Date: 4/7/2003
Subject: Iraq and sweat

So much has happened; I’m not quite sure where to begin.

For a time, I was the furthest forward of any veterinarian in Iraq. A dubious honor. For my soldiers and me the war has begun in earnest, no longer an ethereal game of Scud hide and seek, nor an intellectual debate as to the right and wrong. Once in the thick of things, you lose your global perspective and concentrate on the reality of the moment. That reality is a concentrated adrenalin rush of possibilities.

That man walking elegantly along the roadside could be a fedayeen, or more likely is simply a man, trying to survive in a world at war and wondering quizzically at these infidels, so inappropriately dressed for the Iraqi climate.

The turn in the road might be an ambush, but probably is just a turn in the road.

The sheep which I pulled from a canal may have been thrown in to contaminate the water, having died of some terrible weaponized disease, or more likely she tragically prolapsed her uterus trying to deliver triplets, and was pushed off the side of the road.

The piece of metal protruding from the dust could be in the pressure plate for an anti-personnel mine. Or nothing more than a piece of metal.

The possibilities are endless and represent the universe of the modern soldier. Single-minded, selfish and paranoid, but with dreadfully good reason. In An Nasariyah, in the southeast of the country, fighting erupts like the single ember drifting on the wings of anger to ignite neighboring fodder. In an instant of a true twist of fate, the fact of danger was brought sharply home to me. At the last minute I was pulled from a civil affair’s mission that I had intended on using to determine the animal populations in some of the smaller villages. The small convoy headed out while I remained behind to care for a sick military working dog. That evening, as I rested from the beating of the day’s heat, the rumor mill brought news of the ill-fated convoy which had stumbled upon a firefight between an entrenched sniper and a marine unit. The result was a driver catching a bullet along the nape of his neck, miraculously simply leaving him with the makings of a nasty scar, and several new holes in the Humvees.

A fate which could have been mine, but was not, and only over the small matter of a German shepherd with a bad case of diarrhea. Perhaps it’s luck, perhaps it’s simply happenstance. I don’t think on it. If I did, it would be impossible for me to affect any good on the mission, and it is at this stage when the veterinarian becomes most useful.

The temperature rises daily, and we swelter in the weight of our gear, immune at this point to the filth, to the choking dust. Helicopters rush patients in the combat support hospital within which we have established our little pied-de-terre. Patients from both sides of the strife. Iraqis and Americans are carefully tended, supported and saved. Innocent and guilty alike. As it should be. In Abraham Lincoln’s words, “with malice towards none, with charity to all.” The hospital is an ironic haven, where the wounded are brought from inferno into a purgatory of dispassionate care.

Here the veterinarian’s role is overshadowed by the human element, but our impact is equally as great, and I quietly take pride in being able to help. The hospital heals the gaping wound, while through our care, the sheep may birth more lambs, the chickens may lay more eggs and as a result, the children will not go to bed hungry. Small, almost imperceptible changes, but I prefer this calm method to the frenetic, controlled chaos of the operating chamber. Medicine is medicine, you choose the scale.

We live in the shadow of the ziggurat, the birthplace of Abraham, and are mere miles from the ancient city of Ur. Our home is a single frame tent, close quarters for myself, my vet tech and two food inspectors. We work, sleep and live in the same space, ten feet by twenty feet. No air conditioning in the over one hundred degree midday heat, no running water, no amenities. You don’t want me to describe the toilets, lets just say that I intend on spending a solid week admiring the clean porcelain, cool tiled floors and faucet-controlled water. We have one hot meal per day, two packaged military meals and two liters of bottled water. We have covered the outside of our nest in a canopy of camouflage netting. It serves the dual purpose of breaking the sun’s rays with the artificial cover, like an old oak’s leaves swaying in the Iraqi breeze, as well as providing us a small area of privacy from the day passing by.

Evening is wonderful. Cassiopeia Diana and Orion rule the constellations; a window into eternity, while the same wind which tormented us all day long with the saturation of flourlike dust now caresses us with gentle cool fingers like a tender lover. I sit on our covered “veranda” and in the darkness can imagine that I am anywhere. Orion won’t betray a longing for green trees, and Cassiopeia is too busy holding on to her upside-down throne to concern herself with the wistful thoughts of a single man in a war-torn corner of a saddened world.

