2

Journey to Gitmo

May 2002

When I was sixteen, I attended an all-black, all-male Catholic high school that was strict about rules and heavy on the discipline. For me, that meant constantly getting in trouble for running my mouth too much. A buddy named Tyrone and I were talking about what our parents did for a living one day, and he said his old man was a psychologist. I didn’t really have any idea what a psychologist did, so Tyrone explained that his father talked to people for a living. I didn’t think much more about it until I visited Tyrone’s house one evening and had a chat with his dad. I asked Tyrone’s father exactly what he did at work.

“Well,” he said, “I get paid a lot of money for talking to people.”

This sounded interesting, but I was still trying to fit the concept into the world I knew at my strict school. “Do you ever get sent to detention for talking too much?” I asked.

Tyrone’s father laughed long and hard before catching his breath and answering my question. “No, son, I don’t go to detention,” he said. “I talk as long as I want, and the longer I talk, the more I get paid.”

I was sold on the idea. Many more conversations followed with Tyrone’s father in the next few years, and by the time I went to college in 1975 I had my plan all laid out: an undergraduate degree in four years and on to a PhD and a career in psychology. I left my beloved New Orleans, where I felt truly at home as a light-skinned black man of Creole heritage, to attend the University of Dubuque in Iowa, where I feared I would stand out like a palm tree in a cornfield. The folks in Iowa welcomed me warmly, though, and my full football and track scholarship paid for nearly everything I needed. I was an intensely focused student athlete, spending every minute on my studies or on the practice field, so much so that my roommate insisted on setting me up on a blind date because he figured I would never make the effort myself. The blind date turned out to be a lovely, petite Iowa girl named Janet who had fourteen brothers and sisters, all of them raised by their father to be fiercely independent and capable. When he was repairing the roof and needed someone else up there with a hammer, he didn’t give a damn if the closest offspring’s name was Jack or Jane, the kid better scramble up on the roof.

On our first date, we were riding around in Janet’s little white Gremlin when a tire went flat. Already liking this gal enough that I wanted to impress her with my gallantry, I hopped out and went right to changing the tire. What I had forgotten, and what I could never tell this girl I’d just met, was that being raised in a house full of women had left me with absolutely zero mechanical skills. I looked into the trunk of that car and had no idea how to even get the spare tire out. After I fumbled with it for a while, Janet finally came around and, with a look of consternation, showed me how to do it. At least she wasn’t strong enough to actually lift the tire out by herself.

Once we got the tire around to the side of the car, I began fumbling with the jack, getting more embarrassed and ham-handed as I realized I didn’t know how to work it. Janet watched for a few minutes and finally had had enough. With a heavy sigh and a roll of the eyes, she said, “Stand back and get out of the way.” I did as I was told and watched this beautiful little gal change that tire like she’d done it a hundred times before and didn’t need any man to come to her rescue.

Ten minutes later, we were back on the road and I was in love. Later, I called my mother back in New Orleans and told her I’d met the woman I was going to marry. She expressed skepticism, to say the least, but I kept going on and on about how capable Janet was and how I’d never seen a woman take charge like that before, a woman who could be so delicate and gentle but also so independent. By the end of the phone call, my mother knew I was serious.

I married Janet while still in school and we had our son soon after. While obtaining my doctorate, I wrote my dissertation on child molesters. That required working twenty to thirty hours a week in a prison, interviewing prisoners. Still facing several more years of training as a psychology resident in a hospital, I looked at the different opportunities and my attention kept going to the military option. Medical residents were, and still are to some degree, treated like indentured servants, working extremely long hours under stressful conditions for very little pay. Of all the places you could train, the military provided the best pay, and it also offered excellent benefits for my family. And on top of that, I liked the idea that I could serve my country while seeing the world. I joined the Navy and trained at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., and then my first assignment right out of training was the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where my years of experience working with prisoners for my dissertation prompted my boss to immediately assign me as the brig psychologist.

Temporary assignments followed in Guam, Japan, and the Philippines. Though the experience was largely positive, I didn’t reenlist in the Navy when the time came. Instead I became an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, not far from New Orleans where I always felt at home. While teaching at LSU, I also worked as a consultant at the local prison. The work was satisfying, but I soon felt out of place in the almost entirely white suburb where I lived with other professionals from the university. This was Louisiana, but it wasn’t New Orleans. My wife and son also didn’t feel at home in Baton Rouge, but none of us wanted to complain. The final straw for me came in 1991 when the white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke came in second in the Republican primary for governor. I was dismayed to see that 85 percent of voters in my district had voted for this former Grand Wizard of the KKK. How could I raise my biracial son in this community?

