Being There: Ramadi 
Carlos Brown Is a Hero (No Matter What He Says)
I’ve known him since the seventh grade, when he was awkward, obnoxious, and unpopular with the girls (okay, we both were). He always said he was going to be a surgeon, and when the Navy sent him to Iraq, I flew there to see him. I watched him work around the clock to save soldiers and civilians, Americans and Iraqis—even insurgents. Through it all, his mission never changed: Ignore the politicians, take care of the patients, kick butt at PlayStation, and get home safely.
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“All right, everybody,” said Carlos loudly but calmly. “It’s a child. Let’s get her inside.”
The IP was led into the trauma room, where he laid the girl on a table and backed away as the medical team flowed in and around her. Her eyes were open, but she was barely conscious and never once blinked. The team moved efficiently, ten people bouncing from the table to stations around the room, cutting her clothes off and getting an IV started in her thigh. At the head of the table Carlos trimmed the girl’s hair away from the wound, then instructed the group to roll her so he could clean blood from her back and check for more injuries.
By then Clark and Junker were in, still wearing workout clothes, and Clark stuck with Carlos as Junker placed a plastic oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. She groaned softly as Junker asked one of the techs to find a pediatric airway kit. He needed a tube small enough to fit in her throat, and that was a problem. The hospital was intended for adults, and care for children always presented a challenge. One of the nurses put a pulse meter designed for a man’s finger on the little girl’s left big toe.
An interpreter hustled to the table. He’d found the girl’s father and learned that she was three years old and asthmatic. She’d been playing in the courtyard in front of her home with a couple friends when a mortar landed nearby. Her friends were dead.
Once Junker had the girl intubated, Carlos leaned down to look at her head.
“A small amount of brain is coming out of a hole in her skull,” he said. As terrible as that sounded, it was actually good news to me. I’d seen a clump of something on the floor at Carlos’s feet that I was hoping wasn’t brain. It turned out to be a small bundle of pink plastic balloons decorating the barrette she’d had in her hair.
Soon Carlos had stapled her scalp and bandaged her head. Then he followed the interpreter through the crowd to her father. He was easy to spot, a small man with a mustache in a plaid flannel shirt standing in a daze outside. To the interpreter Carlos said, “Tell him I’m Dr. Brown and that his daughter has a significant head injury, so we’re going to fly her by helicopter to the hospital in Balad for brain surgery. And ask him if he has any questions.”
The father never looked at Carlos or the interpreter; as the translation came, he kept his own unblinking eyes fixed on the hospital door. When the interpreter asked for questions, the man asked only if he could fly with her. Carlos said of course and then put his hand on the man’s shoulder, “We’ll do all we can.”
After Carlos had checked on the preparations for the girl’s flight, we trudged through the mud back to his hooch. He untied his boots, then grabbed a bag of chips and sat on his bed. After a couple minutes he asked me, “Was that the first time you ever saw me work on anybody?”
I told him it was.
“Hmm,” he said as he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he’d put them back on he continued. “It’s weird. When Iraqi adults come in, they scream bloody murder. But the kids are almost stoic. They’re so quiet.” Then he finished his chips without saying much else.
The next morning, Carlos checked on the girl’s status on a classified Web site where he could look up every casualty he’d sent through the military’s medical system. She was the last patient he’d seen and the first one listed. The main page gave just her name and condition: “Rania, deceased.” She’d died in Balad on the way to the operating table.
You didn’t need to be Carlos’s best friend to know what he was thinking. All you had to do was look up at the pictures of  his own three kids posted on the walls of his hooch. It was suddenly, heartbreakingly plain where we were.
The Most Dangerous Place in Iraq
TAKING ITS NAME FROM THE ARABIC word for “ashes,” Ramadi was destined for tragic distinction in this kind of war. It sits seventy miles west of Baghdad on a spot where the Euphrates River was once crossed by a Silk Road trade route, an ancient supply line from the Mediterranean Sea that now carries foreign fighters and arms. In 1869 the remote Turkish government formally established the city as an outpost for controlling, or at least monitoring, the various desert tribes that still dominate the region. More hopeful to the United States, in September 1917 Ramadi was the site of one of the final victories of British general Stanley Maude, the commander of the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force who drove the Turks from Iraq during World War I, ending nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule. Though Maude died of cholera shortly after his men took the city, his campaign pushed on to the west and the north, beginning four decades of informal British colonial rule.