Curled up on my lap is my most recent cause. An orphaned puppy which I have converted into the hospital’s combat stress therapy dog. “Tallil” is a motley combination of every dog in the Middle East, a chameleon in this dun-colored land; he sleeps with a belly full of military food and the attentions of every soldier in a mile’s radius. In the tragedy of his mother’s shooting, he has gone from pauper to prince, and likely remains the only dog of his kind holding such a luxurious and exalted status in the entire theatre of operations. Hopefully, I will be able to ensure his amnesty and bring him home safely to the United States. A refugee in a nation of spoiled, pampered Pomeranians and overweight Golden Retrievers. For now he is exhausted and his four-week old eyes are clamped shut as he dreams of chasing scorpions and lizards in this arid landscape.

Yours,
Eric

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Date: 4/9/2003
Subject: blood and dust

Yeoman’s work. Heroic in action, humble in appearance. The 86th “Cash” conducts the daily business of patching together soldiers and civilians fractured by the war. Boys and girls as yet unable to drink in the United States are running oxygen, blood, suture or instruments for the surgeons, as they dig shrapnel out of bloody heaps of muscle and sinew, ruined bodies, destroyed faces, shattered lives. We watch them stumble around the camp in a zombie state of half-waking, for how else to handle to constant infusion of horror than to deny it.

The surgeons are equally tragic heroes, running the endless cycle of patients through the mill of triage, stabilize, cut, patch, support and monitor. Each is a personal, emotional drain. For some it is purely work, however I doubt that any could remain unaffected. The moment is the mechanics of the body, this vessel attaches to that, this muscle functions so, this bone will heal in this manner. How to make the whole human machine function as a viable living thing. This is the mechanics of the surgeons’ job. And likely, those who can remain aloof, detached and impartial are more effective, but it is the rare man who is so made.

Mere yards from our tent, the helicopters land, spewing forth a new crop of disease and dismemberment. The Blackhawk crew–exhausted from their own effort in supporting the patient from the battlefield to the hospital–unload the litters to the ground response teams. These in turn rush the patients to the care of the clinicians. Each patient has been seen a few times prior, in the mad rush from injury to healing.

Often, there will be the medic in the heat of the fight. This soldier has some basic first aid treatment knowledge, along with a fragmented understanding of anatomy, physiology and medicine. Above all, they are brave. These are the most forward caduceus in any fight, and they are most often treating their screaming, dying friends while bullets fly. From the mud and smoke, the victim is rushed to an ambulance, either ground or air to get them to the rear of the front. Ironically, that is a relatively accurate description.

The Cashes and Mashes are the second line of defense, where the combat medic’s travails are quickly examined, and the work of repair begins. Truly, the wounded lives or dies within those first hours, within the capable hands of line medic, ambulance crew, surgeon and nurse. Far back, in distant worlds, the field hospital stands, and further yet are the hospital ships “Hope” and “Comfort” floating in the Gulf. Beyond imagination are the fixed hospitals of Germany and the United States, but the soldier lives or dies here.

The veterinarian is a strange breed of animal. Our medical degree and learning gives us the capabilities of most human clinicians, at least at the sub-specialty level, and in my time, I have participated in the repairing of bones, sutured muscle bodies, stopped hemorrhage, performed abdominal and thoracic surgeries, removed eyes, performed C-sections and amputations, repaired intestines, stomachs, spleens, fractured livers…etc. This is not to suggest that I am on equal standing with the fine surgeons who work dusk till dawn across the way. It is rather to say that I know and understand. Granted, I am not swimming in the blood of some mother’s son. And although our societal value system does not elevate the animal to the human level, however, I do understand.

Lost deep in military doctrine, is the role of the veterinarian in such circumstances, and I have offered my services and capabilities with open hands. In the days prior to my arrival, the hospital was hit with a mass-casualty, or “mascal.” A school bus of Iraqis, two Blackhawks and a Chinook all unloaded within fifteen minutes. Seventy-one people injured, maimed, dying or dead. Seventy-one in fifteen minutes. Children and parents lay dead somewhere miles away, while those who might still survive where trucked here bleeding.

A soldier was shot through the face, and to his extraordinary fortune he was yelling at the time. The bullet was a tracer round, meaning that it let off an incendiary track which allows the shooter to determine impact area. All of his teeth were intact; his spinal cord was missed due to the decreased power of a tracer bullet versus a normal round. And all of the tissues had cauterized. In effect, the simple, stupid luck of being shot with one kind of bullet as opposed to another had saved his life, and the plain fact of an open mouth had saved his face. Granted, he was still shot, and endured the agony of it, but in comparison with some of his comrades in that mascal, fate had smiled.

