How could they?

Part Three

The mother, in the back seat, is separated from her daughter by a wall of metal. Her daughter’s hair is damp from perspiration and clinging to her swollen forehead, which is garishly reddish and purple. With 45 percent of her body ravaged by third degree burns and with multi-organ system failure there is little hope. 

As the sandy landscape opens up below, the mother slaps her thigh with an open palm and then raises it to the ceiling with her eyes shut and her chest heaving. Tears fall from her dark eyes and trickle down the wrinkled valleys of her cheeks. She splashes water from a plastic bottle over her cloth-covered hair and pours handfuls of water over her heart as if she could wash away the pain. She murmurs softly to herself. Her shoulder blades, no bigger than a newborn’s fist, protrude from her back and her sobs rise above the deafening Blackhawk engine. At 120 knots, the Blackhawk will arrive at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad in 45 minutes.

I skit beside her on this trip, the minutes are drawn out and I imagine all clocks thrown into a worm-hole lost in space where minutes on the clock are huge pieces of taffy stretched into the deep blackness of the universe.

“Remain objective, don’t get to close to the subject,” I tell myself. “It’s the only way to report the truth.”

But I want to be anything, but a reporter yet I have nothing to offer this woman. I can’t speak Arabic and if I did my voice would be lost in the engine’s roar and what would I say anyways, “I’m sorry.”

So I put my arms around this tiny woman and I hold her.

I find it odd when journalists say, “I didn’t want to take the picture, I felt bad, I took the picture.”  I prefer the silent journalist with no explanations, but that’s not me. I need to purge. I am what I loathe.
As I hold her all I can think about is if I should I ask her if I can take the picture, is it worth it? I take a breath and move away from her, holding up my camera, pointing to her and it. She nods, yes and sorrow is history, isn’t it?

Don’t worry I am here to exploit, but for the greater good. She looks up at me, her weeping eyes ready for the click, as if she is ready for a gunshot. Click. I take the photo.

After nearly an hour, the Blackhawk lands and she grips my hand like I could save her from the shuddering of the aircraft shaking her child-like knees together like cymbals as we land.

The mother is escorted out of the aircraft first. Her long, dark skirt billows in the gusts of air produced by the rotor blades. The crew chief takes her hand and he escorts her to an ATV. She huddles in the passenger’s seat. She seems to shrink as they pull her daughter, on the litter, out of the aircraft. The mother with furrowed brow, trembling hands, looks down at her child, loaded onto the bed of the vehicle. There is nothing she can do, but sit and watch. Her daughter’s hands are covered in layer of cloths. Most of her body is severely burned, tubes, plastic and machines stop mother from being able to embrace her child.

In the hospital the mother extends her hand to me and I hold it in mine as she follows her daughter wheeled into a small room. She heads for the closing door. I don’t stop her because I have no idea where we are or what to do? The medics are busy with the patient.

A nurse blocks our way.

“You can’t go in there,” she says.

I steer the mother in another direction. Thankfully interpreters are waiting and sit her down so she can wail and rock in grief. Does she know her daughter’s on her final breathe? I lean against the wall, waiting for what comes next.

I won’t find out. The medics motion that it is time for us to leave. The soldiers have done their job, depositing a burn victim into a higher level of medical care.

I say goodbye to the weeping mother now infolded in the interpreter’s arms. The mother pulls me closer and kisses my cheeks.

Back at the base I learn that the family reported the girl’s burns as a result of a propone explosion, but there are no shrapnel wounds on her body. The final report to the medics is that the girl is pregnant and burned, report closed. The MEDEVAC Company has already picked up several burned patients in the last 30 days. There is talk of “honor burnings,” The medics have to draw their own conclusions.

“The patient was essentially set on fire,” says one medic. “…Its not a quick death. Its very malicious, it’s very crude and archaic and to have someone do that to you… I can’t imagine being doused with something and then set on fire.” 

It’s hot outside, so hot, it’s hard to breathe, hard to think. I look at the helicopters sitting still on the airfield and the high concrete walls topped with barbwire and I think of the mud houses and women dressed in black outside these walls and it makes me want to shut my eyes and sleep.

“There are things I’m gonna be thinking about for the rest of this whole time,” says the medic, his green eyes wide like the moon. “How could someone do that to someone else, another human being?”

I walk away from the airfield and into an air-conditioned trailer, thinking, “How could they?”

Letters

Part Two

5/31/09

A letter from me to my mother after three months in Iraq.

Send me some love.

The atmosphere is as dry and loveless as the sand.

