I joined the Army in 1994 as an infantryman and did active duty for a little while. In 1997 I became a conscientious objector. But I opted to stay in the military and transfer into medical services. After getting out of active duty, I went to the North Carolina National Guard and I deployed with the North Carolina National Guard to Iraq from February 2004 until December 2004.
When we first got to Camp Caldwell in late February, early March, we were occupying an area that didn’t have a lot of U.S. military forces. It was an Iraqi training base and we ran operations out of there as well. So there was no established detention facility, no Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), and really nothing to establish a practice of care.
Late April, early May, I became the supervisor for the detainee medical program. I was a specialist, a rather low rank. It just turned out that I knew two or three phrases in Arabic, and no one else wanted the job. I developed an SOP to provide a daily sick call for the detainees. Medical personnel would go down every day and do a face-to-face with each detainee, see how they were doing, and treat any medical conditions they may have had.
My original plan called for a medical professional, either a physician assistant or a doctor, to go down as well. On the first day this plan went into effect, the doctors refused to go. Throughout the next eight months, only three of the fifteen doctors in our clinic would go to see the detainees. So the medics did most of the detainee medical care. Most of the things were headaches and backaches, which could be treated with Tylenol or Motrin. But there were urinary tract infections, hernias, things that really did require a doctor’s care. When I confronted doctors with this, at least four different doctors responded saying they wouldn’t see the detainees because they were not American.
Our detainee facility was a seventy-two-hour-tops detainee facility, where they would bring in locals who were being detained and decide whether or not they had enough evidence to push them forward to a larger detainee facility such as Abu Ghraib. So we only had them for a brief period of time.
Some specific incidents: Early on, there was a individual with blood clots in his lower legs, and it was possible that a blood clot would loosen itself and become lodged and cause a stroke. So we had him on Lovenox shots twice a day. This was right when the clinic was starting, so I was still going through and getting doctors’ signatures on prescriptions. I had to do it day by day. So whether or not this person would get his medication depended on the doctor on duty. Toward the end of the rotation, it got to the point where the medics—not the doctors—were prescribing medicine for the detainees because nobody else would do it.
When we did an initial assessment of all the detainees, the MPs who ran the detainee center tended to identify the detainees by what they had been arrested for. Instead of it being an individual, they became a number. 30-0024, for example, “tried to bomb U.S. soldiers” or “is targeting translators.” They lost their identity in that process and it was hard to maintain an unbiased attitude toward caring for them when the first thing you hear is what they’re there for. As it turned out, a high percentage of the people who were detained were just released because there was not enough evidence. I don’t have an exact number, but during the time I was supervisor, we saw approximately 225 detainees, and I would say that at least 60 or 70 percent were released for lack of evidence.
This medical neglect started to influence our treatment of other Iraqis. The Iraqi workers on the post would be doing construction work and have an injury, and they would be refused treatment. There was a translator I worked with quite often who developed a hip problem. I tried to get him an X-ray, and the doctors refused to treat him. There was a lot of neglect. Having been in charge, I feel a lot of guilt because I didn’t say anything. I feel that I did these people an injustice by not demanding that the doctors actually see them, and instead allowing myself and the other medics to do the doctors’ job on our own.