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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First Sergeant George stopped in to nutshell the day for Carlos: 16 IPs killed at the scene, 59 casualties brought in to Charlie Med, 38 evacuated immediately to Level 3, 4 operated on, and 17 sent back to duty. And the hospital had gone through all 120 oxygen tanks it had on hand, plus 20 donated by an aid station at a COP in town and 40 more sent down from the hospital at Camp Taqaddum.
Junker walked up as George was finishing. “A civilian is coming in hit by an IED. I think it’s unrelated to all this.” Carlos winced and then waited. Ten minutes later, four Marines brought in a sixteen-year-old kid, still conscious, with his right hand attached to his elbow by just two thin, white tendons. In between was nine inches of rotting ground chuck. The OR was set up immediately.
“Today has hurt,” said Carlos as he rescrubbed. “It’s just been awful. I mean, you read about this stuff and then you’re in the middle of it. Somebody drives a truck through a wall and explodes it? Then sprays everybody with gas? That’s just evil.”
It took a little over an hour and the last two units of blood from the walking blood bank to get the kid’s hand off and close up the nub. When they were finished, Leyva started putting the unused supplies back on the shelves while Loera took the dirty instruments to the sterilizing machine. As he usually does, Carlos mopped the floor of the operating room. He said he’s not sure why he feels as if he ought to do it, but he does. It helps him wind down.
Then, while most of the team headed to the Man Cave for cold burgers, Carlos went to his hooch to lie down.
No Place for Politics
FATHER DENNIS ROCHEFORD is the reason Carlos has been attending Mass voluntarily for the first time in his life. With a high-and-tight flattop over his round face and a slight Boston brogue, he presents a Capra-esque version of a Catholic Marine Corps chaplain. He’s 58 years old and a Vietnam veteran, and his openness in talking about his pre-priestly life—the men he killed, the woman he almost married—gives him a special bond with the warriors. They stop him for short visits when he carries his tray through the chow hall, smiling like high school kids greeting their church youth group leader.
He closes each service with a simple thought, “Please take care of one another,” and he includes in each week’s bulletin a prayer he writes himself. When I went to Mass with Carlos during my first weekend in Ramadi, the offering was titled “A Warrior’s Prayer for the War in Iraq.” One line leaped out: “Teach us all to walk humbly with you, so that we may be worthy to conquer all insurgents and those opposed to our noble cause.” I later asked Father Rocheford if he wasn’t assuming a great deal with his characterization of the fight. With no hesitation he explained how I was missing the point.
“When you consider the ‘noble cause,’ ” he said, “think about this: There is no greater love that the world has ever seen than the willingness to lay down one’s life for a friend, and that’s what the soldier and Marine do every day. I don’t get into arguing with folks about whether we should have been sent here or not. When you put on that uniform, you are a man of nobility because you are willing to shed your blood and give your life, not necessarily for the politics of the Iraqi war but for your brother soldier or Marine.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And that is so noble.”
As Rocheford explained, the warrior’s primary concern is protecting his comrades, and that unity is the essence of military service. It’s drilled into your head at boot camp and reinforced every day by a base full of people wearing the same clothes and haircut. It’s in the military language of acronyms and euphemisms that dizzies civilians. At Camp Ramadi, it’s recalled whenever a soldier has to stop on the way into the chow hall to fill up a sandbag that will go to a COP and protect the fighters who stay there. Rocheford relied on it when he was a grunt and now stresses it as a chaplain. It explains how he was able to kill and why he’s at peace with it now. North Vietnamese stormed his position and attacked his platoon. So he killed them. A peacetime cynic might call it brainwashed conformity, but in wartime it fills the space in a soldier’s mind that would be given over to worry for his own safety. The implication is that if he’s got someone else’s back, then someone has his.
