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.
Related Multimedia
(Page 3 of 9)
There was guarded optimism on the FOB when I arrived in Ramadi. The Ready First was preparing to rotate out, and the counterinsurgency plan was viewed as moving slowly to success. In closing remarks to his platoons, Tedesco noted with pride that the inkblot strategy was now going to Baghdad. “When they talk about ‘the surge,’ ” he said, “they’re talking about what you have done here.” The public affairs officer who briefed Carlos and me said that insurgent attacks were down precipitously, citing impressive percentages, though he refused to give hard numbers. When Carlos asked what accounted for the decrease in casualties at Charlie Med, the officer said, “The short answer, sir? We’re winning.”
Carlos, who had initially insisted I not leave the FOB, started encouraging me to do so. He wasn’t allowed to go “outside the wire,” as the military called it, so when I ended up making two trips to one of Tedesco’s south-side COPs, it was partly to satisfy Carlos’s curiosity.
Both times I left the FOB in a convoy of Humvees that headed out on a desert highway and then took dirt roads marked by Bradley tanks at each end. The city felt deserted, the streets covered with water and debris and lined by windowless courtyard walls. Occasional date palms and fig trees peeked over the walls, and behind them rose homes, none more than two stories tall, though some clearly had been.
The architecture was boxy desert Arabic, the color of the earth, signified by columns and arches, lattices and porches, and arabesques ringing rooflines. The side streets and alleyways were blocked off by concrete barriers and tangled rolls of concertina wire, and every now and then I saw kids on the other side playing soccer and riding bikes as small groups of men and women gathered to watch. Brief moments of color appeared as well, too muted with dust and faded by the sun to be described as bursts: old reds and blues drying on clotheslines, stacks of green sandbags, and the red-black-and-white Iraqi tri-color at IP stations, but mostly the anonymous hues of trash blown against the walls or caught in the concertina. Everything else seemed brown and gray and in pieces.
An Unending Series of Slights
FEW THINGS IN LIFE GIVE ME as much pleasure as explaining Carlos the little kid to those who know him only as the renowned Dr. Brown. Nowadays he’s actually got a little George Clooney to him, standing a handsome six feet tall and a sturdy 185 pounds, with a noble Spanish jaw and deeply self-assured, dark-brown eyes. His story, of course, begins somewhere else.
Carlos Vidal-Ribas Brown was already crowing about becoming a surgeon when I met him in 1979 on the first day of the seventh grade—not that anyone was listening. He showed up at our lily-white middle school in West Lake Hills all forehead and mouth, the new guy with the funny name and the mom who yelled in Spanish at his Little League games. He was a year young for our grade, scrawny, hyper, and inexplicably brash. Questions spewed out of him in a high voice that jumped an octave when he got excited, the leaps usually prompted by something like an increase in the market price of one of his baseball cards (“Did you see that Ozzie Smith’s rookie card is at twelve dollars? I’ve got thirteen of them!”) or his scoring higher on a test than everybody else (“I got a ninety-eight! What did you get?”).
He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1967 and moved to Austin after spending his younger years in Honduras, Ecuador, and Virginia. But his name and that history barely hinted at how exotic his story really was. His parents met in Langley, Virginia, when Marisol Vidal-Ribas was teaching Spanish to CIA agents and brooding Glenn Otis Brown was one of her students. She was a tall, barefoot gypsy daughter of Catalonian aristocracy—her father had been president of the revered Fútbol Club Barcelona, Spain’s version of the New York Yankees—and he was a high-level spook with a master’s degree in English who had cut his teeth in “the company” playing jazz piano as his cover in Holland.
But all that meant for Carlos was that his mom stuck out in our Waspy environs like paella in a Luby’s line and that his dad was gone to places unknown for six months at a time. Carlos quickly fell in with the guys that I ran with, an odd bunch who occupied that social no-man’s-land for kids with no meaningful adolescent currency: no athletic skills, no musical talent, no three-figure allowances. Carlos was the guy who never acknowledged those deficiencies, who’d spend hours figuring his Pony League statistics and then announce at school, “If I get four hits in my next five at bats, I’ll get my average up to .386. That’s what George Brett is hitting.”