I am struggling to make the days go by without that feeling of dread,

I'm in a funk, a foul mood, the calling, what calling? 

There are so many signs that say, “I should not be here.”

I need a motivational speech.

Love you, thinking of you, send me a note…

I love love love you

5/31/09

A letter from my mother.

We await you.  We are here.  We are the same.  You have an anchor.  It doesn't waiver.  It endures.  So will you because you are more than your surroundings, more than the dry air and you carry within you more love, compassion and feeling than any one person could possibly hold.  You are a light and a beacon. 

My mother and wolves

I am posting a series of vignettes relating to the joys and pain of motherhood.
Thank you mom for showing me strength, independence and kindness throughout the years.

Part One

My mother makes crepes for breakfast and turns on the fireplace when it gets chilly. Each cat sleeps in its own bed. Their fur rests in the warm corners of this house. 

Spring has appeared out of the shadows and every day I feel sharper like the photo of the wolves hanging on my bedroom wall. They are lumbering forward on their long limbs, they are certain that they are moving. They look focused, impressive with their purpose driven lives. They need to eat and sleep.

Something about going to Iraq to work as an embedded journalist feels just as primal.

But I am not sure footed, just more focused. As everyone who has ever faced death, we truly live when we hit that edge, when we watch what we would miss in those spaces we love to deny time and time again.

But we live in other spaces too, huge spaces that overflow and then feel small.

My mother smiling in the kitchen, ignores the ruckus of my brother, father and I flinging insults in the living room. She quietly cuts and cooks and cleans and it is purpose driven, it is beautiful to see her there in what may be my last sweet memory. 

A little boy on the tarmac

It's been raining here a lot, to the point where I am beginning to doubt this alleged rain shadow. Perhaps I have been gone from the northwest so long that I no longer know how much rain is a lot of rain. This is what is on my mind, rain, for the same reason anyone talks about the weather because it's easy, but I can only ignore the outside world for so long.
On Sunday night I receive a text from a Marine I met in Afghanistan. It read, "Holy crap, Osama bin Laden is dead."
I look online for reports on CBS, FOX, ABC etc., all with the same story. I watch Obama's speech. I watch the Daily Show. I read different posts anywhere from jokes to celebrations of death, anti-celebrations of death to corrections about what Martin Luther King said about peace.
"The face of the Arab world in America's eyes for too long has been bin Laden and now it is not, " said Jon Stewart. "Now the face is only the young people in Egypt, Tunisia and all the Middle Eastern countries across the world where freedom rises up."
But we do not know how Osama bin Laden's death will change things quite yet.
It does remind me of the vast chasm which separates me from the Middle East, a place that resembles nothing surrounding me now. It reminds me of soldiers and Marines who have lost limbs and lives and of the destroyed lives of Iraqis and Afghans.
I have pulled from the archives a short piece I wrote about the casualties of war.


As an aircraft lands on the tarmac, the hospital staff wheels out a little boy no more than two. Attached to his arm is an IV bag of liquid as big as his entire body. He holds a small floppy dog toy in his lap. The helicopter is at least a half a mile away, but dust manages to float up in the air around us.  A soldier kneels before the boy, extending his hand for a handshake. The little boy reaches out and takes the man’s hand with some hesitation. He doesn’t smile or laugh. His big brown eyes as still. The bandages are still on his chest from gunshot wounds.
I imagine there are scars he’ll bear forever.

I first met the boy a week ago when another soldier, a magician by hobby, a pilot by profession, wanted me to photograph him performing magic tricks for kids at the hospital.

As we walked inside the children’s ward, the nurses wheeled the boy out. They dressed him in a frayed yellow shirt that said something like, “I heart the U.S.”
I raised my camera lens and the nurses rushed to me, frowning and saying urgently, “No photos allowed.”

The boy’s father, either a terrorist or a sheik or both, depending on which rumors you believe, had never been to the hospital and therefore could not sign release papers for photographs, so this child of war was un-captured, no one outside those walls would remember his eyes, that begged the question, “Why must we watch the world burn?”
Children have that affect on everyone, a medic told me.
“You have to treat everyone the same, but when you see children you just can’t feel something else,” he said, red and watery eyed after transporting another  toddler with massive wounds.
Some of the other medics commented on the terrible smell of impending death.

Several weeks after I saw the little boy on the tarmac, he died. The wounds on his belly were too large, too deep.
I do not know if anyone came to gather his remains. I do not know if it would have mattered if I had a picture of him, if it would have made any difference at all.

What I do know is that hope is a fragile cage to live in and I still hear whispers when I sleep. 