Had our small team been on hand, we would have lent a hand carrying litters, and I would have filled in for the clinicians at the door, triaging and deciding who was urgent, who could wait, and who was dead on arrival. The dentists and veterinarians hold that supplementary role. I hope that in future writings I will not be describing my participation in such an event. The hospital beds rapidly filled, and the dining facility was used to hold the surplus. Screams and groans where the mainstay and all available hands worked frenetically to effectuate a swift, fluid flow from receival, to prep, to surgery, to recovery, to ward. All night. Yeoman’s work.

Off in the near distance stood a squat ruin. Rumors spoke of a temple, of the birthplace of Abraham, but no one within the camp seemed certain of what it was. It was structured somewhat like the Mayan pyramids of Tikal, yet not quite as high. It was formed of multiple layers, each one slightly smaller on the crown of the former, with a massive brick stairway leading up to its peak. The ziggurat of Ur lay on the highest point of land in miles, and surveyed everything from its moderate height. The airbase was like an ant nest, milling excitedly about the sleeping roots of this forgotten giant.

It seems that the Iraqi regime, as many dictatorial governments, forget the treasures that the land still wears as testament to a time long past. So it was with the great Buddhas who fell to the simple-minded Taliban, or the Khmer empire which fell into ruin and loss, and then was abandoned to the jungles of Northern Cambodia, only to find renaissance in the destruction of Pol Pot’s era of slaughter.

As the civil affairs units are among the few who roam the countryside, I decided to see if the ruin could be visited and went to their headquarters. As it turned out, the unit, which was otherwise actively drawing together stockpiles of humanitarian rations for distribution to the civilians, was planning a trip to the ziggurat the next day, and with some bartering, I was able to secure a spot for my team on the small convoy. We loaded a seventy-five pound sack of flour to give to the curator and Masteller grabbed a satchel of toys which she had carried from the States. Sergeant Hill and Sulley strapped on their protective gear, and we all headed out.

After a short drive, we arrived at the checkpoint of military police designated to protect the religious site, and moved through to the curator’s home. As I scanned the area for animals, Masteller and Sulley took down the sack of flour and offered it to the curator’s extended family. Around the large brick and adobe house played a dozen beautiful small children. Little girls with black curls and massive dark eyes which captured and seduced as they hid behind their fathers’ robes. We handed out the toys after demonstrating the use of a yo-yo and a superball, and while they accepted gratefully, I wonder if the children really understood them to be toys or just some other colorful aspect of these peculiar Americans who rain horror and kindness from the skies.

The site was in fact a temple under the Sumerians, and according to “Mike,” our translator, dated some twenty three thousand years before Christ. It was also the location of a once fabulous palace and a massive necropolis. Supposedly, the Euphrates had once run at the ziggurat’s feet, and all of the building materials had been brought from over a hundred kilometers away by boat. Now the squat monument to the origins of civilization lies untended and its clay and tar bricks disintegrate under the weight of wind and rain and footsteps. Mike spoke eloquently about his impressions and beliefs concerning the Sumerians and their supreme role in all of humanity. He believed firmly that the great pyramids of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Americas were all extra terrestrially guided. Not divinely per-say, but literally the work of a great alien culture which had once dominated the region. Mike was a Syrian, who had joined the U.S. led unit known as the FIF or “free Iraqi forces”.

Most members of the FIF had post war intentions on the political scene, and based on the rapid advance of our troops into Baghdad, their aspirations were likely to be fulfilled. The majority had been through a U.S. basic training course run by Civil Affairs at Fort Bragg, and as such wore a semblance of an American uniform. They were not combatants, but acted mainly as interpreters. Mike was a former pharmacist and amateur historian, and was deeply in love with the lore of the land. In a way, perhaps the abstract, and somewhat humorous vision of the origins of the Bible were a breath of fresh air from the rigid absolutism of the American Bible Belt, and I found myself enjoying his description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as due to an atomic explosion, and of Jerusalem, which he told me meant “land of peace” was in fact an alien “no fly zone”.

April brought with it a taste of hell. The filth, the sweat, the raw discomfort, the ache, all reach a stage of acceptance in one. We eventually come to allow it, to cease to fight against the desert. Like the swamps of Louisiana, eventually, one simply watches the mosquitoes settle on your arm, watch with morbid disinterest, as the flying hypodermic sucks the blood into its bloated abdomen. You might kill it, but only out of habit, not out of discomfort or need. So became the essence of our lives here. The dust was part of living, and nothing could be done otherwise. But on the dawn of that second day in the middle of spring, the desert launched a new attack.

