Baghdad ER

This weekend my wife and I watched Baghdad ER, an hour-long HBO documentary about the work of the Army’s 86th Combat Support Hospital at the emergency room in the Green Zone in Baghdad. I’m not sure anyone could cram more human drama into one hour.

There was not one word of narration or outside commentary in this film. The camera crews simply filmed the scenes and recorded the sounds. No one spoke other than the wounded troops and the military medical staff who attended to them. That doesn’t mean the film was free of commentary. Several of the men and women in uniform offered their opinions on the war that brings an almost non-stop flow of wounded and dying Americans and Iraqis to this ER.

This film should be seen by everyone, no matter what opinion they have about the war in Iraq. It removes the veil between us and the horrendous reality of war; sometimes it rips the veil off and shreds it just like an IED rips off legs and shreds human flesh. There’s no question that it’s raw and graphic. Watching a man’s amputated leg or arm get tossed into a red bio-hazard bag, or seeing a man’s thumb and finger in a plastic specimen bottle, brings the viewer “up close and personal” with the most significant costs of war.

I soon realized that some of the men I saw in that ER are men whose names I’ve read in the daily newspaper list of those killed in action. A couple of the men treated in one scene were victims of an accident in which their vehicle rolled into a canal and several of them drowned. The two men shown in the ER did not survive. A woman I work with lost her son in Iraq when his Army vehicle rolled into a canal and he drowned. I don’t know if I watched her son in that clip, but the odds are….

In some ways I’m beating around the bush because I don’t really know what to say about what I saw. When it ended I was speechless; when I think about it now I’m still unable to explain what I feel. Let me try it in bullet form:

§ The courage of these wounded soldiers and marines is exemplary; they’re the definition of courage. We watched one after another look at their wounds and bear their pain with strength, dignity and an often remarkable acceptance.

§ Their devotion to duty and to each other is exemplary. They were not excited about or even enticed by the opportunity to return home because it meant leaving their buddies before their unit’s mission is complete. Their first, and perhaps their last, thoughts were about each other.

§ Their resilience is exemplary, both in those who returned to duty within a matter of a couple of days and in those who we learned returned after recovering from serious wounds that sent them home.

§ Their sense of humor was pure G.I; like the wounded soldier who said, “Alright!” when a nurse told him she was going to remove his pants.

§ Everything I noted above – exemplary courage, devotion to duty, resilience and humor – applies to the entire military medical staff we watched – the doctors, nurses, medics, chaplains, medevac pilots, technicians, aides, and the orderlies who mopped up the pools of blood and carried away the bio-hazard bags. At times their sense of futility and helplessness was palpable. At times all they could accomplish was to stabilize the soldier and send him or her on to the Army medical center in Landstuhl, Germany, ASAP. One doc pointed out that they never make an incision that isn’t absolutely necessary because they can’t get a sterile operating environment. At times their anger boiled over. One major mumbled “senseless” in the hallway. The chaplain prayed for peace time and time again.

This is a film about heroes, plain and simple. When you see it it’s hard to imagine being anything other than supportive of these men and women. They deserve our full commitment to them. But this is also a film about the horrors of war and the scope of its cost in human terms. Lives are lost; lives are shattered; lives are turned in completely different directions in a moment of time; and all lives involved are forever altered. I felt like every one of the men and women I saw in that ER would come home wounded one way or the other.

War is actual hell; one is not a metaphor for the other. War is brutal and gruesome and dehumanizing. With killing as its purpose, war exposes mankind’s most colossal weaknesses and abject failures. Watching one man hold another man’s perforated guts in his hands should send us a message – it takes guts to fight; but it also takes guts to heal. And it takes guts to know when to stop fighting; when to stop killing; when to stop putting limbs in red bags; when to stop mopping up blood; when to stop putting young men and women in body bags and cold storage; and when to stop putting their blown-up bodies into the ground.

That last paragraph is not a call to stop now, because I fear that stopping now will only increase the carnage and change the nationality of the dead. I don’t know when to stop; I don’t know where to stop; I don’t know how to stop. But, by God, I know why to stop. May those who think they know when, where and how have the guts to do so at the right time, the right place, and in the right way. We owe that to the men and women in the Baghdad ER. May God bless them, one and all.