For the week of August 27 - September 2, 2003

Photos convey
spirit of Iraqis

Surgeon with Valley ties
serves on frontlines

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By TIMOTHY FLOYD
Special to the Express

A happy girl waves to soldiers passing by, a typical response from a rural Iraqi. Photo by Timothy Floyd

For 124 days this past winter and spring I served with the U.S. Army Medical Corps and was deployed to Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was the orthopedic surgeon in a 20-soldier unit, the 934th Forward Surgical Team, which traveled just behind the front with the Third Infantry Division and the Fifth Special Forces. We skirted the fighting at Basrah and An Nasiriyah and set up our tent at various locations south of Baghdad. Once the Baghdad airport had been secured, we traveled north to a military air base at Balad, near Baqubah. Finally, we made our way further north to Tikrit, where we spent our last month in Iraq. We treated wounded American soldiers, but mostly wounded Iraqi military personnel and civilians.

We had our share of military adventures and misadventures. As a Forward Surgical Team, our mission was to be as close to the war fighters as possible, while remaining as safe as possible. This battle was so non-linear, however, that occasionally we found ourselves beyond the forward edge of battle. At one point, during a convoy to a camp just south of Baghdad, we crossed the forward edge of the battle area and came within two kilometers of an Iraqi tank battalion. I fully anticipated seeing flashes of light from the muzzles, but learned later that the range of their Soviet era tanks was less than one mile. As soon as our convoy cleared them and headed north, I watched with sadness as our Apache attack helicopters and A-10 warthogs destroyed all 80 tanks and their support vehicles. Sad because I knew from treating Iraqi prisoners of war that most of them were just like us. They didn’t want to be there. They hated Saddam more than anyone. All they wanted was to be home with their families, to live as normal a life as possible. To see their children grow up. Most of them had been forced to fight by Special Republican Guard thugs who had held them or their loved ones at gunpoint in order to force them to fight.

Children waving at our convoy as we passed through northern Baghdad. Further up the road we heard sporadic gunfire as Iraqi civilians fired their AK-47s into the air. Photo by Timothy Floyd

I came to learn that most Iraqis are warm, happy, generous, kind and forgiving people who have suffered and endured so much tragedy that it is astonishing and inspirational that they have any spirit left at all. Rare were the chanting mobs of angry young men. And the great majority of them are deeply grateful that someone has finally come to liberate them from Saddam’s oppression so that they can live free again.

This is the story that isn’t often told, and that I hope to convey through photographs. The story of the average Iraqi, who was born and has lived under a tyrannical regime, who has lived in abject poverty, who has lost family members to torture, rape, imprisonment or execution. And despite all of that, who still hopes for a better life.

This boy’s brother inadvertently set off a grenade, wounding himself and two others. Here his father holds him after surgery at Camp Dogwood. Photo by Timothy Floyd

The most profound example of Iraqi gratitude and trust that I experienced came from a 25-year-old medical student named Ahmed. While driving a car in Baghdad, Ahmed, his uncle and his cousin encountered one of our Bradley fighting vehicles, and thought it best to turn back. This act--turning around and not stopping for inspection--triggered our rules of engagement, and the Bradley opened fire on Ahmed’s vehicle, wounding Ahmed and killing his uncle and cousin. Ahmed crawled from the car just before it burst into flames. Our forces brought him to a prisoner of war detention area where he was held outside for a week before he was sent to me to have his wounds examined.

At first, he was like the other EPW’s I had treated. He was thin, which I had learned meant he was probably in the Iraqi regular army. Republican Guard and Fedayeen terrorists lived better and had a layer of fat under their skin. Special Republican Guard were, frankly, overweight. He had been shot in the chest, but not into the chest cavity; his right wrist was shattered from a gunshot wound; and his left elbow was shot with a resulting paralysis of his hand.

In a quiet voice, with perfect English, he described his ordeal and his wounds to me. I learned that he was a fifth-year medical student and that the paralysis in his left hand had started a few hours after he was wounded, which indicated the nerve was not severed but rather contused. I told him I might be able to salvage some function if I transposed the ulnar nerve from its usual location to a softer, more protected area in his forearm, and he agreed.

Over the next several days I visited him frequently in the recovery tent, and we came to know each other fairly well. His patience and kindness were remarkable. His overwhelming concern was for his family, and the question of when he would be released to return to them. After several days of interrogation and checking, the intelligence officers determined he was not a threat, that he was not in the Iraqi military, and they decided he could be freed.

On the day he left to be taken to an Iraqi hospital in Baghdad near his home, I gave him final wound-care instructions and a general idea of what to expect while recovering. He told me he wished he could thank me in some way, do something for me. I looked at this young man whose country had been invaded by a vastly superior force, whose family members had been killed and incinerated before his eyes, who had been wounded, who had been treated like a prisoner of war for two weeks, whose career had been destroyed by the wounds he received at our hands and I thought of the suffering he had endured at our hands.

Although I knew that he would, I asked him to answer very honestly a question. I asked him what he felt, what most Iraqis feel, about what we had done, what we were doing in their country.

He told me that, although many people were being killed, he realized that civilian deaths were unintentional and unintended and inevitable, and that the Iraqi people had suffered so deeply for so long, that violence was necessary to overthrow Saddam. He told me that, other than a few people of the ruling class, most Iraqis were glad that we had come, and that he hoped that we would "send Saddam straight to hell."

Orthopaedic surgeon Timothy Floyd of Boise and formerly of Hailey.

Everywhere we went the streets were lined with hundreds of smiling, waving, and cheering people. Children put their thumbs up. Women blew kisses. To them, we represented a chance that their hopes would turn into reality. History will determine whether or not it was right for the U.S. to enter Iraq, and for American lives to have been lost, under the presumption of weapons of mass destruction. However, in a global, humanitarian sense, there is no question but that liberation of the Iraqi people is a just and moral endeavor.

 

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