 of their comrades dead.
"First up,"
shouts the voice on the radio, calling the priority medevac team to
work. A convoy from the army's Eigth Infantry Regiment has come under
attack yet again just outside this base at Balad, in the heart of resistance
country north of Baghdad. A soldier is down, alive but badly wounded.
A smoke flare marks the exact spot by a pontoon over the Tigris river.
It's a "hot LZ", says the voice on the radio: the Iraqis are
still shooting.
This is the hidden
story of America's military adventure in Iraq. From their heavily barricaded
offices in Baghdad, the US army's public relations operation did not
announce the attack last week on Wilhelm. It did not describe how the
Black Hawk pilots risked their lives to retrieve him and bring him to
the emergency room of the 21st Combat Support Hospital at Balad where
some of the army's finest nurses, medics and doctors saved his life.
It did not describe the pain he is suffering, the agony his family is
going through or the fact that Spc Wilhelm will never be a soldier again.
More than 320 US
troops have died since America invaded Iraq, but hundreds more have
been injured in the line of duty, many so seriously that they will be
disabled for life. This is the price the commander-in-chief, George
Bush, asked of his troops when, after the fall of Baghdad, he challenged
Iraq's many resistance fighters into battle. "Bring them on,"
Bush declared on July 2. And on the fighters came, their attacks ever
more sophisticated and ever more deadly. According to the military's
official count, up to six soldiers are now killed each week in Iraq
six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and at least another 40
are injured.
The military has
never admitted the total number of soldiers injured so far, though the
figure appears to run into the thousands. At the combat hospital in
Balad, one of a handful of military medical centres in Iraq, a total
of 1,088 patients were admitted for treatment between May and the end
of August. As many as 916 had to be evacuated, although not all suffered
combat injuries (soldiers who break their ankles in football games are
also sent home to recover.) One report last month said 6,000 US soldiers
had already been evacuated home, of whom more than 1,000 were designated
"wounded in action" - twice the toll for the first Gulf war.
Six minutes after
the first call, the Black Hawk helicopter is in the air, racing just
a few hundred feet above the canals and brown fields of Balad towards
the smoke flare. At the pontoon, heavy reinforcements in Humvees and
armoured personnel carriers have already set up a perimeter. A medic
on the ground has bandaged Wilhelm's leg, encased it in a splint and
attached a white paper to his flak jacket reporting the injury: "RPG
blast to left leg."
The convoy hit a
makeshift bomb in the road and was then hit by a rocket-propelled grenade
and rifle fire. Spc Wilhelm lies on the stretcher in pain but still
conscious, propping up his head with his right arm, dirt in his fingernails.
Blood is starting to seep through the stretcher.
Twenty minutes after
the call the helicopter lands back at the base. Specialist Chris Shirley,
a cheery ambulance driver with "God Bless America" scribbled
on his helmet, helps lift the stretcher off the Black Hawk. Minutes
later Wilhelm is lying on trolley five surrounded by doctors and medics
inside the emergency room tent. A nurse carefully places his bloodstained
flak jacket and uniform into a black plastic bag as the doctors prepare
him for surgery. Within just an hour of the first call, the young soldier
is already on the operating table.
In the opposite
corner of the emergency room tent stand a group of sullen soldiers,
among them the patient's company commander, Captain Kevin Ryan, 29.
It is the seventh time in recent weeks that Ryan has stood here waiting
for news of an injured soldier from his company. Frequently he spends
the night by their bedsides, comforting young men trained to believe
in their own invincibility, and then returns to his company at dawn
to prepare them for another day of patrolling. "It pisses most
of them off," he says. "There is really nothing we can do
except try and prevent it the next time. After an incident like this
we get everybody involved back together and piece together what happened
and see how we can handle it a little better next time."
The doctors report
to him that Wilhelm will live and will probably keep his badly damaged
left foot. They cannot quite believe Ryan is back in the hospital. "He
has had an inordinately high number of soldiers that have ended up here,"
says Colonel Carol McNeill, deputy commander of nursing. "He has
brought them through the moment that decides whether they are going
to live or die and he has made a difference."
The problem facing
American infantrymen is the resistance fighters' weapon of choice: homemade
bombs, known in military parlance as improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
They are artillery shells or grenades hidden by the roadside and detonated
from the bushes with a command wire as a US convoy passes. The blast
forces the convoy to halt and then the fighters open fire. "We
return fire but they have got the choice of ground. They get as many
shots off as they can and they back off," Ryan says. Soldiers now
stuff sandbags into the flooring of their Humvees for protection from
the bombs and otherwise hope today is not the day the medevac is coming
for them.
