Paradise General
Authors: Dave Hnida
GENERAL
Dr. Dave Hnida
RIDING THE SURGE
AT A COMBAT
HOSPITAL IN IRAQ
S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY
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Copyright © 2010 by David William Hnida
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2010
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9957-9
               ISBN: 978-1-4391-0040-0 (ebook)
To Mothers and Fathers
1.
I'm Not a Solider but I Played One in Iraq
2.
Which End Do the Bullets Come Out?
8.
“A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Tears”
14.
Death of an American Soldier
19.
The Wounded Wore Aftershave
GENERAL
1
I'M NOT A SOLDIER
BUT I PLAYED ONE IN IRAQ
T
HE LAST TIME
I talked with my dad was on a sweltering April evening in 2004. It was a lopsided conversation. He had died of a heart attack almost thirty years earlier. But he was one of the main reasons I was hiding in a sandy ditch in the middle of Iraq, and I had some things to tell him before I died. My dad was a good man, although up until a few days before his death, I didn't always think so. A hard-toiling factory worker, he drank a fifth of cheap whiskey every day, was a mean drunk, and always left me searching for the answer to why any man felt the need to retreat to the safety of the bottle. I had my hints and theories, but never walked in his shoes, or in this case, his Army boots. It took three hours in a ditch to get a firsthand revelation about why the liquor cabinet was permanently open while I was growing up.
As a twenty-three-year-old infantry lieutenant at Anzio in World War II, my dad sent a number of other young men into battle and could never forgive himself for the ones who didn't return. This
member of the “Greatest Generation” was silent about his war until he abruptly and permanently corked the bottle in late 1975, when I was a senior in college.
We were driving from Newark to Philadelphia down the Jersey Turnpike when he threw a couple of quarters into a tollbooth, saying, “That's not much of a toll in this life, Dave.”
I wasn't sure what he meant until a painful flood of war memories suddenly spilled from a place deep in his soul. He had never told anyone, including my mom, about any of his wartime experiences. I was the typical college kid who thought I could handle anything the world dared throw at me, but was humbled into silence as each mile marker brought a new and horrible description of the savagery of war.
In a calm and measured voice, my dad told me about being hit with flying body parts as German artillery shredded the men next to him in a foxhole; driving a knife into the throat of a wide-eyed enemy soldier no older than himself; then sending out on patrol a man, no, a boy, really, who had saved his life in an ambush only the night before. A boy whose machine-gun-riddled body my dad dragged back to American lines a few hours later. Finally came the worst story of all: the fear. The fear of failure. The fear of letting your fellow soldiers down. The paralyzing fear of fear itself. Fear was my father's lifelong bartender.
The drive ended in exhausted silence an hour later when he dropped me in front my apartment at the University of Pennsylvania. His voice was steady for the entire trip but as the car braked to a stop, his eyes were damp. With the exception of drunken bursts of anger, it was the most emotion I had seen from my father in my twenty-one years. We shook hands, said our goodbyes, and that was it. Almost. As he rolled up his window, my dad quietly said, “I'm sorry, Dave. I hope I wasn't a bad father.” He died of a heart attack four days later.
I think my dad died a more peaceful man, but for me, his stories of war delivered anything but peace. I tried to make sense of the things he had told me in the hour-long monologue, wondering how his
experiences shaped him andâas a resultâme. And I simply couldn't shake the last words I would ever hear from him, a questioning statement that was almost a plea for forgiveness.
How could I think of him as a terrible father after what he'd been through?
I saved myself from a lifetime of regret when I answered with a smile and a quick thumbs-up as he pulled away from the curb.
As the decades following that car ride melted away, the stories did notâthey seemed to be on a constant simmer below the surface of my life. I went on to medical school, got married, and started a family. Yet as I watched my own four children grow, there was always a sober thought that the only way to learn what made my father tick was to leave them, and go to war myself.
N
OW, IN A
classic case of
be careful of what you wish for
, I found myself lying in some nameless ditch along the side of a nameless road outside a village whose name I couldn't pronounce. It was a beautiful desert night, with a sparkling sky and a moon so brilliant it made me the perfect silhouette.
“Doc!” The voice came from behind in a stern whisper.
“Get your ass down and make yourself small!”
A wiry young sergeant had silently wiggled up beside me.
“You're going to get us all killed unless you get the fuck down and eat some sand, sir.”
He was right. Here I was, a forty-eight-year-old doctor, well schooled in medicine but clueless in the ways of war. And fortunate to be getting lessons from a twenty-three-year-old tutor carrying an oversized M4 automatic rifle.
Christ, this kid is the same age as my father when he crawled around Italy in 1943.
My night in the ditch had actually started hours before the sun went down. We were on our way back from convoying a wounded Iraqi insurgent from our aid station to a British combat hospital. I was nearing the end of my deployment and had been through a few close
calls. Now I needed my luck to hold out for just one more ride. I stared out the small window of our Humvee as we weaved and dodged well-hidden IEDs, trying to make sense of why we were risking our skins to save the life of an insurgent who had cursed and spit on us as we loaded his stretcher into the ambulance.
Along the route, our convoy picked up a number of stragglers, vehicles whose drivers knew there was safety in numbers. Among the group of wheeled hitchhikers were a number of fuel trucks, appetite-whetting targets for anyone with a rocket-propelled grenade. The convoy hauled ass toward our base, making good time until one of our Humvees unexpectedly let out a series of groans and weakly chugged to a halt in the middle of the road. The breakdown left us no choice but to sit and wait for help. And wait we did, watching the sun disappear, and darkness creep up.
It didn't take long for word to make its way to the wrong ears that an American convoy was stranded on an isolated road. At first we could vaguely see, then only hear, scrunching footsteps in the darkening fields and groves that ran along both sides of the road. The contractors from the fuel trucks huddled as the soldiers set up a protective perimeter around the dead convoy. I settled into my spot in a ditch that was two feet deep, cradling an M16 rifle, and waited. And listened as the scrunching slowly and steadily got louder.
I'm a doctor. What the hell am I doing here? And what will my kids do when they get the news I was killed?
A
S MY FOUR
children grew, I made sure their world was different from the one where I grew up. They would never never worry about their father stumbling around drunk in public or throwing an empty booze bottle at their heads. And they'd never cower in a corner waiting for the alcohol to trigger an artificial slumber.
Though I worked hard, I tried to make it home early every day to have a catch in the backyard or help with homework. And despite
offers of more money to work in New York or L.A., I realized the way to have more was to take less, and the best place to raise a family was at the foot of the Rockies in the tight-knit community of Littleton, Colorado.
Life in Littleton, in fact, seemed to revolve around kids: My family medicine practice was more pediatric than grown-up; I coached Little League baseball, basketball, and football; and I volunteered as the team physician for so many schools, there were days I didn't know who to root for. Life was good and I was content. I had even made peace with my children's grandfatherâtelling my kids the stories of the good times of my childhood, while leaving out the bad.
Then came two events that shattered my world, and started the wheels that would take me to the ditch.
The first happened in 1999, a seismic blast that shook the country, as well as my lifeâthe Columbine High School shootings. My office was literally a stone's throw from the high school; I knew most of the students, parents, and teachers; and most importantly, of the thirteen who died in the shootings, nine were patients of mine, some of whom I had cared for since the day they were born. And as they fell, so did I.
