Tales from the Sandbox - Holmes - Military Times

Surgery, Old Town and the first IED

We’re in Mosul now. Our first day here, we found dead pigeons every few feet. I thought maybe somebody was poisoning them, but one of the interpreters told me it was heat exhaustion.

It’s hot. 122 degrees today. But dead pigeons falling out of the sky? Yeesh.

Watched a couple more surgeries yesterday. A 6-year-old boy was “collateral damage” when U.S. troops attacked an insurgent’s home. Shrapnel tore his bowels out and left a wound in his back that’s leaking urine. His dad was there — handcuffed and under guard.

Worse, he went to the Iraqi medical system first, but rather than stapling his belly back together, they used silk thread, which wasn’t sufficient, and then they left some of his organs hanging out. The American docs weren’t sure why.

A doctor there told me he thinks all of the Iraqis are insurgents because they’re not patriots. When he asks them why they joined the army or the Iraqi police, they all say they did it for the money, not for some ephemeral notion of democracy.

Then again, the American Revolution was launched by Americans; nobody started it for us. So why are we expecting deep-seated patriotism from Iraqis?

But even after saying all Iraqis are insurgents, the doc helped reassemble an Iraqi army soldier whose tibia had been pushed out the bottom of his foot. They called it the “puzzle case” because they had to figure out where all the pieces went, and then they went to the tool shop and had metal pieces crafted for the guy’s leg. That was intense to watch. For some reason, I’m still OK with all the blood; it’s the noises that get me. This time, it was the doc drilling screws into bone.

My photographer Rick Kozak leaves today, so in honor of his going, we went out with the 2-7th Cav today in Old Town. So cool — the city, I mean. So old. Old enough that there’s a monument to Jonah, the Biblical figure who found himself in the belly of a whale.

The guys, as always, teased and played with the kids. As we were leaving, the soldiers started hooting: “Whoooo!” And all of the kids — and there was a herd of them — started yelling “Whoooo!” back. Pretty funny.

But we took the short route back, past Saddam’s Mosque. They call it something else now.

Just after passing it, we heard an explosion, and Staff Sgt. James Sink, sitting in the passenger’s seat, started yelling, “Where is it? Where is it? Now! Where is it?” Finally someone realized it was up amid three trucks ahead of us, and then we heard gunfire. The Humvees all pulled into battle positions as we saw dust ahead of us. But we didn’t stop — they realized the vehicle could keep going, and they just drove faster. Traffic all over the place.

I said, “What was that?”

Sink said, “First IED, ma’am?”

Oh.

It blew out the tires on the Humvee it hit — obviously remotely detonated because there was so much traffic on that road. No injuries.

I’ve talked to guys who say, “I’ve been blown up 15 times,” and that’s what they mean: They’ve hit an IED.

It also means hearing loss, brain injuries, broken bones, shrapnel wounds and plain old fear for the next time out.

Most of us don’t realize how often they happen because we only hear about them when someone dies.