A Cold Day for Mortar Explosions

How I responded to two near-death experiences in Iraq haunted me for years.

Bright but cold winter days, the sun illuminating a barren landscape, transport me back to deadly attacks on similar days at a U.S. Army hospital in Mosul, Iraq. Just like many others in or out of a war zone, I had no control over the violence directed at me then.

And like those who knew they were going to die, I’ve experienced the joy and anger and shame of surviving.

On the days leading up to Christmas 2008, I was waiting at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Diamondback for a ride back to Q-West, a remote base where I’d been living for the past four months. I’d just finished four days of Rest and Relaxation in Doha, Qatar. Travel from a remote Army base outside Mosul to Qatar and back had stretched my time away to almost two weeks, but the travel through highly targeted bases hadn’t been pleasant.

I was a Navy psychiatrist, fresh out of residency training. The deployment had been rough so far. In October, one of my patients committed suicide, and afterward, I had to medically evacuate out of Iraq nine soldiers for wanting or attempting to kill themselves.

In the middle of an urban area, insurgents regularly attacked FOB Diamondback with car bombs, mortars, and sometimes snipers. Q-West, in the city’s outskirts, was quieter. I never enjoyed traveling to Diamondback.

Christmas Eve, I had lunch with a psychologist on our unit’s Diamondback team. She’d worked at Q-West with me. Now, her eyes always waited to cry.

“Let’s go to our clinic,” she said with urgency after lunch, like she needed me to hear her before another attack silenced her for good.

We walked along a gravel road. The horizon distracted her. I followed her darting eyes to abandoned buildings outside the base.

Suddenly, the base’s air defense alarm filled the air with a constant high-pitched scream. We ran until we weaved through an opening in the tall concrete barriers that surrounded the clinic. A small building, it hid from view close to the Army hospital.

The path to the clinic’s door seemed to lengthen before my eyes. We searched for a concrete bunker near…

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