During Saddam Hussein’s reign, the city fared relatively well. It was the capital of Al Anbar Province and the southwestern point of the Sunni Triangle. Its half a million residents, practically all Sunni Arabs, were either loyal Baathists or people with a talent for feigning loyal Baathism. Saddam maintained a base for his Republican Guard there, making for a significant military population that shared the city proper with a sizable middle class. Self-sufficient tribes controlled the outskirts of town, headed by sheikhs who lived in a manner that ran from mansions and Benzes to mud bricks and donkeys. Through cash payments to the sheikhs, Saddam had ensured their allegiance. But after the overthrow of the dictator and de-Baathification, the soldiers lost their jobs, the tribes lost their incentive to obey the law, and the middle class lost its sense of security.
That mix made Ramadi one of the war’s instant hot spots, but the city grew into something more in late 2004. Nearby Fallujah filled the headlines that spring and summer, after the lynching of four American contractors prompted a brief end to efforts to take that city. When Fallujah finally fell in a bloody November sweep, few noticed that many of those foreign fighters not yet ready for martyrdom had moved thirty miles west, to dig in at Ramadi. With no sectarian tensions to split their attention, the burgeoning insurgency could focus on killing Americans and anyone who cooperated with them. Ramadi became known as the most dangerous place in Iraq, on some days accounting for nearly half the insurgent attacks in the entire country.
But last May, the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, rotated in at Camp Ramadi, the forward operating base, or FOB, that coalition forces occupied in Saddam’s old Republican Guard facilities. Under the subdued command of Army Colonel Sean MacFarland, the “Ready First” intended to take the offensive, but it opted against the kind of massive show of force that had cleared Fallujah. I spoke one afternoon with one of MacFarland’s battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel V. J. Tedesco III, of the 1-37th Armor, an earnest soldier who, among other things, taught military history at West Point after fighting in the first Gulf war. “Instead of lining up and marching in a wave from one end of the city to the other, killing everyone who hates us,” Tedesco said, “we chose a slower, methodical approach.”
The plan was specifically tailored to fight an insurgency, and its essence was to win the city in sections. The military calls it an inkblot strategy, and the first dot is the combat outpost, or COP, a large house or group of homes seized by U.S. forces to serve as a base of operations in a given area. From there, the warriors—as the soldiers and Marines who do the actual fighting are reverentially known—fan out through the neighborhood on daytime patrols and nighttime census operations, cordoning blocks and entering homes one by one to photograph male family members, search for weapons, and attempt to gather tips. In its first six months in Ramadi, the Ready First established eighteen COPs.
“The key is the people,” Tedesco said, “showing them a positive future and getting them to invest in it. So when we go in, we pull the family to one side while we talk to the men. We give the kids candy and school supplies, and we give the moms sugar. If your objective is only clearing houses, you can do a lot in one night. But if you carefully go in, you can build relationships.”
Of course they also killed bad guys, and though Tedesco is prohibited from saying exactly how many, he gave an approximation that sounded insightful: “Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.” His battalion, responsible for one quarter of the city, lost twelve of its own.
Slowly, parts of Ramadi started coming around. Foreign fighters had long intimidated the city with public executions of policemen and their families. When the Ready First stepped up Iraqi police recruitment as part of the COP plan, the insurgents stepped up the violence, but this time it backfired.
Last August insurgents murdered a sheikh who’d encouraged his tribesmen to join the police, and significantly, the killers hid his body, preventing his tribe from honoring the Muslim tradition of burial within 24 hours. Locals were furious. Tribesmen quietly started to cooperate with coalition forces, and highly prized insurgents occasionally turned up dead in the streets. In September a group of sheikhs aligned to form the Al Anbar Awakening, pledging to defeat the insurgents and send even more recruits from their tribes. Applicants went up from thirty a month last spring to eight hundred in December. Ramadi wasn’t safe, but it was starting to look safer.
“When we first got here, coalition forces could only operate in Ramadi at enormous effort and risk,” Tedesco said. “We would have to fight our way in, and then we could not stay very long. Now there is no place in my area that I will not go.”
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