Fixing Hell (21 page)
As I left my building and headed for the chow hall I bumped into one of the intelligence officers. This tall, lanky guy with dirty blond hair and wire-framed classes said, “Colonel! Welcome back. I’m glad I saw you because I need to talk with you.”
We stepped to an area where we could talk with some privacy, and the intel officer passed on some interesting news.
“Sir, I was talking with some of the intel officers in our brigade back in Camp Victory and I have been briefed that you’re on the most wanted list.”
“Captain, what the hell are you talking about?” I asked, looking him right in the eyes.
“Well, you know Al Zarqawi, right?” he continued, referring to the most wanted man in Iraq at the moment, a high-level terrorist leader. I was quite familiar with him. “Well, he has a most wanted list and I was told that the four Army colonels at Abu Ghraib were named on this list. You’re one of the four Army colonels here, so you’re on the list.”
I didn’t know quite what to say. What does a person say in this situation? I just said something about how I appreciated the heads-up and left it at that. As I turned to walk away, the captain seemed to think that he hadn’t really gotten his message across.
“Sir, you should be careful out here,” he called after me. “There is also a $25,000 bounty on your head.”
That got my attention again. “What in the hell does that mean?” I asked.
“Well, sir,” he said, “if the perimeter wall on this post gets breached during an attack, the bad guys are gonna come looking for you with their machetes. Colonel, the first one to capture you and cut your head off with their machete will get $25,000 from Al Zarqawi.”
Well shit . . . there’s a thought that’ll keep you up at night,
I thought to myself. But after a moment, I considered that maybe, probably even, this young captain was embellishing the facts. Still not good news, but probably not as bad as the captain was saying. So I thanked him for his information and headed toward the chow hall.
Before I got halfway to the chow hall, I was soaking wet with sweat and it seemed to be unusually humid and hot that evening. I stopped for a moment, took my helmet off, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. Before I put my helmet back on and buckled the chinstrap, I could see the intel center commander moving quickly toward me. He called out as soon as he was within earshot.
“Hey, Colonel James! Good to see you back. Larry, we need to talk about some pretty serious shit. The four colonels here, including you and me, have shown up on a pretty serious hit list.”
Maybe it was my denial, but by this time I really wasn’t in the mood for any more discussion about my name being on a hit list and getting my head chopped off, so I just told the commander I’d already heard and started to move on toward chow. The commander stopped me in my tracks, looked me in the eyes, and made sure he had my full attention.
“Colonel James, you’re not tracking with me. So let me say this so you receive this message loud and clear. First, you need to know that you and I are high-value targets here and there’s a goddamn bounty on our heads. You need to take your nameplate off of your front door, because trust me, the enemy already knows where you live, and if they come through the wall tonight, you better be ready because they’re coming for you,” he said, frustrated that I wasn’t taking this seriously. “Larry, here’s the deal: if you’re captured, first those bastards are going beat you beyond recognition. Your wife will not recognize your face ever again. Then the fuckers are gonna butt-fuck you to the point where the docs will have to sew your asshole back together. Your asshole will be literally ripped apart. Man, after they’re done with their group orgy with you, while you’re still breathing, they’ll get out the video camera and tape your execution. They will put you on your knees and cut your head off with their machetes and film every minute of it. After that, they’re going to cut your nuts and your dick off with that very same machete and stick them in your mouth. Then they will take your head with your testicles and dick stuffed in your mouth and put it all in a paper sack and drop it off on the front steps of the Red Cross. This will be the special gift these bastards will give to your wife just in time for Christmas. Colonel James, from here on out you’re ordered to always keep your weapon locked and loaded at all times. Are you tracking with me now?!”
I was. I got the picture clearly. This wasn’t some bullshit threat that would never amount to anything. I really was on Zarqawi’s hit list. (Our intelligence community would erase any lingering doubts in the coming weeks, confirming that Zarqawi had me in his sights.) I could be the next grisly video shown on CNN and downloaded all over the world. If I still had any second thoughts about being a combatant, the intel center commander helped me get my head on right that night. After we finished our chat and I walked to the chow hall, I kept thinking about what the commander had described.