“Our lives are at risk aren’t yours?” the ghosts of murdered children ask weeping without tears or fear or rage, but with the dull curiosity of an adult in the dying lights of my nightmares.

From Iraq to Rock

I have completed my second day on the island. They sky is gray and wet, the birds are struggling to live through this cold early spring weather. I am making good friends with my work computer screen and  I am still looking for an apartment under $600, which is proving to be challenging.  In the meantime I'm soaking up the April showers.
Here is another unpublished gem from the archives.

From Iraq to Rock
The driver swears his undying love for Lady Gaga, we break into laughter and that’s when something explodes beneath us. The armored hummer swerves to the right. The truck commander immediately radios the rest of the convoy that we’ve got a flat tire. Suddenly the other vehicles encircle us and the tire is changed instantly as if we were at a NASCAR race, but the mechanics wear armor, their large black M4s strapped over their sweaty backs. The tire change is a relatively small glitch if we were at home, but in a war zone it should feel ominous. I try not to laugh, but here I am a journalist, in the middle of the desert and the biggest news I’ve had in weeks is this, a flat tire and I can’t even get out of the vehicle. I’ve agreed to sit in my seat unless told otherwise. As we pull away from the side of the road, just minutes later, and onto the endless stretch of road, I wonder if I should feel something more?

I spent eleven months in Iraq. My mind labored there in the monotony of concrete walls, barbwire and the endless anxiety of a war zone. I returned home to the organized manicured lawns and children riding bikes under leafy oak trees. I missed the possibility of something happening. Some of us search for lost thrills in drugs, alcohol or fist fights. My self-medication is rock climbing.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m no hardcore free solo climber, all it takes is seventy feet and some slab to freak me out, but I love it.  So when a friend I made in Iraq, invited me on a climbing trip, I said yes.

We start the climbing trip driving in the darkness. It’s February and Darrell’s headlights reveal the Joshua trees standing with hairy arms adorned reaching into the sky. The vegetation offers a needed distraction. Three of us, freshly returned from a year in Iraq are boring Garrett, a recent biology graduate from Montana, about our war stories. Natalie, a MEDEVAC Blackhawk pilot, Darrell, a MEDEVAC Blackhawk crew chief and I have complaints. The list includes soggy vegetables in the chow hall, aircrafts landing outside of the designated lines, creepy men and temper tantrums. We haven’t seen much blood and gore, but we’ve been isolated, cut off from our familiar worlds.

My year as an embedded journalist with a medevac unit came with its thrills of running to the concrete bunker when mortars came in. Breaking news stories were far and few in between. When they did occur the military had plenty of rules. “You can write the story, but you can’t take pictures on the flight line, in the hospital or of the patient,” I heard often.

The horrors of our deployment were subtle, full of walls, not just the concrete barricades or the thin walls of the trailers we called home, but also the walls we built to keep others out. Darrell says it wasn’t that bad, perhaps he is tougher than I, or perhaps his time in Afghanistan helped him appreciate real suffering. Later in the week of our climbing trip, as I watch him scale a difficult 5.12 (climbing grades typically range from 5.5, for beginners, to 5.15, only climbed by the few) gracefully stretching his arms out to maneuver each move, he appears to be the real embodiment of Darrell, while the person I palled around with in Iraq was a mere ghost.

Darrell and everything else in Joshua Tree National Park, California is more alive than anything in Iraq. Green and reddish shrubbery fill up the empty wide spaces. Huge monuments of rock jut out in all sorts of directions as if some great giant boy placed them like building blocks and they could be knocked over at any time. My first climb is not exactly graceful. I’m clumsy, unsure of my steps.

Over the next few days we travel to Red Rocks, Nevada. “I should just do it,” I say, working up the courage to lead a route. (Lead climbing is when the climber is above the rope clipping into anchors along the way, opposed to top rope climbing when the climber is attached to a rope, attached to an anchor overhead.) “I just lived in a war zone for the last year. I can do it, I think,” I say. Up, up, up I go, leg shaking, breath cramped inside my ribcage and my heart like a little bird flutters. Afterward, with my feet back on the earth, I say, “That was fun.”

Four days later I finally feel comfortable again on rock. I ascend an easy 5.8 route. Halfway up, I reach between my legs and pull up the rope into my teeth. I fumble with the quick draw (consisting of two metal carabiners connected to a piece of webbing), which hangs on a bolt almost out of my reach. Just as I push the rope safely inside the carabiner, my foot slips ever so slightly and a gust of wind knocks a contact lens out of my eye. “I don’t think I can do this,” I yell down to Natalie, my belayer. “I can’t see.”