I was miserable but I didn’t want to uproot my family again after only eighteen months in Louisiana. With great hesitation, I broached the topic of moving from Baton Rouge and was relieved when my wife and son revealed that they, too, hated this place and wanted to go. Was there any chance of moving back to Hawaii? we wondered. I was still a Navy reservist so I looked into going active duty with the Navy again, and found they would be glad to have me back. But the most likely assignment would be Beaufort, South Carolina, or Cherry Point, North Carolina, and I didn’t think that would be much of an improvement for my multiracial family. I was having a drink in a bar one evening, mulling over what to do next, when good fortune walked in wearing an Army uniform and sat down next to me. I was wearing my Navy reserves uniform, so we struck up a conversation and I soon learned he was the chief psychologist for the Army. As we talked and compared notes on our previous tours in Hawaii, he mentioned that he was having a hard time finding qualified psychologists in the Army who were willing to pick up and move to Pearl Harbor. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

“Sir, don’t jerk my chain,” I said. “If I could do it, I’d join the Army and take that assignment in Hawaii myself.”

My new friend made a few calls and soon I was in the Army, headed to Hawaii. I spent eight good years there and then in August 1999 I was reassigned from Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. By then I had established myself as a leading military psychologist and an expert on the psychology of prisoners.

In the spring of 2002, I had already had a long, interesting career as a military psychologist. A colonel with plenty of experience in the field, I was not going to be at a loss for stories to tell after dinner or having a beer with other veterans and psychologists. I still had several years before retiring from the Army, but my three-year assignment at Walter Reed was winding down. I had about six to eight months left on this tour before my wife and I returned to our quiet life in Hawaii, where I would return to working at Tripler Army Medical Center.

Until then, the global war on terrorism was ensuring that, as for most people in the military, there was always something to keep me busy. I always loved it when people asked me about my position on the war. Some assumed that because I was an Army colonel, I would be a gung-ho, conservative Republican, over the top in support of the war, praising President Bush at every opportunity. Others assumed that because I was a psychologist, a medical professional dedicated to caring for people’s mental well-being, I would be a liberal Democrat opposed to the war and the president, only begrudgingly following my orders as an Army officer. Plus, I am a black man and everyone knows that black Republicans are about as rare as white running backs in the National Football League. The truth was I didn’t fit any of those templates and many people who knew me well considered me something of a paradox.

My political orientation is best described as conservative Democrat. I carry a gun at all times, even in civilian clothing with a concealed weapon permit, and I believe very strongly in the right to bear arms. But I also believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe in less government but also that all Americans should have health insurance. Those positions made it hard to align myself simply with one political party or the other, but politics didn’t come into play when my country launched the global war on terrorism. As an Army colonel I followed orders and did as my commander in chief instructed, and I was largely supportive of the growing calls to invade Iraq. In 2002 it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein was a modern-day Hitler, killing hundreds of thousands of his own people and committing unspeakable atrocities on men, women, and children. Humanity, in the form of the United States military, had to stop him, and if the president decided to abandon the sanctions, inspections, and talking, I was glad to be part of the effort to go in and stop this dictator. I just wanted President Bush to do a better job of explaining why we might have to go. The oft-cited explanation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was pure nonsense; a group of angry Girl Scouts could have posed more of a threat to our national security than Iraq did. There was a perfectly valid reason to send in U.S. troops, but I cringed every time I heard my commander in chief tell the world that it was weapons of mass destruction.

By May 2002, the U.S. military and our allies had been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for eight months and we were treating many casualties from that operation at Walter Reed, where I was chair of the Department of Psychology. One day in May there was a knock on my door. It was my deputy department chief, Lieutenant Colonel Denise Dobson. Denise wore two hats as my deputy and also as the director of training for the Department of Psychology. I had enjoyed working with her for nearly three years. It had been a long haul and we had been through a lot, notably the tragedy of 9/11, in which Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and I relocated most of our clinical services to the Pentagon to provide mental health services to those who survived the attack and responded during the rescue efforts. I had worked sixteen hours a day for three months, from September 12, 2001, to December. Managing the Department of Psychology also had put Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and me through the wringer with the usual administrative hassles, a hospital-wide power failure, tremendous staff shortages, facilities in disrepair, and even a mold problem that threatened your health when you were merely sitting at your desk.

Dobson had proven herself a tough officer and a valued colleague, but I was worried about her. In spite of her desire and energy to keep up with me, which sometimes is a tall order, she had had a scare with a life-threatening disease and at times didn’t look well. She responded by always taking on more duties, as if trying to prove to herself that she was not weakening. On top of this, the invasion of Afghanistan had produced a type of patient we had never seen before—the Islamic extremist terrorists. Treating them, even understanding their mental health issues, was proving to be exceptionally challenging. Dobson came to my office with a specific intent and a special purpose on this day. She was winding down in her capacity as the director of training for the clinical psychology training program and we needed to select a new director. Lieutenant Colonel Dobson requested permission to assign these new duties to Major (Dr.) John Leso, a slender, good-looking fellow who was about five feet eleven inches tall and gave the appearance of spending a great deal of his off time in the gym. John was a very capable military officer who had the confidence of everyone in the department, and in particular the young Army captains who were interns in my department.

