Nurse saw worst of war in an Iraqi desert ward
Toolbox
By Peter Hirschfeld Staff Writer - Published: November 11, 2007
She never set foot on the front lines, but Capt. Amy Denis has seen the worst of wartime combat. During 12-hour night shifts in a Baghdad hospital, the U.S. Army nurse stood in the eye of a desert storm. "Gunshot wounds, blast wounds, burns, stab wounds, broken bones, amputated limbs. You saw really everything," Denis says.
Between 2003 and 2004, Denis spent a year in Iraq caring for the war wounded. Her journey from her hometown of Waitsfield to the fortified walls of the Green Zone offers a glimpse into the horror and humanity of the war hospital.
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Denis fell into her Army scrubs almost by accident. A third-generation Vermonter, the 1997 Harwood Union High School graduate hadn't anticipated enlisting in the ROTC at the University of Vermont.
"I kind of fell into it during college," Denis says. "I signed up for a military studies class, which turned out to be an ROTC class, and I learned I was more interested in the military than I ever thought I would be."
When she enlisted in early 2001, the World Trade Center towers still defined the New York skyline. Putting her nursing degree to work in the Army, she thought, would allow her to pursue the humanitarian ideals she had always sought to fulfill.
"Nursing is very unique and it gives you opportunities to participate in humanitarian missions," Denis said during a phone interview from her home in Fort Bragg, N.C. "I'd always been interested in taking care of people who don't have the same access to health care as Americans, and I thought (the Army) would be a great avenue for that."
The avenue changed course after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She was still "too new" to the military to be involved in Afghanistan. But "when they started talking about WMD and Saddam this and Saddam that on the news, I knew it was probably only a matter of time."
Denis, who was a child in 1991 when the first Gulf War took place, found irony in her marching orders.
"I remembered Gulf War I," Denis says. "I was in the sixth grade. We sang 'Wing Beneath My Wings' in a chorus concert and dedicated it to soldiers overseas. All the audience and parents were crying and clapping but I never understood the emotions behind it."
She also remembered the soldier with whom she corresponded.
"I had a pen pal, a soldier there, and he talked to me about playing soccer," Denis recalls. "Fast-forward 13 years and now I'm going to the same place my pen pal was. He was in the Army. His name was Rusty."
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Denis deployed with the 28th Combat Support Hospital for the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. The largest medical unit in theater, the team set up a makeshift hospital in a desert south of Baghdad.
"Think of a major medical center and put it in a bunch of tents in the desert," Denis says.
The unit assembled trauma centers, operating rooms, laboratories and pharmacies. Though they encountered little enemy violence, Denis and her medical colleagues were prepared for a fight.
"We were our own unit. We had armaments. We each had our own weapon," she says. "We could sustain ourselves and we did security for ourselves during convoys. But of course we did rely heavily on supply units for food and water and things."
After the United States seized control of the capital, Denis' unit moved into Ibn Sina, a Baghdad hospital built under Saddam Hussein.
"It's the hospital you always hear about in the news," she says. "It was actually Saddam's private hospital."
Technically a first-year nurse, Denis began her trial-by-fire education in the midst of a war zone.
"Even in probably the worst trauma center in the United States you don't see the kind of injuries you see over there," Denis says. "I was experiencing a lot more than I ever would have expected."
Long shifts under grim circumstances forced her to adjust quickly.
"You don't really have any choice but to adapt," she says. "If you don't adapt, you break down mentally and emotionally. That happens to people sometimes. Not that they're weaker than anybody else. But you say to yourself, once I'm boots-on-the-ground, this is it. I just have to make it through this."
Denis didn't tend only to fellow servicemen. Her patients included wounded Iraqis, many of them children, and enemy combatants who had only hours earlier been trying to kill her colleagues. Denis says the nurses and doctors distinguished patients on the basis of need, not race.
"It's hard to see race when you've got someone and you've cut off all their clothes so you can find all their wounds," Denis says. "At that point, you're just seeing a life you're trying to save, someone you're trying to heal."
For the first months of her deployment, in the desert, Denis treated mostly Iraqi prisoners.
"Most of them treated us very respectfully," she says. "Even those considered high-value detainees, on the deck of cards, were pretty respectful most of the time."
In Baghdad, she cared mainly for servicemen, civilians and pediatric patients. Patients came in from bombings and attacks in the Iraq capital and elsewhere.
"It was the unwritten rule that when you heard an explosion, everyone not working just went into the hospital to deal with a mass casualty situation," Denis says. "Then you just waited to hear the helicopter blade and you knew they were coming."
Triage required matter-of-fact medical assessments.
"In mass casualty incidents, you try and triage out people who either were definitely going to die, and they go to one part of the hospital, or people that don't need immediate life-saving surgery, and they go to my floor," Denis says. "Then you focus on the people who need immediate help to save their saves."
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Denis found inspiration in her American and Iraqi patients.
"When you have U.S. soldiers come in, those that are going to be able to go back out and fight, they're so gung-ho to do that," Denis says.
Her work with Iraqi children, Denis says, forged unlikely bonds with Arab strangers.
"I had a really unique opportunity, as most medical people do, to really participate in diplomacy in a way," she says. "It's an opportunity to reach out to a population that hates Americans and they want to kill you because you're an American and all of a sudden you're giving them outstanding medical care...
"There's definitely a level of intimacy there, and it's not always spoken because there's that huge language barrier, but it's there. You know when a woman wearing a burka reaches out and touches your arm and looks at you and her eyes are filled with tears, that she's thanking you for taking care of her child or husband or father," Denis says. "And when the men are doing it and crying, you think, wow. He's supposed to hate women and he's thanking me. This is kind of cool."
Denis is hopeful her work in Iraq may even have changed the views of her enemies.
"When some of these prisoners leave the hospital and either get cleared or go back to prison camps, you have this hope that maybe their heart is changing," Denis says. "Maybe they'll teach their kids that America's not such a bad place."
As the nation celebrates its veterans this weekend, Denis works stateside in Fort Bragg, N.C., helping wounded soldiers rehabilitate from devastating injuries they suffered in Iraq. For Denis, a new mother with a 10-month-old baby boy at home, the assignment is a fitting change from her year-long deployment in Iraq.
But her direct ties to the war will intensify again when her husband deploys to Iraq next year.
"I'm not looking forward to it but I am very proud of him," she says.
She has already lost a cousin to the war, and her husband's best friend also was killed in action.
"You just have to put that part of it in God's hands and you can't think about whether or not they're going to come home because that would drive a person crazy," Denis says. "For the ones we have lost, I just hold on tight to the fact that I know 100 percent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they did not die for nothing like some of our fellow countrymen choose to think."
Denis says the United States is fighting now for the future of the children she treated.
"I can tell you the soldiers over there are fighting for each other, fighting to come home and fighting to give the Iraqi people a chance at life," she says. "I know if my son had to grow up living in Iraq, I'd give anything to have someone come and fight for him and give him a chance at a better life."
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