The platoon spread out along the lakeshore, glassing the park with spotting scopes, binoculars, and rifle sights. I planned to watch for an hour. Gunny Wynn and I were discussing the wisdom of entering the huge park with only twenty-two Marines when a battered red Volkswagen chugged up and stopped near our position. Ten rifles trained on it immediately. I turned to watch, but we continued our conversation.
“It’s a deserted island. They can cut us off. We need to plan for that,” Wynn said. He wasn’t against going into the park; he just wanted to make sure we thought it through in advance.
“What about putting a sniper team up in the tower?” I asked. “They could overwatch us everywhere and coordinate air.”
“Bad idea, sir. They’d be vulnerable up there, and we’d have to drop a team just to secure the base of the tower. Then we’d be down to fifteen guys. Better to stay together.”
I wasn’t about to contradict Wynn on sniper tactics. Before every mission, I’d float a dozen ideas, and he’d shoot down eleven of them. Then he’d suggest a dozen refinements, and I’d turn away eleven. The winnowing process helped us come up with the best plan.
“Sir, Gunny, better get over here,” Doc Bryan called from his position next to the car.
A middle-aged woman sat in the driver’s seat, waving both hands helplessly through the window. Behind her, I saw a man sitting impassively in the back. I walked toward the car and smelled the infection.
A teenage girl, about thirteen, reclined in the front passenger seat. A cast covered her leg. She smiled stoically, almost coyly, but her lips trembled, and pain shone in her eyes. Mish said her name was Suhar. She had been wounded by a bomb more than a week earlier. Iraqi doctors had slapped a cast on her leg, but she hadn’t received any follow-up care. Her parents hoped to run the gauntlet of American checkpoints to find a hospital, but they saw us on the side of the road and decided to stop.
I looked at my watch. Four hours till we had to return to the power plant. “Doc, you’ve got fifteen minutes,” I said.
Retrieving his med bag, Bryan sliced open the cast and peeled it back from her leg. Suhar screamed. Flesh peeled off her leg in strips, and the bones beneath were clearly broken. Green and yellow pus oozed from the holes in her skin. The smell nearly knocked me over. With the cast off, Suhar settled into choking sobs that racked her body.
I knelt in the dust next to her mother. “Mish, please ask her name.”
She looked at me and said, “Mariane.”
“Mariane, we will do everything we can to help Suhar.”
The parents watched Doc as he worked, and I watched them. I couldn’t fathom their emotional cauldron. Their child was grievously wounded, probably by Americans, but her life depended on the charity of other Americans. They had to hate us. If the tables were turned, if I were that father watching my daughter suffer, I’d be plotting the deaths of the people who’d harmed her.
I swore under my breath. Our mission was to recon the amusement park. My commanders wouldn’t think kindly of us getting sidetracked to help this girl. The night before, I had rejected the personal pleas of the villagers to protect them from thieves. When the shooting orgy had erupted all around us, that decision had been confirmed as the right one. With Suhar, I faced a similar choice: stick to the mission and hope we’d be serving the greater good, or be distracted by a personal side-show. The very concept of “greater good” was fading into fantasy. All we knew was what we saw. In training, this would have been a slam-dunk scenario — turn the girl away and focus on the mission. But the past month hadn’t been training.
Suhar’s parents watched with great dignity as Doc Bryan scrubbed and prodded at their little girl. When he glanced at me, I asked for an update.
“This infection will kill her. She’s a heartbeat away from septic shock. Sir, we have to get her to a hospital.” Doc had turned away from the car and spoke quietly. “I understand the choice you have to make, but you should know that without care, she doesn’t have a chance.”
Calling the battalion, I asked to speak to Dr. Aubin. Bryan took the handset from me and relayed information on Suhar’s wounds. We waited while Aubin checked to see what resources were available in Baghdad.
I fought not to sound bitter. “Resources in Baghdad? How about the whole fucking U.S. military? They better give us something.”
Finally, Aubin called back. “Hitman Two, there are no American aid stations set up yet for Iraqi civilians. We have locations on a few Iraqi hospitals, but none of them have any supplies. Do your best to buy her time so her parents can locate another source of care.”
I was livid. Aubin was a good man. He had proven his guts and dedication ten times over at Qalat Sukkar, and I knew the situation angered him as much as it did us. He had done all he could. I thanked him and turned back to Doc Bryan, asking for options.
“I can clean and irrigate her wound, then pump her up with antibiotics and check the infection… for now. I can wrap her with a clean dressing. We’ll give her parents a supply of dressings and antibiotics and instructions on how to use them. But without proper care, the infection will become systemic. She’ll die.”
“Do your best, Doc. Give them all the supplies you can spare without compromising the safety of the platoon. Let me know when you’re finished.”
I walked away to sit in the dust with Gunny Wynn. “Can you believe this? We’re supposed to be the power here. We can’t even get a doctor for a teenage girl,” I said.
Wynn suggested that we give the parents directions to RCT-1’s headquarters. We knew its exact location, and they had to be better equipped than we were. I agreed and bent over the hood to write out a note in clear block letters:
THIS GIRL, SUHAR, HAS BEEN WOUNDED BY AN AMERICAN BOMB. WE PROVIDED BEST MEDICAL CARE AVAILABLE AND SENT HER FAMILY TO SEEK FURTHER TREATMENT AT HQ INCHON. PLEASE RENDER ALL POSSIBLE AID. SEMPER FI. BRAVO TWO, 1ST RECON BATTALION, MC 3937 0063, 14APR1130Z2004, 1STLT N. C. FICK, USMC.
Mish gave the note to Suhar’s parents, along with directions to Inchon, the call sign for RCT-1. When Doc finished cleaning and re-wrapping the wound, we watched the Volkswagen speed off down the road toward Baghdad.
“If they don’t get killed at a checkpoint, they’ll probably just get laughed at by Inchon,” Bryan said, spitting in the dust with all the disgust I felt.
It was late afternoon by the time we crept slowly across the bridge into the amusement park. Tending Suhar had cost us two hours. On the hundred-meter span across the lake, the platoon made the mental shift back to combat mode. Tenderness gave way to aggression. We turned right at the end of the bridge and made a slow counterclockwise sweep through the abandoned walkways and parking lots. As in the rest of Baghdad, looters had been a step ahead of us. Broken glass lay everywhere, along with random pieces of furniture discarded by thieves in midflight. The incongruity was surreaclass="underline" Humvees passing a carousel, and Marines poking rifles into the Tilt-A-Whirl’s teacups to make sure they were empty. Everything was empty. The park was not only deserted but assertively so. Doors swung on their hinges, and paper trash tumbled by in the wind. It was Hollywood movie set empty. The part of me still untouched by the war wanted to sit down at one of the picnic tables and read in the sunlight.
The platoon leapfrogged through the park, with teams alternating security and kicking down doors to search buildings. We found a movie theater, a snack bar, and administrative offices, but no signs of fedayeen. With the sun quickly sinking, I urged the Marines forward. I wanted to reach the northern tip of the park, where my map showed the large building identified to us as a “suspected regime palace.” We approached it more warily than we had the other buildings but repeated the same drill of posting two teams on the perimeter and sending two teams inside. The building was a single story, sprawling along the lakefront.