AFF's Doublethink

Date: 6/19/2003
Subject: Mission complete

Hey there friends…

Only a couple of weeks left. Ideally I’m home by Independence Day, and then I’m taking leave to come North. I know my parents are planning a get together, I hope you all will come.

I will have a week or so to overcome the culture shock and remember how to wear clothing that doesn’t blend into the surroundings. I can’t wait to throw on a pair of cowboy boots!!!! The following are some of the more recent notes. Communications have been tough, but I really appreciate the outpouring of support I’ve gotten. You really can’t understand how much it has meant.

The new crop of soldiers has moved in, fresh and clean, their equipment still green in both use and color. Soon they will take on the dun sameness of Southern Iraq, as their individuality is erased under the coating of the suffocating dust. The fresh meat struts around with a false haughtiness amongst each other, but they remain fully cognizant that they were not here, and as a result, when a dust colored soldier walks by, the respect is palpable.

The arrival of new troops makes us all mindful of a singular thing. Few of us have a redeployment date. It is a small thing, but it governs our universe. When do we get to go home? My soldiers are restless, bored and depressed, they try to sleep away the hours. Only in the oblivion of slumber do they lose track of their surroundings, forget the prison walls, and can drift into contentment.

It’s ironic. My troops and I are proud. Our tiny band crossed over the berm at the very onset of the war; we took the high ground and established our footprint on the front line. While we were not bloodied in combat, we proved our worth in the combat zone and we performed our jobs in support of the soldiers under fire, and when it came to our jobs, we were flawless. It sounds arrogant, but of the seventy-five thousand American, British, Korean, Italian, Rumanian and Croatian soldiers, marines and airmen who have marched through Adder, there has not been one reported case of food-borne illness relating to the military mess.

How then do I face the yearning which floods my soldiers’ faces, the ardent desire for one solitary thing? To go home. They all know their duty, their sense of which is unflagging, however, as the flow of the mission slows to a trickle, tedium finds root and the mind begins to grasp at those things of the world which are comforting and missed.

Adder is becoming an Air Force base, and there are currently only eight military working dogs on site. The food mission is a smooth operation, which legitimately should not need our presence. But the inspectors are the safety net, quiet professionals whose existence is ignored unless something goes awry. As for the dogs, they’ve presented a significant amount of work, but fortunately I’ve managed to keep them in good health, and as such I wait, like a vulture, for them to fail.

I watch my soldiers’ strength flag at the news of the Third Infantry Division turning back, and that the Marines are not redeploying as planned. There is little I can do to bolster their morale, little I can offer, for nothing will compare with what their hearts desire most. Home. We’ve done the job put before us, ensuring that the soldiers could trust the food which they ate in snatches, comfortable in that conviction.

The Army tried to make things difficult for us by allowing the contracted suppliers to buy their food at the best price. This resulted in fruit and vegetables showing up from Egypt, Iran, Palestine and India. Problematic at its core, as these countries often fertilize their crops with night soil–human waste. So it doubled the labor, but additionally doubled our resolve. The kitchens knew to bleach everything before it went onto a plate, and with the eyes of the inspectors on their necks, the suppliers sent us the best they could, full in the knowledge that bad product would get condemned and the guillotine would fall upon them.

It is a guarantee that some soldiers fell ill from products they ate, such as the block ice from Nasariyah, or the goats and chickens which they would buy to roast in a down moment, but in so much as we four could watch, nothing got through which could hurt the war fighters.

The massive outbreak of the Norwalk-like virus occurred at epidemic levels throughout theatre, but the culprit was poor sanitation and lack of hand washing. Up until the Korean war, and even into Viet Nam, more Americans were lost to Non-Battle-Disease-Injury (NBDI) than to combat wounds. That is to say that between syphilis and dysentery, scrub typhus and malaria, shigella and cholera, more soldiers fell to poor hygiene than to bullets. In response to this realization, the military looked to its own organic support and realized that the failing was internal. Combat generates casual disregard. Soldiers stop taking care of themselves. The whole standard drops across the bar. Cleanliness is a luxury, not a daily occurrence, and when you are condemned to the never-ending battle against filth, eventually you succumb to it.

