You, and anyone keeping the vigil tonight, might enjoy reading this article about a nurse who was involved in the capture of Saddam. Too bad it did not get more publicity last year.
If you don't want to read it all, just skip down to "In a day's Work" and "No Translation Needed"
Issue Date: December 20, 2004
Vol. 6 •Issue 27 • Page 37
Accidental Diplomat
How the compassionate care a nurse provided two civilians in war-torn Iraq helped lead to the capture of Saddam Hussein
By Cheryl Dellasega, PhD, CRNP
As a military wife, Julie Carpenter never dreamed she would be the one in her family who ended up in a war. After her husband retired and her sons were grown, she followed a mid-life dream and went to nursing school, enlisted in the Air National Guard after graduation and then trained as a flight nurse for 4 years. But little did Major Julie Carpenter, RN, know that she would soon play a role in the capture of a man considered among the most dangerous in the world — Saddam Hussein.
Hazardous Duty
Carpenter's deployment to Kirkuk, Iraq, prompted both excitement and concern for her family.
"We enlist knowing we could be in a war," she said. "When you're actually deployed, there's a sense of excitement, because it's what you have trained for, which sounds strange, I know."
Carpenter was deployed to one of the most dangerous bases for nurses because they received seriously injured soldiers for stabilization before they were sent on to Germany and the hospital tent was often under fire.
She described her role in helping to stabilize patients as "very independent."
"There's no comparison between nursing in wartime and as a civilian," she said. "We had so much autonomy. For example, we could make judgments about how much analgesia to give. Many patients were in such bad shape [that] giving 10 mg of morphine to control pain wasn't surprising."
When the hospital tent was fired upon, healthcare providers did "bunker runs." When mortar shells landed nearby, everyone had to put on Kevlar helmets and flak vests and run to a protected bunker, taking ambulatory patients with them. If patients couldn't move, someone had to stay with them, but for Carpenter it wasn't hard to volunteer for such duty.
"I would rather have stayed in the tent," she recalled, "because after awhile, I got claustrophobic in that bunker."
In a Day's Work
The pace of Carpenter's work day in Iraq was dictated by how many casualties there were, which made the time go quickly or slowly. Sometimes, they took care of Iraqi prisoners or citizens who were wounded in the conflict, as mandated by the Geneva Convention.
"It was to the patient's advantage to get care from us because Iraqi hospitals provide only the basics; we heard nurses only got 2 weeks of on-the-job training," Carpenter said. "We begged to be allowed to go off base and help them, but our commander thought it wasn't safe."
The day Saddam Hussein was captured, Carpenter awoke to gunfire. Although curious as to why there was so much shooting in Kirkuk that day, she nevertheless went to do her laundry, a major pastime on her day off.
At 10 a.m., rumors reached the camp that Saddam Hussein had been found. Upon hearing the news, Carpenter and comrades ran to the morale tent at one end of the hospital unit to watch the news on TV.
The announcement that U.S. Army soldiers had indeed found the former Iraqi president explained why the residents of nearby Kirkuk were shooting their guns; they were celebrating. Unfortunately, their bullets were raining back down on U.S. troops, making helmets and bullet-proof vests an around-the-clock necessity for the next 3 days.
No Translation Needed
On New Year's Eve 2003, or just 3 months after Hussein's capture, an Army colonel from the base in Kirkuk came to the hospital with several certificates of achievement. Carpenter's commander gathered everyone together and handed them out. While doing so, the commander explained that two Iraqi families had been so grateful for the medical care their loved ones received by Americans at the camp they gave key information to the Army concerning Hussein's whereabouts, eventually leading to the discovery of his underground hideout.
Putting the pieces together, Carpenter remembered those two patients. They had been brought to camp by American soldiers after their car was hit by another motor vehicle in the middle of the night. Although the circumstances were suspicious, the Iraqis were given care. It was likely they would not have survived at an Iraqi hospital. Both underwent hours of surgery and required chest tubes, but by the next morning were stable.
Carpenter remembered riding in an ambulance with the more severely injured Iraqi patient to the Army side of the base. The patient was awake and alert, very cooperative and looked her in the eyes from time to time, she said. But his pain was tremendous. Each time they went over a bump in the very rough road he would yell what sounded like "lalalala." until she realized he was praying to Allah.
"I took his hand and held it," Carpenter recalls. "This seemed to comfort him. Under normal circumstances that might not have been appropriate, but it was the only thing I could think of that might give him comfort. I wanted him to feel he wasn't alone; I imagine it was scary for him."
Jobs Well Done
Carpenter and the members of her unit were asked not to talk about the news of their indirect role in Hussein's capture until it was verified, so she put the certificate and the reasons for it in the back of her mind.
In March, when her unit returned stateside, its public affairs person asked Carpenter and her comrades if they would be willing to talk to the press.
"When the story was confirmed, things kind of exploded," Carpenter said. "We were invited to Washington, DC, and Philadelphia for interviews. A reporter from Fox News called me but I declined an interview."
"I didn't really want to do a confessional kind of thing, because we had already been given a lot of recognition," Carpenter explained. "There were 57 of us in EMEDS (Expeditionary 506 Medical Service), each with a job to do," she said. "We were just doing our jobs the day those gentlemen [injured Iraqis] came in, the same as we did every day in Iraq. Whatever role we might have played was insignificant compared to the Army soldiers who put their lives on the line to find Saddam."
On the Home Front
The experience in Iraq changed Carpenter's perspective. Previously an intensive care nurse, when she returned home, she changed her civilian job. She is now a surgical nurse working in a PACU in Mechanicsburg, PA, and also continues her military service in the Air Force National Guard, serving 1 weekend a month preparing soldiers to be deployed.
"When I do physicals on soldiers about to deploy, I try to tell them things that helped me while I was away," she said. "I say 'thank you' in advance. Sometimes I get asked if I would want to go back, and I don't hesitate to say 'absolutely!'
"You go to war, not because of the violence, but because of those good outcomes we don't always hear about," Carpenter said. "You go because you believe you have the chance to help make things better in your own small way."
Cheryl Dellasega is a professor at Penn State College of Medicine, Department of Humanities, Hershey, PA.
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