The 21st Combat
Support Hospital (motto: "Fear Not") is a peculiar honeycomb
of white, air-conditioned tents built around a corridor that connects
the emergency room to a pre-op tent and then to two fully collapsible
operating rooms. Spread out on either side are wards for intensive and
intermediate care. There are seven surgeons in the unit and a host of
other medical staff including a dentist, a psychiatrist, a physiotherapist
and even a dietician. Most are on active duty - full-time soldiers put
through medical training by the army and taught to handle gruesome combat
injuries. Specialist Robert Burrell, 32, a phlegmatic medic with nine
years' service in the military, was one of the first to treat the injured
infantryman. A photograph of Burrell's two young daughters is among
dozens of family snaps pinned up on the wall in the emergency room,
next to the incongruous "Peace and Love" posters, a timetable
of the five different religious services held each week and a calendar
that counts down the unit's time left in country: 158 days to go.
He attends the chapel
every Sunday, says grace before each meal, chats regularly with the
chaplain and has no truck with the post-traumatic counsellors who suddenly
materialise in the hospital after particularly heavy days. "We
sure see some ugly stuff in here - guys who come in from the field,
bleeding all over and with 15 bullet holes in them," he says. "We
see all the shit that the rest of them don't want to see."
Others among the
medical staff are reservists, Americans who joined up as students to
pay their way through $120,000 medical schools and who are now giving
back their time to the army. Now they live far from home, work 12-hour
shifts and spend part of nearly every night sheltering in the bunker
from the regular mortar attacks. Major Gordon Olsen is an orthopaedic
specialist who runs a small private practice in Heber City, Utah, where
the most serious injuries he sees are riders who have fallen off their
horses. "Before I came over, watching the news I was rah-rah and
here we go," he says. "Now I am just thinking, this needs
to stop and go away. When talking to my wife at home, you know, people
just hear about a few casualties a day and it doesn't sound like a big
deal. But when you see a 19-year-old kid with his leg barely hanging
on, that one alone is a big deal."
Yet what most of
the medical staff in the hospital find the biggest challenge is not
the horrific injuries they see every day but the fact that they must
also treat Iraqi prisoners. In one recent case an American soldier died
from his injuries, while on the trolley next to him the Iraqi suspected
of attacking him was treated for his wounds, operated on several times
and eventually pulled through. "There are times when you take these
guys in, take care of them and they are going to live and that is really
hard," says Captain Eric Ritter. "I know what these guys have
done and you have got to remind yourself they are patients. But every
day our guys are out there getting hit."
There are nine Iraqis
recovering in the enemy prisoner-of-war ward, all of whom have been
injured by US troops. Two armed military policemen guard the door. Ather,
24, a taxi driver, was shot in the hand in a scuffle after troops found
a gun in the back of his car. Doctors at the hospital performed a complicated
operation on his hand, which is now held together with several pins.
"We didn't do anything wrong. We were just driving to Baghdad and
we had a gun in the car to protect ourselves from thieves," he
says. "I was happy that Saddam has gone but I'm not pleased with
what has happened to me." Like all the other patients on this ward,
once he has recovered he will be taken in for questioning at a US detention
centre, probably at Baghdad airport.
In a ward next door
nurses are treating a young Iraqi girl, Aya, six, who suffered severe
burns to her back after she fell into a clay oven apparently scared
by a low-flying American helicopter. There was little the local hospital
in Balad could do for her and her father, Faris Abdullah, is plainly
overjoyed that his daughter is being so well treated. But every day
outside the base there are long queues of Iraqis desperate for similar
treatment. Some of the soldiers even mutter their own private criticism
that such Iraqi civilians benefit from their medical care.
The news for Wilhelm
is good. After more surgery he will probably be evacuated first to Landstuhl
regional medical center in Germany, from where most are sent on to the
overcrowded wards of Walter Reed army medical centre in Washington.
The doctors tell Ryan to go back to his tent and rest. His soldier won't
be out from surgery for a while yet. But Ryan wants to stay and the
nurses prepare a bed for him next to Wilhelm in the intensive-care ward.
In the quiet after the terrible casualties, there is little encouragement
to question the reasons for war. "We are here doing our job. It
is part of the risk we take," he says. "If being in the army
was easy, there would be a lot more soldiers around."