Is this the night that they will come for me? On this night will I have to kill another human being?
Clearly this was a new mind-set for me. This was a new way of thinking that I had never ever considered before. I wasn’t worrying any more about whether I would have to kill or might be killed as a consequence of being here to do my job as a psychologist, sort of an unwanted side effect of just doing my job. No, this was now about me in a very personal way. I personally, Larry James, Biscuit 1, was now a specific high-value target for the enemy. It was freeing in a way, because the enemy had made it crystal clear that to them, I was a soldier, indisputably, no qualifications. My moral dilemma over being both a soldier and a doctor didn’t mean shit to them. Part of me understood that already, but having your name on a terrorist hit list has a way of bringing the issue into great clarity.
My 9mm and M16 became permanent parts of my body and I could not follow the usual rule of always keeping my weapon on safe and not having a bullet locked and loaded until the shooting started. With what the commander described still ringing in my ears, I considered that for me, every single moment was now like being in a convoy. I had to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice. My orders from the commander were clear: be locked and loaded at all times and don’t keep your weapon on safe. But this created an additional layer of anxiety for the rest of my deployment that I had not anticipated. After a couple of days walking around with my gun always loaded I couldn’t help thinking about a conversation I had with a former student of mine who used to be a Honolulu homicide policeman. John had retired after twenty-six years on the police force. I asked him once whether he had a pistol at home for personal protection, and he said, “Hell no, I couldn’t wait to get rid of that damned gun. Dr. James, having a gun on your hip all the time is like having an extra-big dick. You always worry about whether it’s hanging out. Is it showing or did you forget it somewhere?” I understood now what he meant. Every soldier has to be mindful of his or her weapons, but carrying a locked and loaded weapon all the time creates a burden of vigilance that soon will wear you down.
The threat of having to kill someone, and being killed by Al Zarqawi’s minions, became worse by the day. One evening in late August we all were put on alert and told that there was a high probability that there would be a major assault on the camp, and/or a prison break, that night. I asked a senior sergeant where the fighting position was for my staff and me and what our specific duties were during an assault. He brought me over to a door inside my office that always remained locked. I had never asked any questions about this particular door, even though my own desk was right in front of it. We just assumed it led nowhere and we didn’t need to use it.
“Your assignment is this door, sir,” he told me.
I had no idea what he meant, so I asked him to explain. The young, redheaded sergeant told me about that door with a very flat, poker-faced expression.
“Sir, on the other side of that door are twenty-five hundred Iraqi prisoners.”
“Son, that can’t be right,” I said in reply. “I think you got the layout of the camp sort of wrong.”
“No sir,” he said. This young sergeant went on to tell me that behind that door was the other prison at Abu Ghraib, the one that the Iraqi government was in charge of, not the Americans. I knew already that there were really two Abu Ghraib prisons, but I hadn’t realized until this moment that this two-inch-thick door in front of my desk was the only thing separating me from the Iraqi one.
“Sir, the last time there was a real bear of a prison break, somehow those prisoners climbed up on the roof and were jumping down in the courtyard right outside your main door there. If they get out of that prison, sir, they’ll be all over you in a heartbeat.”
I told the sergeant I believed him now about my proximity to the other prison, but I still wasn’t clear on my orders. What were my staff and I supposed to do?
“Sir, the first goddamn thing that comes through that door, or if you see something climb down from the roof, you shoot that motherfucker in the head.”
All night we guarded that door and the roof. We stayed at our positions with our weapons pointed directly at the door, the roof, and the courtyard, locked and loaded all night.
Unknown to us at the time, we were exploring a new frontier for health care professionals in the global war on terrorism, particularly me. I had no idea that I would be thrust into the center of a national and international debate on the use and role of psychologists in a combatant situation. Sitting in Abu Ghraib, I had no idea that the debate over psychologists’ involvement in interrogations was gathering a great deal of traction. Most Americans simply didn’t understand our role and how simple yet critical it was to these young interrogators. We provided a great deal of guidance to the interrogators on how to interview someone without any yelling, abuse, or torture. These interrogators were young, inexperienced at life, and usually right out of their brief training school. We provided support and guidance on how to improve their interpersonal skills with the detainees and build a relationship.