Morning broke with an overcast sky, falsely allowing us to wonder on a softer day. But what we initially saw as a reprieve was actually the setting of the stage for the whip to descend on our bent backs. The dust cover and overcast sky concentrated the day’s heat within the convection oven left between clouds and earth, and the sky remained a dull tan color. People joked that it reminded of the movies Dune or the Martian landscape of Total recall. At times it became difficult to differentiate between the earth and sky when staring at the horizon. The day progressed, hot and stifling, but we all looked for the evening to be our salvation. The cool, soft wind of nightfall.

As the day began to wane, I was performing a necropsy next to a squat bunker which seemed contiguous with the earth. The dog in question had been euthanized as it had aggressed soldiers at the entrance to the hospital. It seemed quite sick having potentially a rather serious respiratory disease as evidenced by the large amount of hemorrhage in the internal tissues of the lungs, which I attributed to being the work of a herpes or distemper virus. As I crouched over the dead animal, I scanned the landscape. The gathering sky had turned a deep orange. Not a simple earth tone, but the very essence of orange, bright, brilliant and everywhere. The setting sun must have been casting its full fury on the backs of the cumulus, for she was hidden from us. Sweat continued to pour down my back and I noticed an absence of noise. There was no wind, and the world seemed to have frozen in anticipation of Armageddon.

The night prior, gunshots and mortar rounds had been fired to ward off an attack at the front gate, and the stress of the event still lingered in the backs of already tired minds. Then it began. Slowly, like a rolling wall of sand, the storm crashed down upon us. Wave after wave of the choking dust enveloped and suffocated us. I ran aimlessly for the protection of a tent, clutching “Tallil,” our therapy dog, in my arms. But in the sandstorm, I was completely without sight. All senses are lost. One becomes blind and deaf, and stumbles around without direction seeking any cover as sanctuary. The heat intensified and my eyes burned with the accumulation of dust.

I crashed into a tent line, and on hand and knees followed it to the tent itself, and then feeling for the door, thrust first the puppy, and then myself inside. There in the darkness, dog and man sat together, wondering at this insane climate, staring at the canvas roof, flapping against the fury of the wind.

Just some more ramblings, hope you’re all well. Comms are not the best, but Ill shoot out what I can when I can. Love to you all.

Cheers,
Eric

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Date: 4/12/2003
Subject: Smiles and tubans

Life has undertaken a peculiar change of season. While the temperature remains as caustic and stifling as always, the general feeling is one of a slowly released breath, almost a sigh. I wonder at the soldiers who fought during the World Wars, months drawing into years, from that first moment of raw terror as the sea crafts hit the French soil, to the final days of Hitler’s reign, or even to be then abducted over to the Pacific to continue the daily nightmare. I believe that two of the horsemen of the apocalypse should be renamed as waiting and boredom, for it was a slow cancerous drain on our energy stores punctuated by fire fights and distant explosions which drew us back into the stark addiction, of adrenalin driven action. Slowly the casualties have ebbed, bringing the hospital into an empty feeling of confusion and for some, despair.

Still, the Iraqi patients will flow through, as terrified fathers attempt to crash through checkpoints, and the young soldiers, not knowing that it was simply the raw emotion of fear and not hatred which forced the cataclysmic rush against the hardened barriers, who open fire at the speeding vehicle. It is to everyone’s violent dismay when the surviving father sees his family destroyed around him, and the soldiers realize that they have killed children.

One of the Free Iraqi Force’s soldiers, and my friend, “Mike” shook his head in sorrow. He spoke to me in broken English of our frailty. We are all human, both Iraqi and American, and it is the fear which drives us. Fear born of the propaganda, of the rumors and of the chaos. Fear of the looters, which has doctors hiding in their homes in Baghdad, fear of the faceless sniper which has the infantry-man clutching his M16 and staring blindly into the night. It is fear which had Mike disarming civilians and American’s both in an encounter near An Nasariyah, where all assumed the other wished their gruesome and damned end. In this we are so terribly flawed.

I drove today towards a local town, and children rushed to the sides of the street, waving wildly, some trying to touch the passing vehicles. Men smiled and nodded as I passed. Everything almost seemed normal, even pastoral. If not for the hull of the Chinese tank, still smoking in an irrigated field, if not for the 5-ton stripped and rotting off the side of the road, and the divets in the tarmac, custodian to the memory of a Thunderbolt’s gatling gun ripping through reality in a fraction of a second. Off to the side, I watch two beautiful birds circling in playful loops over the tank hull. They are white birds, approximately the size of doves, with two singular tail feathers reaching out at least the length of their entire bodies. They are magnificent and they for me will forever be symbolic of the end of the war. Two innocent birds over a smoking weapon of war, while time and humanity passes by in placid continuity.

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