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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The morgue was around the corner from Carlos’s hooch, a small wood-frame building that I’d never noticed. The inside looked a little like the surgery room, the same bright lights, the same soft-blue floor. But there were no hooks in the ceiling over the beds and no clutter of tools on the walls or counters.
Two black body bags sat on tables in the center of the room, and the attendant opened them one at a time. At first the contents looked like piles of bloody fatigues waiting to be laundered. All that was left of the soldiers were torsos. It took a moment to find their heads, but following the plackets on their shirts up to their collars, I saw what was left. There was nothing behind their faces, no eyes, no teeth. The soldiers’ skulls had been blown out of their heads by the force of the explosion.
Neither bag was open for even a minute. As Carlos and I walked out, he stared at the ground. “If there’s any comfort, it’s that they didn’t feel anything,” he said.
Dinner was quiet. There was a Madden football tournament scheduled for the evening that had dominated conversation the past four days. But Carlos was going to pass on that to attend the Heroes’ Ceremony for the dead soldiers. He’d described the ritual in an e-mail back in September:
The soldier’s entire company (~200 troops) lined up in ranks outside the morgue, then came to attention and saluted. The doors of the morgue opened, and four young soldiers slowly carried out the body of the dead soldier and carefully placed him in an ambulance. The ambulance proceeded to a landing zone with the company following closely behind on foot. Out of the night sky dropped two helicopters, completely blacked out. They landed with a gust of wind, sand, and debris. Once again all came to attention and saluted as the soldier’s body was loaded onto the helicopter. The helicopters left in the same darkness they had arrived. I hope it is something I won’t have to experience often, but it was one of the most amazing nights of my life.
Carlos and I went to attend the ceremony a little before eight o’clock, and the path in front of the morgue was filling with soldiers. Then Carlos’s Bat Phone rang. Another American casualty coming in.
“You ought to stay here,” said Carlos.
“No, I’ll stick with you.”
The ambulance pulled up to the slab as we got there. Four medics carried a young blond soldier in, conscious and appearing okay in the front but with blood showing on the back of his uniform as they placed the stretcher on the table. The team moved quickly, cutting off his clothes and pulling off his boots. A nurse called out his blood pressure, “Fifty-four over thirty-eight”; another worked to get an IV in his arm. Clark went to the foot of the bed and asked the soldier to wiggle his toes. Only the ones on the left foot moved.
“We’ll get some morphine in you soon, and it’ll stop hurting,” said Clark, “but right now I need you to tell me if you can feel me touching the bottoms of your feet.”
“On the left foot.”
Moving his hands to the top of the feet, Clark asked, “What about now?”
“Only the left.”
Clark and Carlos looked at each other as Clark moved his hands to the tops of his ankles and said, “What about now?”
Before he could answer, Junker spoke up from the head of the table, where he’d just connected a bag to the IV. “You’re going to go to sleep in a second so we can get to work on you, okay?”
Then Carlos said, “Someone please check the blood supply.”
“Do we have the right kind, Carlos?” asked Junker.
“O positive,” said Carlos. “Got it today. Radakovic, get the blood going. I need a blanket, somebody.”
When the blanket arrived, the team rolled the kid on his side to put it underneath him. That’s when time stopped.
Nobody said a word or even looked at one another. From the small of his back to the tops of his thighs, there was nothing but a gaping hole so red it looked black. You could see through to the front of his hips. His colon fell onto the table.
Time started back up. “We’re going to need a walking blood bank,” said Carlos. “Ten units.”
“That’s not going to be enough,” said Junker.
“Twenty units,” said Carlos. “And get me some towels and clamps.” As he stuffed the towels into the hole, Junker left to help ready the OR. “We’ll be up there after the chest X-ray,” said Carlos. And then to himself, “His back looks shattered. His pelvis is gone.”
There was little talking while Carlos and Clark scrubbed. A crowd started to gather in the operating room. The soldier’s company was on hand, some in the hospital, some on the slab. Others wandered over from the Heroes’ Ceremony, which had been delayed by high winds. First Sergeant George showed up, as he always did, to watch the team operate. Brigade Commander MacFarland came in for a while, visiting briefly with George in the back of the room. A new Catholic chaplain had rotated in for Father Rocheford, a tall guy who stood by the door, never talking to anyone or taking his eyes off the table. Fully 25 people stood in a half circle around the surgical team while they tried to keep their patient alive.
