“That’s When My Whole Activism Kicked In, Because I Started Realizing What Kind Of Crap War This Is”
Specialist Wendy Barranco, Combat Medic, Army, interviewed by Rachel Powers:
Wendy Barranco was 19 when she served as an anesthesia technician at a Tikrit field hospital — from October 2005 to July 2006. She was just out of high school, like so many of her patients, including the first one she saw die.
Now she is 22, a full-time student and anti-war activist, preparing herself for Sunday’s participation in the Winter Soldier fundraiser at the First Congregational Church of Long Beach. The fundraiser will bring together many veterans to speak about what they saw in Iraq in hopes of sending the vets to a similar conference in Washington D.C. later this month (www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier).
Her poise falters occasionally: When describing three badly burned Iraqis, she suddenly stops speaking, pausing for a full 12 seconds to steady herself. And certain aspects of the military experience are so ludicrous as to absolutely require the strongest of obscenities.
With all of this in mind, I thank her for her time and willingness to engage in a conversation that must be very difficult — either because the stories are so gruesome and terrible, or because frequent retellings have rendered the subject so tiresome that she feels as if she’s going to go out of her mind if she has to go over it one more time. “Both,” she says....
Are there any patients that stand out in your memory?
The first guy I saw die. We were in the emergency room and this guy came in, an American soldier. He was all shot up. And basically he was dead on arrival, but we were trying to resuscitate him so we stuck him on a bunch of lines and tried to pump him full of fluids and stuff, trying to bring him back.
We did CPR and it just wasn’t working.
The surgeon, as a last resort, went ahead and cracked his chest open and he started doing heart massage to try to get his heart back. That really doesn’t work, but you do that as a last resort, a last ditch effort to bring them back.
He was wearing his flak vest, and there were a couple of bullets in his head and his neck. I think he was ambushed or . . . I don’t know. He was just shot up. He essentially bled out. That was the first time I saw somebody get their chest cracked. Eventually it became kind of mundane.
With trauma we do a lot of exploratory laparotomies, which is basically cracking the chest down the mid-line and looking to see if there is any damage. And so in that type of surgery everything is wide-open, cracked-open. When the surgeon told us to get in there and keep massaging the heart after him, it was kind of surreal. I just stuck my hands in there and started doing what I needed to do.
We all knew he wasn’t coming back. We were trying to make every effort, and then the surgeon said, “I’m just going to go ahead and call it.” That was it. That was when I stopped.
And then we all kind of just walked away.
I took a step back about six or seven feet and looked at his body, and it hit me: This guy is 19 years old, and he’s basically a kid. I saw myself on that gurney.
That’s when my whole activism kicked in, because I started realizing what kind of crap war this is, and what kind of people it was killing, young men and women, kids, 18, 19, 20 years old.
Did you ever treat any Iraqis?
Oh yeah. We treat everybody: Marines, soldiers, contractors, insurgents, local nationals, a couple of coalition troops.
What sort of injuries did you see with the Iraqis?
With the Iraqis? I’ve never been asked that. Most of the things that we saw with the Iraqi locals were trauma, things like burns, shots. Three guys that stick out in my mind. They were basically burnt to a crisp. They had nothing done for them, there was no treatment, there was no pain control, there was nothing.
Needless to say, the surgeon was pretty pissed off, because their burns were a week old — the event was a week ago — and the Iraqi hospital took them in and did nothing for them. And now they come and they dump them on our doorstep and then we have to take care of them. The surgeon called in a favor and had them medivaced to a Baghdad hospital with a burn unit. Burn victims need all kinds of specialized care. We don’t have that type of facility. It’s not like we can send them to Germany.
So the men who had been burned: They were still alive when they came to you?
Oh yeah, very much so. Yeah, that was my turning point. They were Iraqi people and the Iraqi (doctors) had not helped them in the least. No pain control, no irrigation, no scrubbing, no temperature controlled room, nothing, absolutely nothing, not even the most basic care. And then they just house them for a week, just to be able to get that money from the government. And when they don’t feel like having them anymore, they put them in the little ambulance, bring them over to us, drop them at the front gate, we get a call to pick them up, and we bring them back.
And everybody’s like, “What the fuck? What is this?”