“You’re doing great,” she yells. I finish the climb and without depth perception, feeling the rock below with my fingers before stepping up. An hour later, back in the warmth of the van, we talk about our favorite climbs. By now all discussions of Iraq have dissolved in lieu of more entertaining topics.

Several days later I am home with a nagging sense of depression. The fear and excitement is gone. I ride my bike in the rain, downhill without the braking. For a short moment I feel alive again. I start to look for my next job, my first location choice, Afghanistan. 

With Hope I Turn West

After returning from my last freelance job as a communications advisor in Bangladesh, I started fishing around the Internet for long-term position that (gasp) actually pay decent wages. The most appealing job offers happened to be located in out of the way destinations, including small towns in Wyoming and Alaska. I applied for a job in a Navy community, as I have prior experience working with the military, but I did land that job and was referred to a job opening on the San Juan Islands.
And now, just two weeks later, I am sitting in a coffee shop in the island writing this blog and googling the definition of a rain shadow, one of the many charming aspects of my new home. The Olympic Rain Shadow, according to KOMO news (http://www.komonews.com/weather/faq/4306627.html), is thanks to the wall created by the Olympic Mountains, which protects the northeastern Olympic Peninsula and the San Juan Islands from the non-stop rain which torments the Pacific Northwest.
Basically, it means that I will have all the perks of a landscape with curvy Pacific Madrone and tall Douglas Firs with more sunny days.
I start this blog with an old article, I wrote during my time in Iraq, about a young man who misses the Pacific Northwest and the fishing it has to offer.


A FISHERMAN IN THE DESERT

Balad, Iraq—Inside the air-conditioned trailer, American soldiers lean against leather couches watching Brad Pitt cast a line in A River Runs Through It. Sgt. Jason Westlund’s brown eyes dreamily-gloss over as the screen flashes images of the wide river running over smooth rocks, the high grass carpets, snow-capped mountains looming in the distance and giant trout swimming through clear waters. 

“The fish were breaking my heart,” says Westlund. “You can’t catch trout like that anymore.”

Westlund, 27, of Corvallis, Ore., a flight medic in C/7-158 MEDEVAC, based out of Salem, Ore., sometimes wishes he could drive out to one of his favorite fishing holes. Westlund fishes in places like the Alsea River, known for salmon and steelhead. The fifty-mile river flowing northwest of Eugene to the ocean is adorned with stone and fern covered riverbanks shaded by dense forests.

“It’s a short ride from home,” says Westlund, who often wakes at 3 am and fishes until 2 pm. Westlund also frequents the calm Odell Lake in Klamath County, Ore., where he grew up camping and fishing with his family. It’s still one of his favorite spots because “Kokanee are easy to catch and they taste good,” he says. These are places fishermen salivate for in their sleep, especially if they are stationed on a base in the middle of the desert.

Unfortunately soldiers in Iraq can’t just take off for a weekend whenever they have an urge to reel in a big one. When I ask him what he misses most about fishing trips in Oregon he says, “Everything.” He can’t quite explain how much beauty he finds there in the solitude of sunrise, of afternoons with sunlit skies over grass that sparkles like strings of emerald with the perfume of fir and pine and the cool, algae-laced lakes to wash away summer sweat. “Even if the fishing sucks, I still have a great time,” says Westlund. “All by myself in a gorgeous part of state.”

Westlund ties a fly in a trailer in Balad, Iraq.

Solitude in Iraq is a joke. With over 100 soldiers in his company, there is rarely an empty room or silent space. Westlund spends most of his days restricted to a half-mile area, so he can hear a mission called in on a black radio strapped to his hip. That leaves him with several trailers usually bustling with other soldiers. The dining trailer is only quiet in between meals. He sits at one of the tables in the corner with his brow furrowed, fingers delicately curled and carefully moving. With a backdrop of a poster of a waterfall and lush greenery, he’s tied over a 100 flies while waiting for missions. Westlund works for hours, silently berating his creations, thinking about how “Ugly and lopsided they are coming out.” Not that there are any fat-bellied trout anywhere nearby to notice.

 Every soldier has to find an escape from the heat, memories of blood-soaked helicopters and dying patients. On one of his first missions, Westlund cared for a teenage Iraqi girl with most of her body ravaged by burns, a difficult picture to erase. For Westlund keeping his hands busy is one way to de-stress. 

“It makes the time go by faster,” he says.

Watching Westlund with his flies and rod in a trailer produces a certain melancholy feeling, like watching a boat stranded on a concrete driveway in winter.