Carlos barely had his gloves on before he’d opened the soldier’s belly and gotten his intestines and stomach out and set them on his chest. There wasn’t much to work with. He patched a hole in the aorta and closed off his pelvic arteries, veins, and inferior vena cava. After two hours and thirty units of blood—three times the body’s normal volume—Carlos had him stable enough to fly to Balad.
“That casualty was a reservist,” said Clark a while later, as we watched his buddies mill around on the slab. “Reserve units are actually even closer than regular Army units because they’re all from the same town. A lot of them probably grew up together.”
I left him to find Carlos. He was sitting on his bed with his back to the wall. He’d worn the same drained expression since I’d seen him outside the operating room seven hours ago.
“What did you think of that, of those guys today?” he asked. “Those are truly the most heroic figures I see here. I mean, they’re just young guys, just starting their lives, you know? They haven’t done anything yet. Yeah, they’ve served their country, and that’s a great accomplishment. But they haven’t gotten to enjoy their own families, raise their own kids.”
He looked at the posters his mom had sent him of his own three children, then turned his head to the laptop on his desk. “With the slow month I naively thought maybe it was getting better here. That may have had more to do with the weather than anything else. The mass casualty two days ago and now Americans get hit with an IED again? I don’t know when it ends. It ends for me in March. But I don’t know where it ends in the bigger picture.”
He ran his hand over his buzz cut. “You know, people say the surgical and medical guys here are heroic, but we’re just doing our jobs. These guys put their lives on the line every single day, all the time. They’re heroes. And that’s where all the politics is a bunch of bullshit. It doesn’t matter if Bush wants the war and Clinton and Pelosi don’t. That’s irrelevant. These guys died doing what they were told to do. Obviously I’d love it all to end today; we leave, and Iraq’s a happy place. That’s not going to happen.
“The only political thought I have is I hope these guys died for something. If they died for nothing, then that’s a crime. But if something good comes out of this, then the death is part of their job, and they did it well. And I tell myself the sacrifices the war fighters make are for something, that something will change, that there will be some benefit, long-term, for civilization or humanity or Iraq or our country”—he paused for a moment—“or something.”
Home
I LEFT RAMADI LATE THE NEXT NIGHT, after lucking into a spot on the standby list for a helicopter flight to Camp Taqaddum. The wait was four hours, but that was no bother; the priority passengers were three hundred or so soldiers who were rotating out, including the men and women of Charlie Med, their fourteen-month deployment having finally ended.
Carlos and the surgical team remained another six weeks, a period that ended up being as busy as any other time during their stay. In the three weeks after I left, two more mass cals came in, both from coordinated attacks involving multiple car bombs. One explosion was so great it blew the doors open on the Man Cave, and Carlos thought initially it had occurred on the base. It was actually at an IP checkpoint several miles away, and it caused 16 Iraqi casualties. The other mass cal featured 22 wounded, all Iraqis and more than half of them children, including a three-month-old boy whom Carlos operated on and managed to save, though he gave the credit to Junker. During one 12-day period in the middle of February, he operated on 21 patients. The monthly average had been between 25 and 30.
Carlos left Camp Ramadi on March 8, but military life being what it is, he didn’t get to California for another week and a half. On Monday night, March 19, after four days of scheduled and scratched arrival times, the whole family—Debbie, the kids, his mom, and brother Glenn—picked him up at Camp Pendleton. Their celebratory dinner was at the nearest McDonald’s, where for the first time in Brown family history, the kids spent so much time climbing on their dad that they left their Happy Meal toys sitting on the table.
They arrived in L.A. just before midnight to discover that friends had hung “Welcome Home!” banners all over the house and tied yellow ribbons around every tree in the yard. It was a sentiment Carlos appreciated, even if it left him a little uneasy. To his mind, the heroes were outside the wire, the warriors who risked their lives to keep him safe. But just as he had to get used to grateful praise in Ramadi, he’ll have to endure it now that he’s back. As soon as the sun was up the next morning, the doorbell started ringing with friends and neighbors and, to Carlos’s astonishment, complete strangers who had just happened along, all stopping in to say thanks.
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