Iraqi hospitals are paid by the US government?
For every patient that they get and that they take in, they get money from the US government because we’re trying to, I guess, initiate that drive to help your own kind.
The problem is that once they take that patient in, there’s nothing that says that they have to treat them properly or efficiently or in a timely manner.
And that wasn’t the only case. There was a guy who was dropped off who had a chest tube, but it was on the wrong lung. (Another) guy was 60 or 70, and he had a whole array of problems. He was diabetic, he had GI problems . . . I mean, this guy was just a mess. And this guy got dropped off at our gate by the Iraqi hospital, just left there. We spent about eight hours in the operating room, taking tubes out that they had placed, putting things in where they needed to be, just things like that. There was one guy who was shot in the leg and we had to do numerous surgeries on him, because it kept re-infecting and it just wouldn’t heal properly. He was about 10 years old, eight years old, something like that.
How did the Iraqi patients seem to you? What were they like?
Most of them, their demeanor was very calm, cool and collected. It sounds ridiculous, but they were. And it has a lot to do with their culture. They were surrounded by people they don’t know, wearing hats and scrubs, we look completely different, we speak a totally different language.
Most of them were just trying to take it all in, and discern if they were in good hands or not. I do remember one guy with a leg injury who, when we were rolling him in to the operating room, he kept saying, “I love America! I love America!” And looking back on it, I think that was his defense mechanism. He knew what surgery meant with Hussein. With us, I’m sure he was terrified. He knew what had happened to other people, so with him going under and into surgery, I think he was very scared that he might not be coming back.
As for the troops that you saw, did you have any sense of how they felt about the war?
To be honest, the last thing that I had on my mind was asking them, “How do you feel about the war?” They’re bleeding out on my table and I’m trying to save them, and to say, “How do you feel about the war?” while I’m pumping away at their chest. . . .
Seeing the type of emotional state that they were in, whether they were completely lacking emotion or just straight-up bawling, like, “Am I going to freaking live? Am I going to lose my leg? Am I going to lose my arm?” To even ask in that moment would be a bit disrespectful.
“I’m blown up here, bleeding out, but you want to talk to me about how I feel about the war?”
So your feelings about the war changed relatively early in your experience?
Yeah, it was kind of a seed that was planted: “Wait a minute, these guys are just like me!”
And then looking at how (the Iraqi) medical system was working, or lack thereof, it was like, “This is ridiculous. This whole little dream that we have of setting up a society, a democratic society, is bullshit.” From what I saw of the Iraqi people, our idea of “bettering” them is not the same as their idea of “bettering” themselves.
How are you feeling now? Have you been able to walk away from all of it?
To try and walk away from it is a mistake in and of itself. I’ve come to terms with the fact that what happened, happened. I’m very proud of the fact that I was there, I’m very proud of the fact that I did something to, in my mind, help humankind, trying to save lives and stuff like that. I go to therapy at the VA. When I came back I thought, “I’m better than that. All this stuff about PTSD and nightmares . . . man, I’m a combat medic. I’m above that.” But it’s not so. I learned that real quick. But now I’ve, as cliche as it sounds, “come to terms” with it.
Activism is my therapy, talking about it and letting people know what’s going on.
But what helps me the most is just being around other veterans, exchanging stories, just talking about our experiences and just laughing, sometimes even crying, sometimes even just shaking our heads, like “Fuck! The military is just (eaten) up!” (But at first) it just hurt to breathe. And the whole range of emotions inside of me, that I’d been quietly collecting . . . and I realized, “Shit, this might be a problem.” I’m not incapacitated by it — I know so many people who can’t even sleep, they patrol their own home with their M16, you know? At night, instead of going to sleep, they just walk around with their M16. And they can’t get out of bed in the morning.
So I consider myself to be truly lucky to be where I am today; I didn’t see all the combat stuff and the front line stuff that the other guys saw. That’s why I have so much respect for them. They go through so much, it’s insane. It’s beyond me.
Is there anything else that you would like to tell me?
I’m just trying to get the message out that veterans are here for veterans. That’s all. I’m not here to say, “Go to the VA,” because that blows. I’m not here to say, “The war affected you and so therefore you should be against it.” Veterans are here for veterans.