The Moment I Knew I Was in a War Zone

A helicopter full of Iraqi prisoners made the suffering and risks all too real.

Summer 2008, I finished a psychiatry residency at the National Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The Surge in Iraq was keeping Army units in the country for fifteen months. They had a shortage of psychiatrists, so the Navy volunteered me and some of its other recent graduates to help.

I spent a week at the Navy base in Gulfport, Mississippi, where I received numerous vaccinations as well as Army uniforms and equipment. Then, with a large group of sailors, I spent three weeks at Fort Jackson near Columbia, South Carolina. Most there weren’t doctors. Army drill instructors trained us at what was called Navy Urban Combat School. It mostly consisted of long days at rifle and pistol ranges.

I trained with both a 9mm Beretta and an M-16 rifle, but the Navy had decided I’d take only the 9mm with me. Other sailors told me I was lucky that I wouldn’t have to carry a rifle everywhere with me. The sergeants training us, many of whom had deployed to Iraq, told me it was better to have an M-16: “You want to reach out and touch your enemy at two hundred meters, not twenty-five.”

Their concern for me having only a pistol struck me, but I assumed I’d never be exchanging fire with Iraqi insurgents, much less be even as close as two hundred meters from them.

I’d deployed years earlier, in 2002, on a supply ship as a general doctor before psychiatry residency. Now I knew I’d be in Iraq, but I assumed it would be somewhere relatively safe, like the Persian Gulf on a ship. An accident could happen in Iraq, just as it does at sea, but I thought I wouldn’t be in any danger from combat.

I spent a week in Kuwait, getting acclimated to August in the Middle East, what felt like living in a hair dryer. Looking out across the desert at the unending dunes of sand, sweat evaporating as soon as it dripped, I thought, Why the fuck have people fought over this part of the world for thousands of years? Scorpions, snakes, and poisonous beetles all contributed to a sense that people shouldn’t live there.

But I was wrong, probably just frustrated with the heat. It wasn’t the desert I was standing in at that…

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