This is doubly true when every fiber of your being is concentrated on staying alive, on your next meal, or the next fragment of sleep. Even I, trained, indoctrinated, brainwashed into the concept of sterility, scrubbing before surgery, five minutes contact time, scrubbing until my fingers are raw, and knowing all the while that the bacteria are there regardless, even I have lapsed into benign neglect. Think of the images of wars past, of the trenches, and swamps, of the grimy, exhausted faces. I could show you photographs from this war, developed in sepia tones and make you believe that it was World War II, except for the uniforms and equipment.

The move North was exhausting for us all, but the Third Infantry Division moved hard and fast. It is exhausting to move through this terrain, under the constant weight of your gear and the threat of death. The Kuwaiti and Iraqi weather is merciless and is becoming even more so, and rumbling forward encased in our vehicles, our eyes dart in every direction hoping to catch sight of the weapon flash or the lobbed grenade, hoping to have some warning of our fate. Even to move the couple of hundred miles from safety into the lion’s den potentially takes dozens of hours, and the weariness bears down on you, additive to the heat and the caution. And so cleanliness is the first victim.

At some point in April, I rode with some Marines in their tracked assault vehicle. It was packed for maximal mobility, six of the men living wholly out of the few square feet of space. Water cases and food were stacked high, sleeping bags crammed into any available hole created by the piles and piles of ammunition. These Marines had been in five significant firefights and had lost two of their own. They were exhausted when I met them, burnt-out from sleeping on the move, from the constant vigilance, from the aching grief at their fallen brothers. These were the true warriors of the flickering screen, uniforms altered for the environment, broken away from the rigid code, these men stank of dried sweat, their shirts caked in their own salt, their arms were riddled with the feasting of the sand flies and mosquitoes. They were unshaven, unshowered and did not care. These were distant luxuries remembered and dreamed of, as a woman’s kiss and the softness of her skin, as a tiled bathroom smelling of the disinfectants and potpourri of Middle America, as a casual meal.

Here, in this reality, where there is no cascading hair to caress, their hands were eternally fixed to the trigger of their weapons, and their blackened sockets belied their drained souls as they fixed their gaze forward. These men will be at the greatest risk of NBDI, of tooth abscesses, of fungal infections, of leischmeniasis and malaria. This is the reality of war.

The first Gulf War was a different creature, a war of missiles and warplanes, of tactical strikes from a time zone away. We believed that this would be the same. Or at least the brass in Kuwait, with their pressed uniforms and air-conditioned SUVs, believed it in their ignorance. As a result of poor leadership, or at least, poor planning, the preventive medicine assets sent into theatre have been minimal, a failing which has been in part responsible for the diseases that we have seen, but more dramatically, will be responsible for the diseases we bring home. At this moment, the theatre authority on leisch is predicting that over four hundred cases of the disease will emerge from the Tallil airbase alone. Much less the rest of theatre. Afghanistan is a high-risk area, and the signs and symptoms sometimes take months to erupt.

If a soldier were to contract the protozoa from a sand fly bite, indolent ulcers could appear down the road. These might resolve spontaneously or they might require the intensive chemotherapeutics required to kill the bug. Either way, it’s a mess. Too much was laid on the laurels of last time. In the last Gulf war only twelve cases emerged from the entire operation. But this is not last time.

Helicopters.

There is something fundamentally sexy about the rotor wings. At Tallil, the double-bladed Chinooks, the workhorse of the Army’s helicopter fleet, fly overhead on a continual basis, so much so that one doesn’t even bother to look up anymore. Their thumping, repetitive sounding drone echoes throughout the Cash as they carry passengers and supplies along the main supply routes.

If Chinooks are the tractor trailers, then the Blackhawks are the taxis, as air ambulances shuttling the wounded from Mash to Cash and from Cash to Field Hospital, or as gunships, escorting the important on their visits of Baghdad and points North. The Marine Cobras and the Apaches are the sports cars, sleek and vicious; they cut through the placid sweltering scene in flights of four or five, weapons standing out like hackles on a dog. When the Cobras pass, we wonder at the havoc they are returning from or are going to. They, like the various fighter jets, represent destruction on wings, and are terribly awesome in their power.

The Hueys are the sensible station wagons, swooping along carrying troops or patrolling the supply routes. They are as effective in this modern combat as they where in the Vietnamese jungles, and it seems a repetition of history to see feet dangling out the open bay doors, and a machine gun trained on the horizon. The Kiowas are the little Volkswagens, zipping around in their intelligence gathering missions, they are small and quick and appear frail in their flight, with their radar bulge hanging over the center of their rotor.