We became even closer in college, when the rest of the guys went away to school and Carlos and I stayed at UT. Weekends began around lunchtime on Wednesdays, the next four days devoted to keeping a beer buzz and chasing girls. Like all lifelong friendships between guys, the relationship was an unending series of slights. Every unlikely girl who showed an interest in one of us would soon be subjected to advances from the other. Our friendship was based on a policy of mutual assured goofiness; if a girl let one of us make time with her, she was clearly desperate enough to go out with the other.
More-serious endeavors worked their way into the party. We coached peewee basketball together for two seasons, until Carlos had to buckle down with his premed classes. When my parents split up during our senior year, Carlos started inviting me to family dinners with his parents and his younger brother, Glenn. Then Mr. Brown died, in 1990. Now the man of the family, Carlos asked me to deliver a eulogy, more an indication of how much we’d come to need each other than any talent I’d shown.
And at some point in there, he became as cool as he’d always thought he was. After graduation I’d summered in Waco. (Don’t ask.) One weekend I came home to find him driving a 300ZX and working as a lifeguard at a fancy country club that I’d never even been to. He’d weighed just 150 pounds when we got out of high school, but now he was filling out a closetful of Polo button-downs. He bought a nice watch and started wearing cologne.
He took a naval scholarship to attend the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, then graduated with honors. He moved to California for a surgical internship at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where he fell in love with and married Debbie Sicher, a pretty neonatal ICU nurse from Chicago with the saintly patience to endure all his questions. While she was having three kids—Trevor, now nine; Madison, six; and Tyler, four—he moved into trauma care, and the family relocated to Los Angeles, where Carlos went to work at the L.A. County medical center, one of the busiest trauma facilities in the country. Still a Navy doc, he was also writing papers and winning teaching awards. He became an international authority on the effects of obesity on critical trauma care.
Discussing that evolution was a favorite topic in Ramadi. “I was always arrogant,” he joked one afternoon. “I just never had anything to be arrogant about. And now I don’t have to be. Now I have a great wife, great kids, and a great career. I’m more comfortable being Carlos Brown than I was fifteen years ago. I think when you find your way in life, you don’t have to be cocky.”
I pointed out that he’d just referred to himself in the third person.
“No, I didn’t,” he fired back. “When?”
“You just said you’re comfortable being Carlos Brown.”
“Dammit,” he said, cackling. “Don’t put that in the article.”
“Okay, no problem,” I said.
He enjoys being at the top of his world, as he well should. But it would be a mistake to say he’s never looked back. Every time we’ve talked on the phone he has asked about life back home, what our old friends are up to and how the city is changing. Last spring, Austin’s Brackenridge Hospital approached him about taking over its trauma program. The job that was offered to Carlos entailed operating, teaching, and researching, and he’d oversee trauma care for eleven Central Texas counties—all in his hometown.
This was what he was talking about way back in the seventh grade, what he’d been working toward his entire life. He accepted the position, agreeing to start in October 2007. But before he could come home, he had to finish his commitment to the Navy. And that meant surviving six months in Ramadi.
Charlie Med
THE HOSPITAL AT CAMP RAMADI is run by the 501st Forward Support Battalion’s C Company, a unit that is better known by the name that appears on white signs with red crosses and directional arrows posted all over the FOB: Charlie Med. Roughly a hundred men and women make up the unit, most of them in their twenties and early thirties, about sixty of whom are classified as combat medics. The balance are a handful of physician’s assistants and nurses, a couple of mental health counselors, a dentist, various support staff like administrators and ambulance mechanics, and three actual physicians: two pediatricians and a neurologist, who function as general practitioners. Their main facility, like most of the larger buildings on the FOB, is a simple one-story structure of about 20,000 square feet made up of a crowded seven-bed sick bay, several hooches for the medical providers, and a cavernous patient-hold area with a concrete floor where as many as forty patients can rest before returning to duty. That large room is where much of Charlie Med living is done. A significant number of staff are always on duty, and the younger soldiers while away the slow periods the way young people do, goofing and flirting, typically loudly, reciting lines from the newest Net-Flix arrivals and speculating about the party they’ll throw when they finally get home.
My Library
