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Small comforts

Baghdad, Iraq — March 24, 2006

I’m sitting in Capt. Mark Heard’s office at the Ibn Sina Hospital inside the fortified International Zone and one of the soldiers who saved ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff’s life just walked past in the hallway.

His name is Maj. Sam Mehta and he’s an emergency room physician at the 10th Combat Support Hospital here. He was wearing his Army physical training uniform, but when he’s in the emergency room he wears scrubs, soft leather clogs and sometimes a black fleece if it’s chilly.

He’s just one of so many incredible people I’ve met here at this hospital, where famous people like Woodruff, who was injured by a bomb in January, and the recently rescued hostages, Christian peacemakers who had been missing since November, were treated. It’s also where the not-so-famous U.S. troops — on duty here for a full year — are treated.

Lives are saved here every day in dramatic scenes that play out in the emergency and operating rooms. Boredom also happens, and with a balance of male and female soldiers working and living side by side, a family atmosphere prevails, with family-style squabbles and all.

The staff is forbidden from going out on missions or even from going that far from the hospital building. On medical evacuations to Germany and elsewhere, the nurses get to take the hour-long round trip to the airfield in Balad,k where they see their patients off. On their down time, the hospital staff can take advantage of the pool at a former Saddam palace down the street. Some of the nurses are already working on their summer tans before it gets too hot to lie out in the sun.

Some live right in the hospital building, others live across the street in a sandbagged trailer area they call “The Projects,” and still others live in a three-story building next to the hospital.

There is a good chow hall that serves up fresh stir-fry orders, and for those with no will power at all there is a sinful ice cream bar in the corner. They have phones, internet access and hundreds of books to choose from in hallway libraries. A rooftop overlooking the city — and the helipad where the casualties are brought in — is a favorite sanctuary for cigar smoking, guitar playing and relaxing.

But down on the lower floors, the doctors and nurses, Iraqi orderlies, maintenance workers, interpreters and a physician from the Ministry of Health earn a good day’s pay; the 10th CSH’s business — saving lives — never stops.

On a visit to the intensive care unit in early March, I watched Spc. Jacob Coppess, Staff Sgt. Burt Hensley and 1st Lt. Kelly Sipe tend to an Iraqi who was blinded and had part of his skull blown out when a bomb buried in a corpse exploded as he inspected it.

I watched them check on the man, a young policeman immobilized in complete sedation with a bandage on his head that said “DO NOT REMOVE” in block handwriting. The deodorant he had presumably applied that morning still looked white and powdery in his armpit, but his lanky body was limp, his lungs rising and falling with the help of a ventilator.

Next to him lay another equally messed-up Iraqi soldier, the victim of another sort of bomb.

In the same room across from the two Iraqis lay two American soldiers, both just out of surgery.

One of them was Pfc. Tyson Ivie, barely 20 years old, a red-headed soldier with the 101st Airborne Division I had met in the ER a few hours earlier. His X-ray showed a piece of shrapnel lodged dangerously close to his heart. Emergency room nurse 1st Lt. Kari Burroughs helped him place a cell phone call and he talked with his parents for about 10 minutes.

“I’m in the hospital, Dad. I’m doing good. It’s nothing big, I just got a little piece of shrapnel in me. They’re going to take care of it,” he told his father bravely, and then he reassured his mother, too.

Ivie listened as anesthesiologist Capt. Ron White told him in layman’s terms what they were going to do in surgery. Ivie said he had never been in a hospital before. White said something like, “You’re going to go to sleep and we’re going to get the shrapnel out and you’ll wake up later. Do you have anything you want to say before the surgery?”

Ivie looked up at the ceiling briefly and, looking back at the anesthesiologist, said stoically, “That I love my family.”

The surgery was a success and Ivie was evacuated from country shortly afterward.

It doesn’t always go that well, however. And, in the ER, a young soldier’s life can end before he even reaches the surgical table.

“Some are dying right in front of us and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Lt. Col. John Groves, the head ER nurse. “The ones that talk to us usually say they just want to get back to their units. The guys who are getting ready to die say they are thirsty. You don’t have the luxury of grieving for them because you might have five or six more coming in right after them and you have to focus.”

He said it’s particularly hard when they have to amputate a soldier’s limb right in the emergency room. “There’s some finality to chopping someone’s leg off,” he said.