Other birds hum through the Tallil sky, many of which I could not identify, a perhaps a Sea Hawk or two, or various Special Forces helicopters, designed and used specifically for rescue and extraction missions. Before Iraq, I had infrequently been able to jump a ride on a rotor wing, and usually only as a simple tourist, being given a quick jaunt, as if on an amusement park ride. War brought few pleasures with it, but one was to be able to jump on these miracles of flight with absolute purpose. In fact, it reached a point where I had logged so many hours of flight time that it began to lose its novelty. Not that the exhilaration ever disappears, however I began to take for granted that it was unusual and even extraordinary to be able to fly over the Iraqi landscape on the ramp of a Chinook, or gazing at the interminable sands from the litter of a Blackhawk.

By rotor wing bird it takes about two hours from Southern Iraq to the heart of Kuwait, but in between is raw desert, an anvil of burning sand. The desert flows and undulates as the reflected heat curdles the air and creates mirages. Single Bedouin challenge the beating of the sun on the sand, beaten into their leathery skin, beaten into their very existence. It is as if to defy the fury of the sun, and in doing so declare one’s existence.

I once watched from the ramp of a Chinook as a Bedouin, riding nobly on camelback, crested a dune on the interminable wasteland between Kuwait and Iraq. For him, time and space have little meaning, nor did the modern boundaries set to paper by Queen Victoria and the diplomats of the era of real politik. Paper is intransient, a temporal arrogance, as are kings and kingdoms. These all rot away with time, leaving ruins for the future to play in and wonder about. Instead, life is defined more absolutely, more perfectly, with a clarity akin to a diamond, pure, simple and piercing. Water, the rise and fall of the sun, the camel. These are the factors which define the moment, these and no others. The desert ship cuts a lone edge through the waves of sand below us, our passage hardly marked as we lumbered over the rising heat and the turbulence of invisible columns of temperature.

Towards the end of my tour, I flew back from Kuwait to Tallil on a Blackhawk. It was mainly a mission of convenience to assuage the political acrobatics of the reserve unit which had taken over the medical mission. The theatre veterinarian had turned over the Iraqi portion of the war to the 72nd Medical Detachment out of Germany, and relieved us after three long, hot, arduous and dangerous months. I had arranged for the incoming unit to fall in on the comforts which I had garnered at the very end of our mission near An Nasariyah. All of the amenities of living with the Air Force had been laid out for them, but they still grumbled that we had been called South early. As a result, I jumped onto the bird to catch some face time back in Tallil. Sounds so simple, even casual: “just jumped on a Blackhawk to spend a couple of hours in Iraq”. The reality starts to complicate once all of the other factors come into play.

First of all, I was by far the most junior passenger on the flight. General Seinko was flying up for a meeting to iron out the medical care coverage in Southern Iraq. As the Theatre Surgeon, he was ultimately responsible for all of the medical assets in the war, which is to say, medical, veterinary, dental, combat stress, preventive medicine, air and ground ambulances, as well as the smaller more specialized groups like the 520th Theatre Area Medical Laboratory with whom my crew and I had worked on a continual basis. So take a one star General, a Command Sergeant Major, a Full Bird Colonel, a Lieutenant Colonel and me, and shove them all onto a Blackhawk bound for the front. Sounds like the makings of a bad joke. A nun, a general, a platypus and I walk into a bar; the platypus says…

Those who understand the rank structure may realize that I was severely outclassed when it came to military experience, so I put on my game face and stared out the window at the yellows and golds of the variegated desert sands below. A massive berm, coupled with a deep trench, tanks and concertina wire boundaries marked the division between Kuwait and Iraq as we launched forwards. One goes into a hazy, trance-like state from the weight of the battle-rattle and the radiating heat, slipping in and out of consciousness. The repetitive thumping of the rotors overhead and the gentle shaking of the craft lend themselves to that end, and soon the desert’s regularity loses form and becomes an ocean of brilliant flax. Conversation is impossible with the foam earplugs shoved as deeply into the canal as possible to drown out the monotonous drone of the engine and thus the passengers to your side and around you take on the persona of total strangers, as if one were riding on a subway in New York. Reverie takes over, and as sweat pours down my chest and back, I dream cool incorporeal thoughts.

