Paradise General Read Free

same age as they. We talked a lot about the importance of serving others—being a doer, not just a talker. I hoped I was setting a good example instead of playing the over-the-hill fool.
    My new title was “Battalion Surgeon.” I was officially attached to the 160th Military Police Airborne Battalion, a reserve unit out of Tallahassee, Florida, which in turn was attached to the 16th MP Airborne Brigade out of Fort Bragg—a unit tasked with security and detainee care around Baghdad and southern Iraq. I was a little confused about where a battalion fit into the scheme of things, but soon found out that their surgeons were typically young, spry, and sharp in military medicine. I was none of the above.
    The night I met my new boss, Lieutenant Colonel Izzy Rommes, the first words from his mouth didn’t exactly make me feel like a first-round draft pick. After a full thirty seconds of a cold stare from a hard face, he finally drawled, “You sure are one old fucker for this job.” Then he stuck his hand out, smiled, and said, “Welcome aboard, Doc. We sure need you, thanks for volunteering.”
    My new unit quickly took me under their collective wing and led me through the maze of the military, schooling me in the best ways to keep my ass intact. When we arrived in Iraq, their first tasks were to scrounge up scarce body armor, find me an M16 rifle, and make sure I could shoot it without hitting them, as well as teaching me hand-to-hand combat and self-defense.
    The war was quiet when our boots first hit the ground, but withinweeks the insurgency came out of hibernation. We were a full eight months from the infamous “Mission Accomplished” moment, now we we had shifted into the “Holy Shit” mode. I spent my deployment carrying an M16 or a shotgun in one hand, medical tools in the other. The months that made up the spring of 2004 were among the bloodiest of the war.
    My greeting card to war was a split-second whoosh of air accompanied by stinging shards of glass hitting my face. We were convoying outside Baghdad when someone decided to take a potshot at a moving vehicle. My moving vehicle. We later calculated that the bullet missed my head by little more than an inch. Only weeks before, my biggest enemies in life had been insurance companies who wouldn’t approve tests for my patients.
    But that was just the beginning. Not only did I get shot at, I was mortared, rocketed, clubbed, and almost stabbed by a group of insurgents, while logging more than two thousand miles convoying the highways and byways of a very pissed-off country. My best stop was Saddam Hussein’s palace outside Baghdad; the worst was the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
    The palace was massive and gilded with gold, with the pièce de résistance its bathrooms—beautiful rooms with elegant fixtures and real flush toilets. It had been months since I had had the luxury of using real plumbing, and as I stood over the bowl taking a wicked pee, I pictured Saddam reading the Sunday comics while sitting on the fancy porcelain. Ever so grateful for the facilities, I was even courteous enough to put the seat back down when I was done. But I got a post-pee shiver when I walked over to another structure on the palace grounds—Saddam’s so-called party house, a building with a stone etching of Saddam’s face on the head of the serpent, handing Eve the apple of sin. The man was truly nuts.
    He was also our most famous, and secret, prisoner. Captured a little over a month before my arrival in Iraq, Saddam was hidden away at the High Value Detainee Center at Camp Cropper. As the world wasplaying a game of “
Where in the World Is Saddam?”,
he was right under everyone’s nose at a camp in Baghdad just a few miles from the Green Zone. Like many older Iraqi prisoners, this self-proclaimed strongman wasn’t very strong when it came to health: Saddam suffered from high blood pressure, a chronic