The thing that affects him most, however, is seeing boots. When a soldier comes in, the clothes come off. Perhaps, he said, it’s because he associates empty boots with the memorial service for a fallen soldier. “It’s the bloody boots or the burned boots that get me,” he said. I just think, someone’s foot was in there,” he said.

“I don’t think we have as much stress as they do in ICU,” Groves added. “We don’t get to know the patients as well. The last CSH advised us not to ask too much about them. It was good advice.”

On the third floor of the hospital, the operating room teams of nurses, surgeons, technicians and anesthesiologists stand by around the clock, their living quarters only steps away from the next life-saving procedure.

That’s life in a trauma hospital. At the Ibn Sina Hospital, it’s where the horrors of war land every day. It is a life that brings waves of excitement punctuated by hours of stillness.

“Trauma doesn’t change,” said Capt. Randi Schaefer, commander of Alpha Company in the 10th CSH, which took over operations at Ibn Sina in November. “It’s the sheer volume of it they see here. In the states there are not a lot of blast injuries, other than the occasional meth lab blowing up.”

Small comforts

Forward Operating Base Iskan, Iskandiriyah, Iraq — March 22, 2006

Toilets at Army bases in Iraq come in different styles and configurations, ranging from the dreaded plastic potty box one sees at construction sites, outdoor concerts or basic training camps to the porcelain commodes with gold-leaf flush handles in the cavernous bathrooms one finds by the hundreds in all of Saddam Hussein’s gaudy palaces. He had a thing about bathrooms.

Shower opportunities at the bases don’t usually invoke the plastic potty box experience, but they range in comfort and style, as well, depending on where you’re staying. At a palace or other type of hard building, you might have access to a luxurious single-occupant bathroom with a toilet and a shower in the same room. I use the word “luxurious” liberally because the privacy that comes with a door and lock can simply mean precious time alone, not a Ritz-Carlton-style bathroom.

It’s all relative.

If you’re staying at a true Army camp where you have to walk outdoors to go to and from your shower trailer or some sort of mobile shower container, there are certain things you come to accept.

For one, you’ll walk out there in your shower shoes — feet dry — and you’ll walk back to your tent or trailer after your shower with damp feet sliding around on the rubber sandals, catching a puff of powdery dirt and gravel with each precarious step, which forms a brown paste between your toes.

It’s tough to get the feet and sandals completely dry when there is a half inch of water on the floor in the shower trailer. It’s just the way it is. Water sprays out of the stalls, collects on the floor and drains like cold molasses … if there is a drain.

Some people smarter than I am will wear real shoes to the shower trailer. It always seems like a good idea at the time to economize on the items you have to carry.

All of that aside, and accepting the moments of discomfort, it is the most wonderful thing in the world to feel clean and refreshed after a day of walking around in a swirl of gritty, brown air which makes your hair feel like camel fur.

At Forward Operating Base Iskan, which is on the grounds of a power plant that supplies almost half the electricity to Baghdad, all the soldiers in 1st Battalion, 67th Armor, 4th Infantry Division, have access to showers.

Most of the 900 people who live here are men. There are plenty of shower trailers that are exclusively for men, but there’s one eight-stall trailer that is divided in half with a sheet of plywood. One half of the trailer is reserved for the women and it’s the trailer I used while I was here.

It’s private, but it’s not a sound barrier. You can hear the voices of men talking on the other side of the panel, like I did late one night when I had the women’s side of the shower to myself.

I had just finished taking a luxurious (remember … alone time) hot shower when I heard two men’s voices. Their conversation went something like this:

“Hey do you have hot water?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

Pause

“I’m going to turn my water off to see if it’ll get hot.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Longer pause.

“I’m going to turn my water back on to see if it’s hot yet.”

The water goes on and the other voice asks, “Is it hot yet?”

“No.”

The water goes off again. And so it went. I felt so guilty. I was trying to quietly brush my teeth and gather my stuff, but I couldn’t help hearing their exchange. The last thing I heard was, “all I need is 30 seconds to rinse off all this soap.”

I shoved my toiletries, wet towel and clothes into my bag and fled the scene. There I was walking back to my hooch, feet slip sliding around in my wet sandals, the brown paste forming between my toes.

I was cozy and warm to the core. I wonder how long those guys stood in their shower stalls waiting for the hot water.