Man in the middle

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Good news bad news.

A suicide bomber struck near the city center, and our arrival coincided with the victims, a mass of broken, traumatized people streaming into the field hospital. Some walked or limped in; the majority were hauled in on stretchers. The admitting nurses were overwhelmed and rushing from patient to patient, sorting the horribly wounded from the merely wounded from the too far gone to save, a triage situation.

I had never seen anything like this. I had seen dead and wounded soldiers, but here the wounded were all civilians, for the most part women and children, looking bloodied and dazed as they cried out for attention and help. I saw tearful fathers carrying wounded little children, and little children standing with desperate expressions beside horribly mangled parents.

What did the terrorists hope to accomplish by this indiscriminate massacre? Worse, I overheard somebody mention that this was only half the casualties; the rest had been rushed to civilian hospitals, which eventually were overwhelmed and began diverting the overflow to the care of the U.S. military.

At one point, Enzenauer and I exchanged eye contact. The ugly irony of us bringing bin Pacha, here, at this moment in time, caught us both off guard and feeling guilty.

In this cauldron of misery and confusion, the admitting nurse asked only a few cursory questions and showed no curiosity or dubiousness about our responses before Ali bin Pacha was admitted for emergency surgery. In Iraq, it seemed, everybody has the inalienable right to get hurt without explaining why.

Doc Enzenauer dutifully emphasized the diplomatic importance of his patient to the admitting nurse, and a few minutes later repeated it word for word to an Army doctor, along with a few comments about his own credentials, which turned out to be fairly impressive-John Hopkins Med School, internship at Georgetown Hospital, specialties in psychiatry and the heart-and he was allowed to enter the surgery room as an attending physician.

I found a cup of coffee and sat and waited two hours before I could hitch a ride on a military ambulance transporting patients to the airport for evacuation to the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Both patients lay on stretchers, one unconscious, the other floating in and out, so dulled by drugs the difference was negligible.

An attractive nurse, who looked mildly Latina and seemed quite pleasant, rode with me in the rear of the ambulance. Her nametag read Foster, and I asked her, "What's your first name?"

"Claudia."

I didn't see a wedding or engagement band, and I asked the question I ask all attractive women. "Married?"

"Five years now. My husband's in New York City. That's where I'm from. The Big Apple, right?"

"Isn't that a suburb of New Jersey?" She did not seem to appreciate this comment, but she smiled a little dryly, and I asked, "Miss it?"

"What I would do for a real tuna ceviche. You know this meal? A Honduran dish. Served in a coconut shell. Muy delicioso. There's a restaurant in the city, Patria. Real Latin food." She laughed. "I still got four months left on this tour. My crazy husband already made a reservation for the day I get back. Is he some kind of nut or what?"

And so we passed the drive for a while; she loved her husband, she missed him, and couldn't wait to get back and make babies by the bushel.

Claudia was Army National Guard-a part-timer-and the last thing she or her husband had expected was a combat tour that interrupted their lives. I eventually asked her, "What happened to these men?"

She pointed at the unconscious patient and said, "Sergeant Elby is a truck driver. National Guard. Like me." She reached over and carefully adjusted his blanket, a gesture as unnecessary as it was telling.

"A roadside bomb, about a month ago. Both legs are gone, his left hip, too. Also his kidneys aren't functioning, so he needs dialysis twice a day. The damage from these bombs is…" She looked away for a moment. "He might lose an arm before we're done."

Not they're done, or he's done; we're done.

I glanced at Sergeant Elby-he appeared young, about twenty-five, and his face was heavily bandaged except for his nose, which was bruised, scabbed, and apparently broken. His left hand, also covered with scabs, stuck out from beneath the blanket. I noted a thick gold wedding band. I could not imagine this level of damage inflicted on a human body. In fact, I did not want to.

She stroked the hair of the other patient and commented, "Lieutenant Donnie Workman. He graduated from West Point only two years ago. Shot by a sniper during the assault on Karbala. The bullet entered his chest cavity and tumbled and ricocheted around, ripping up a heart valve and perforating a lung and his stomach. He's touch and go."

I watched her face as she stared down at these battered and broken men. I said, "You care deeply about them. I see that. Will you travel to Germany with them?"

"No… I…" She hesitated. "I'll hand them off… to the flight crew. It's a medical flight-good people, very competent, and… they don't lose many passengers."

She swallowed heavily and regarded their battered bodies. "We're not supposed to become attached to our patients. But you know what? You do. A lot of them never speak to you. They can't, right? But you learn so much about them. Always their friends stop by to check on them, and always they tell us this man is very special, and they tell us why, and these are the reasons we must save him… or her. Pretty soon, you know all about them."

She seemed to be experiencing separation anxiety, and she seemed to want to talk about them. So I asked, "Like what?"

"Well… like Andy Elby… he has two children. Eloise and Elbert, six and seven. Wife's name is Elma." She smiled and said, "They're from Arkansas, where funny names like that are common. You learn that stuff when you deal with a lot of patients. Anyway… Andy was a truck driver in civilian life, too. A simple guy. You know how that is, right? Poor guy, working full-time, doing the National Guard thing to pay for summer camp and braces for the kids. He never expected to be called up. Never expected this."

Again I looked at Andy Elby. If he survived as far as Walter Reed hospital, Elba and the kids would join him there, staying in temporary lodgings, living hand to mouth. Having had several friends who lost limbs, I was aware of the aftermath-a numbing saga of operations as the doctors chase infections and try to cut off dead and infected tissue before it works its way up, like cancer, and destroys the body. Elba would be shocked when she saw him, and she and her kids would go through hell as the docs tried to coax and force Andy's body back to a level where it could function on its own. As for what would come afterward, well… life would be different. Sad.

Claudia continued, "Donnie-I know, I know-I'm supposed to call him Lieutenant Workman. Anyway, Donnie was this big lacrosse star at West Point. A few of his classmates stopped by to see him. They told me Donnie was one of the most popular cadets. And academically, top of the class. His classmates all believed he would be the first general officer. Isn't that something? This is some talented guy." She paused before confiding in a low whisper, "I don't think Donnie's going to make it."

I took her hand and held it. "You're an angel. You've done everything you can."

Tears were now flowing freely down her cheeks, and Claudia Foster told me, or perhaps someone much higher than me, "I'm going to miss them. God, I hope they make it."

"Most do."

"And some don't."

We sat in silence for the remainder of the drive, me holding Claudia's hand as I thought about these fine, promising young men, and about the bombing victims at the field station, about Nervous Nellie, who constructed bombs that blew people to bits, about Ali bin Pacha, who gathered the money and wrote the checks that underwrote suicide bombings and street massacres, about Cliff Daniels, whose selfish ambition contributed to this, and about Tigerman and Hirschfield, who held open the door for the dogs of war.

Claudia said nothing, just attentively watched her patients. Her mood had turned reflective, and I had the impression that her thoughts, like mine, had to do with the consequences of evil and incompetence, of stupidity and fanaticism. She had no idea of the precise causes, but every day she saw the result, and every day she and her patients lived, or died, with it. I had a very good idea, and I wanted revenge.

The driver let me off after we had passed through the airport checkpoint, and I stepped out of the ambulance. I took two steps, then turned about and said to Claudia, "Were these men able to talk, they would tell you this: Thank you."

She offered me a faint smile and said, "Don't take this wrong, okay? I hope I never see you again."

I blew her a kiss and walked away.