A sudden shaking of the helicopter jolts me back into the present, and a subtle whine begins to build from the rotor. Iraq lies below us, although it is only the passage of the hardened frontier and the GPS that make it so, and as the helicopter begins a slow downward spiral, and as the war damaged tarmac of the double lane highway shoots past my window a third time do I realize that something is going very wrong. The ground reaches out to grab us as if demanding that we obey its gravitational laws, and screaming that we are to be punished for flaunting the very essence of its spinning core, but the pilots’ expertise brings us delicately to earth in spite of the world’s obvious desire to create a crater lined with bits of captain and Blackhawk rotor. The land certainly wouldn’t have the audacity to consider scattering a General’s bits, but a captain and a lite Colonel might have sufficed. Maybe next time.

Acrid black smoke and a smell of burnt plastic met our senses as we exited the helicopter. Knowing only that we had a General to protect and were in unsecured territory the Command Sergeant Major and I circled the smoking bird and mounted a defensive perimeter. Fortunately, the CSM was carrying an M16 as well as his side arm, for myself and the other officers were armed only with our 9 millimeters, our rakish charm and our rapier wit. Not terribly much of an offensive, should a militant or underground fedayeen wander by and see the soft target. But we made due, assuming points at ninety degree angles from each other and the downed bird, facing outwards towards the road.

Behind us was the anvil of the desert, and ideally, it presented as significant a barrier to attack as any. This left us with the road to watch. In the distance, a small grouping of black tents lay quietly under the oppressive tattoo of the sun, and a herd of sheep could be seen grazing on the scant vegetation that the terrain offered. The road produced the occasional car, which slowed or stopped as the Arabs caught sight of the Blackhawk smoking under an Iraqi midday sky.

We sighted each possible target without drawing our weapons, and no movement went unquestioned. The rank settled in behind the helicopter and waited for relief as the crew began to crawl over the fuselage in an attempt to find and cure the malfunction. Over all, the wait was a slow and tedious one, with no real change to the scenery. The black metal of the 9 millimeter soaked in the sun’s heat and began to burn my fingers whenever I would let my hand rest on it. Soon, both of us doffed our kevlars and blouses, putting back on the flak vests over our brown t-shirts.

The vests were not the bullet proof variety seen on cop shows, but rather, reinforced enough to protect against the collateral damage from a bomb or an explosion, as such, it would not keep me safe against a well aimed bullet, but it might save my life if a grenade were lobbed in my general direction. Overall, the vests had proven their worth in the war, as the statistics which were coming back suggested that the bulk of the wounded had taken injuries to the extremities and not to the thorax. Perhaps it is a stroke of luck that many of the Iraqi forces were not expert marksmen; however it was little solace to one standing supremely exposed in the middle of the desert with the added responsibility of a General’s safety thrown in by coincidence. Just for fun.

On the other hand, how many people can say that they went down in a helicopter during the war, albeit a soft landing, in the Iraqi desert with a General officer on board? Sometimes, it’s just the price one has to pay for a good story.

The ending is a happy one, and came without significant incident. The only tense moment was when an SUV turned off the road and began barreling towards us. All weapons were drawn and fixed on the vehicle as it slowed and stopped. Two Arabs in uniform stepped out, and I can only imagine their discomfort at having a half dozen barrels pointing at them. They stopped at a safe and unthreatening distance from the lame duck helicopter and the pilot strode out to speak with them.

It turned out that we were within a couple dozen miles of the Kuwaiti border and that this region was actually assigned to the Kuwaiti forces to patrol. The uniforms were properly identified as Kuwaiti, hands were shook and they moved briskly back to their truck to get away from the angry gaze of the handguns pointed their way. Eventually, the mayday was heard and another bird dispatched to collect the General and his Aide de Camp.

The second helicopter also brought repair parts, and the crew began bashing away at the engine to coax it back into a state of quasi-functionality. With the departure of the General, the mood changed substantially, the Command Sergeant Major and I chatted amiably about Massachusetts and Cape Cod, wistfully envisioning the deep green sea and the breaking of humpback whales over the cresting surf. A few hours later and several dry runs of the rotor, we boarded the bird and continued our journey North, tanner perhaps but none the worse for the experience.

Cheers,

Eric

Captain Eric Lombardini is a veterinarian stationed on the front lines in Iraq with the Army’s 43rd Medical Detachment.

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