Cape Cod, Sunday, Memorial Day weekend.
Today is one of those spectacular sunny, cloudless days that we get here every once in a while in my little town on Cape Cod. It’s the kind of day where no matter what you might have planned, you understand that it has to wait until after you’ve walked on the beach.
I’m sipping coffee, Jenny, my wife, is already out for her morning run, and Lindsay, my daughter, is playing the piano – “Prelude” by Bach. It’s the beginning of a perfect day.
Seventeen years ago around this time I’d returned home from the war in which I served – the first Gulf War. My war was mercifully short, but it was still a war filled with all of the horrible things that make war such an awful enterprise.
Lindsay is sitting straight-backed at the piano focused intently on the sheets of music in front of her while her delicate fingers move over the keyboard filling the house with music. Sunlight is filtering in through the front windows and dancing through light-brown locks of hair that curl gently around her face, caressing her soft smooth skin. Looking at her on this morning triggers a memory that imposes itself on me more often than I want it to.
I’m standing in the emergency room tent of a MASH hospital on a sunny, cloudless morning in the Iraqi desert. Unlike the previous several months that I’ve been with this hospital unit, this morning the mood among the people around me is light-hearted and upbeat. Medics, nurses, and doctors are buzzing through our MASH hospital passing on the news that the war is over; the Iraqis have surrendered. We all share the same unlikely dream that this somehow means we are going home soon – why not, the war is over?
In the emergency room nurses and doctors are tending to patients. I’ve just come out of the operating room to see if there are any patients needing to go to surgery. For the previous thirty-six hours we’ve worked in all our operating rooms nonstop, but now the pace has slowed and we have a chance to relax and drink a cup of instant coffee and speculate amongst ourselves about how quickly we will be leaving this place.
Lindsay throws up her hands in frustration after repeatedly stumbling over a part of “Waltz in B-minor” by Chopin that requires some tricky fingering. “I need to take a break!” And the music stops, leaving me alone with my thoughts of that hospital tent in the desert a long time ago.
A helicopter fills the air outside the emergency tent with sand as it sets down on a makeshift landing pad. A surgeon standing next to me hands me a cigar to celebrate the end of the war. We can’t actually light the cigars because of the oxygen tanks surrounding us, but it’s the thought that counts – the war is over! We are laughing and talking excitedly about our immediate future. Another surgeon shares the news that he’s just heard we’ll be leaving Iraq within a week. We believe him because he’s telling us something we want to believe. A few patients from the helicopter limp through the tent flaps of the emergency room. They’re “walking wounded,” patients with only minor injuries that are able to ambulate without assistance.
Behind these soldiers with minor injuries another group of soldiers struggle to maneuver a stretcher through the tent flaps, allowing a cloud of sand to blow into the tent. People inside the emergency tent don’t seem to notice the stretcher coming in, and the four medics bringing it to the back of the tent are joking with one another in the same euphoric mood that permeated the emergency tent just before they arrived. Two surgeons on either side of me are laughing loudly making it difficult for me to hear what one of the medics manning the stretcher is saying about the unmoving form beneath ugly olive green Army blankets they are carrying toward me.
Lindsay sits down at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee and pulls her homework out of a backpack. She asks what we’re going to do later that day while spreading books and papers across the table.
The four medics carrying the stretcher stop when they’re next to me and ask a nurse where they should put the patient. The nurse is distracted by an animated conversation she’s having with another nurse about going home. From the stretcher unblinking eyes in an ashen face framed in light-brown locks of hair curling around the smooth skin of the face of a young woman are staring at me without seeing me. I feel panicked and I begin shouting “She’s not breathing! She’s not breathing!” The medics are startled and stumble, nearly dropping the stretcher. The nurses stop their conversation and the surgeons stop laughing. I grab the stretcher handle nearest me, shoving the medic holding it aside and forcibly push the stretcher onto a bed.
The people around me are dazed with my explosive behavior and confused by my screaming. At this point I am yelling orders at everyone around me: “I need a laryngoscope and a number 7 ET-tube, now!” “What kind of IV access does she have?” “Get the monitors on her!” Can anybody feel a pulse?” “Bring the crash cart!”
I brush away the hair covering the girl’s face and tilt back her head revealing a thin gold necklace around her neck. Opening the mouth and peering into her throat with the laryngoscope I insert a breathing tube and connect it to an ambu bag and begin breathing for her. Nurses and the two surgeons are stripping off the girl’s BDU top to apply heart monitors. Another nurse is working to start an IV line. I’m screaming orders so loudly and so rapidly that I’m barely making sense to anybody.
Something has snapped in me with this patient. I don’t know if it’s because she’s the first woman casualty I’ve seen, or if it’s because I’m in such disbelief that this has happened – the war is over! “THE WAR IS OVER!”
The heart monitor reveals that there’s no heart rhythm and I start yelling for a defibrillator. A nurse standing next to me falls down when I inadvertently push her while reaching for the defibrillator handles. “Charge it to 100 joules!” I shock the young woman. There’s no change in the heart rhythm. “200 joules!” Another shock, but still no change in rhythm. “360 joules!” Another shock and the doctor in charge of the emergency room arrives angry and irritated with me for my behavior. He rips off the remaining blanket covering the patient.
“She’s dead!” “Stop what you’re doing!” “She’s dead!” I begin doing chest compressions, ignoring the ER doctor. He persists in forcing his point, “Stop! She’s dead damn it, she’s dead!” Pounding on the girl’s chest so hard that ribs are cracking under my hands I look up at the doctor yelling at me and see that his eyes are red with anger, and maybe even filling with tears. He looks back at me and points to the uncovered body of the girl and repeats once more: “She’s dead, please stop. She’s dead” and he turns away. Looking to where he had pointed I see her right leg is gone at the hip and there’s not any blood coming from the gaping wound. She’s bled out every drop of blood in her body. He’s right; she’s dead.
I stop the chest compressions and I look around me at all of the doctors and nurses at whom I’ve been screaming orders. Their faces show expressions of bewilderment, grief, and anger seemingly directed at me – but really directed at the war. I think we’re all wondering the same thing – how did this happen? Why did this happen? I look again at the lifeless face rimmed in light-brown locks of hair. She couldn’t be more than twenty.
Lindsay leans over her books, light brown locks of hair dangling onto the pages. I wonder: What can I do to make sure war never intrudes upon her life?
This Memorial day I remember the soldiers who have served in the past and who are serving now in this war and in every war around the world – many we are not aware of. I remember the civilians who have been caught in the path of war. I remember that war is a ruthless, senseless, evil thing that kills indiscriminately and without remorse.
For the sake of life on this planet we must all begin to realize that as human beings we can do better.
Monte
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Thanks for your service Monte. We count heavily on the men and women at the MASH units. There we days when I was in Iraq that the medivac helos seemed to fly into the MASH unit in Baghdad non-stop. We are forever indebted to the military medical professionals.