We survived several attacks on the compound, but death was a constant visitor. Roy was twenty-five years old, married, and had a young baby at home. I would frequently see him in the chow hall and find time to visit with the marines who protected those of us inside the wall at Abu Ghraib. Through their patrols outside the post and vigil on the guard towers each night, I was able to sleep safely. One day in late August I had lunch with this young lieutenant and a couple of his men, and then he went out in his Humvee and got hit by a roadside bomb. The ground rumbled for a mile radius around the explosion. Even though he had on his body armor vest with the neck protector, a piece of metal from the bomb found its mark in the right side of his neck, in the small gap between the neck collar and the helmet, severing his spine at the base of his skull. He simply slumped over and died. When I learned of his death, I mourned his loss, but I reminded myself that this was part of the new battlefield mission for a doctor like myself.
Larry, that could have been you. The old Vietnam battlefield plan for health care professionals is gone. Now, in this new war, doctors will constantly walk the tightrope between being the soldier and the doctor. Kill or be killed, because it doesn’t matter to the enemy if I am a doctor or a tank driver.
I began to see myself as wearing a white doctor’s lab coat while at the same time I also wore a soldier’s uniform. The change was that in previous wars usually the enlisted medics or corpsman would go forward with the field units. Never before in such great numbers had we seen psychologists and psychiatrists being so far forward in the battlefield. To psychologically survive, I could no longer try to keep them as separate but equal entities in my life, as most health care professionals in the military try to do, but rather I had to find a way to merge them into one. This new way of seeing the doctor on the battlefield would create many long nighttime debates for my doctor buddies and me. Even now, the answers and guidelines for doctors on the battlefield are evolving. Perhaps they always will.
This Is My Dog
September 2004
S
ome things were looking better as we headed into September, but we still needed more help with the medical aspect of our mission. We were getting our asses kicked on a weekly basis by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Most people hear “Red Cross” and think of the American organization that responds to disasters, but the ICRC, as it is called, is a very different group. The ICRC is a private humanitarian institution that monitors human rights abuses and compliance with the Geneva Conventions guidelines on how prisoners should be treated. The group is well-known throughout the world, having won three Nobel Peace Prizes in 1917, 1944, and 1963 for its humanitarian work.
The ICRC is based in Geneva, Switzerland, but we saw that, unlike the famously neutral Swiss, it is a long way from politically neutral. The group’s mission statement says it is an “impartial, neutral, and independent organization,” but the ICRC consistently takes a critical view of the United States. Like most other soldiers, I saw the ICRC representatives as a bunch of radical left do-gooders, mostly from Europe, who were as interested in giving America a black eye as they were in truly helping the innocent. Every ICRC rep I met had long, disheveled ’60s and ’70s hairstyles as well as Birkenstock sandals—the consummate hippie motif. They thought all of the detainees were completely innocent and only needed to be hugged more. I was seen as a devil by them, supposedly helping interrogators craft abusive interrogation practices. I hadn’t been in Abu Ghraib for long before the ICRC accused me of torturing prisoners.
The ICRC claimed, very wrongly and without any evidence, that psychologists were stealing detainee medical information and helping interrogators craft torture. They made these claims in the media over and over without citing any evidence, and the misinformation took on a life of its own. Because of these false reports, many of my colleagues around the world believed that I stole medical information and used it to fashion torture plans. This was a lie, complete bullshit. Any medical information I ever had was used for safety and to protect the detainees. For example, if I knew that a detainee was psychotic, I would tell the interrogators to leave the guy alone. Or if a detainee had a serious medical condition, I would ensure that his medical needs were recognized and met by the doctors. Many of the detainees came to us right off the battlefield and had not ever seen a physician. So medically this could be a very ill enemy who needed medical and psychiatric care and constant surveillance. It was my job to make sure they were very well taken care of. This was Step 7 of my action plan—institute a medical monitoring process to identify abuses. If I became aware that a detainee had any untreated medical condition, I would speak directly with the doctors, and this worked very well. It was the ICRC who concocted the story of medical torture.