That idea is seldom the point of news stories from the war. Back home Iraq is a political issue, and so much reporting reflects the nearly universal view that we shouldn’t be here. It’s the prism through which events are seen and news is related. Last winter the Columbia Journalism Review ran a piece titled “Into the Abyss,” an oral history containing 47 war journalists’ accounts of the conflict. Among its 10,000-plus words of brilliant detail on the horrors of war were just two paragraphs that put soldiers in a positive light. One applauded their discipline while another called them “essentially humane. . . . A huge majority of them are good men trapped in an impossible situation.” Much more space went to the things warriors do wrong, the cultural taboos they violate by wearing their boots into people’s homes, the fact that they say “fuck” all the time and spit snuff juice everywhere. And even that was overshadowed by the remainder of the piece, descriptions of the unthinkable, like the unforgivable treatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners and the heartbreaking deaths of civilians.
“Good news?” asked a correspondent from the Christian Science Monitor. “My first inclination is to say, ‘What fucking good news?’ The violence and criminality of Iraq has only grown in the three years that I’ve been here. And there is not an honest metric that shows anything but that.”
Discussing the media in Carlos’s hooch one night, Major Riccoh Player, the public affairs officer, asked for a little bit more. “If somebody’s going to do a story on a carful of civilians who got killed at a checkpoint, that’s fine,” he said. “But include something in there about how the shooter had been on duty for eight hours and a car bomb had gone off at that gate the day before and killed his buddy. You don’t have to tell a good news story, just tell the whole story.”
Player’s job is to think about such things. Most soldiers don’t have that assignment or feel any such need. They see some war coverage when they go home on leave but little in country. Their time in Camp Ramadi’s Internet cafes is spent on MySpace and e-mail. “If I want to know what’s going on, I just stick my head out the door,” said one.
“The guys carrying the weapons don’t care about politics,” explained Junker. “It’s about taking care of each other and watching each other’s backs. That’s one thing that’s amazing here. Some guy will have a bad injury and the only thing he’s concerned about is his buddy in the next bed.”
That togetherness became the answer to many of the questions I posed. Whenever I asked soldiers how they dealt with fear or the difficulty of fighting an unpopular war, the answer was always the same. “You don’t really think about that,” they said. “My only concern is taking care of my buddies.” When I talked to tank battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tedesco, I asked him for examples of heroes serving under him. He responded with parables about unity.
“One of my sniper teams was attacked by the enemy,” he began, “and a sergeant led two Bradleys in to get these guys out. The lead Bradley was hit by an IED and destroyed. The sergeant pulled the wounded soldiers off that Bradley, threw them in his own, and then continued on, not back to the COP but on to the sniper team. He got them out of the house they were in, and while he was driving away, he got hit by an IED that destroyed his Bradley. He then took all the soldiers who were still alive, set up a defensive position in a nearby house, and ran up the street to link up with elements coming to assist them. That sergeant has been approved for a Silver Star.
“A Humvee coming down to one of my COPs was hit by an IED and destroyed. Three individuals in the Humvee were killed and their bodies were on fire. A first sergeant from the COP came out with a fire extinguisher and a spray washer and stood under enemy fire to put out the flames consuming their remains. He couldn’t live with the fact that their bodies were burning.
“A corporal in a truck hit by an IED picked up the wounded driver, threw him over his shoulder, and ran two hundred yards down the street to get him to an ambulance.”
The lieutenant colonel could have gone on all day with stories of soldiers trying to save other soldiers. “It’s absolutely humbling to lead men like that,” he said. “And it’s in every one of them. These guys are just like every guy you went to college with, and they all have the capacity to do valorous acts like that.”
His stories weren’t good news by any estimation. Nor were they stories that I’d ever read.
“A Whole Other World”
ARMY FIRST SERGEANT GREG SHANAHAN is a solidly built, 34-year-old Tulsa reservist adept at blending into crowds. He’s got blue eyes that don’t reveal much when you first meet him, a low voice that makes him sound as if he’s letting you in on a secret, and a baby girl back home named Emilie whom he’s spent a total of three weeks with since she was born last August.
My Library