As much as I respected Major Leso’s performance, I was not convinced that he was the appropriate choice to replace Lieutenant Colonel Dobson, because a few weeks earlier he had requested a Professional Filler System (PROFIS) position, a temporary assignment for a medical professional to a field hospital outside of their primary hospital. A PROFIS assignment provides the physician with unique experience outside the walls of Walter Reed, and in this case Major Leso wanted some time with the 85th Combat Stress Control Company (CSC), located in Fort Hood, Texas. A CSC is made up of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, psychiatric nurses, and enlisted psychiatric technicians. Their mission is to provide mental health services to soldiers in the field—sort of a mental health MASH unit. His request was reasonable, and I was inclined to approve it, but letting him go to the field unit might create a problem if that unit deployed. It would be a real shit mess if I appointed him director of training at Walter Reed, on the assumption that he would be away in Texas for only a couple weeks, and then he ended up on a long deployment with the PROFIS unit. It was more than just a matter of needing someone qualified to fill the position here at the hospital. The American Psychological Association has strict standards for accredited training programs like ours that require we maintain continuity in the director of training position, so appointing him and then having him away on deployment could cascade into other problems for us.

I balked at appointing Major Leso, but he and Dobson convinced me that my worries were unfounded because there were no deployments on the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Dobson was enthusiastic about Major Leso’s qualifications for the position, and I had no argument with her on that point, but she had limited experience in thinking out strategically what was about to happen in the Army world around her. She did not see the buildup in the war that was about to occur and how this would affect not only her life, her world, but Major Leso’s and mine as well. She and Major Leso were both hard-charging, highly motivated officers with the best intentions, but they didn’t have enough years in the Army to fully appreciate how the system can kick you in the butt when you least expect it. I was just like them twenty years earlier.

But really, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson argued, how likely was it that the CSC unit would be deployed in the two weeks that Major Leso was assigned to it? I had to agree that would take some colossal bad luck for him to be there when the unit deployed. So finally I relented, but I restated my concern to them both that the war on terror was cranking up and warned that Major Leso might get deployed. Perhaps, just maybe, my nearly twenty years of experience in both the Army and Navy was off base and I was worrying over nothing.

After we gave Major Leso the good news, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and I returned from lunch and were soon joined by the major, who was ecstatic about the opportunities he would be afforded and wanted to thank me. He was very excited that he was going to be able to go to Fort Hood for a two-week field training exercise and then be allowed to return to Walter Reed and assume duties as the director of training. I again expressed my concern to him, still worried even after granting permission.

“Sir, don’t worry. It’s not a problem,” the major told me. “I spoke to the commanding officer of the 85th CSC down there in Texas and she assured me that it is not a problem at all. I’ll be gone for two weeks, sir, and then I’ll be back in time to greet the new incoming intern class.”

Even though I had some regrets about letting him go, I needed to express confidence in this young officer, so I said, “John, I know you’ll do a great job in Texas with the 85th. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

Almost in a sprint, Major Leso left my office and busied himself with getting to Texas. After he left my office, my phone rang. It was Colonel Ed Cooper, the chief psychologist of the Army. Chief psychologists were known for how they could sell snow to Eskimos, and on this occasion, I was the Eskimo. Colonel Cooper was encouraging me to remain at Walter Reed and replace him because he was ready to retire. I was quite flattered, but I had to laugh.

“Ed, there’s no way in hell I’m going to stay at Walter Reed and be psychologist of the Army,” I said. “I’m tired, my wife is tired, and we just want to go home to Hawaii and be with our granddaughter. I’m supposed to head home in about six months.”

Colonel Cooper laughed and said he couldn’t blame me, that he just had to try to make his exit smoother by finding a good replacement. “Hell, I’d get myself reassigned to Hawaii if I could,” he said.

Major Leso soon left for his brief training assignment with the 85th CSC in Texas. He hadn’t even been gone for four days when I received a call from the commanding officer of the 85th informing me that the unit had received its orders to deploy to Cuba. The unit would be providing mental health services to the soldiers and enemy combatants being held at the prison on the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Known as “Gitmo” from its military abbreviation GTMO, this Cuban base was a strategic stronghold in one of the last Communist dictatorships still on earth, and in recent years it had been used to house terrorist prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Located in the southeastern part of Cuba, Gitmo had an interesting history. Beginning in 1903 the U.S. military leased it from the Cuban government. Prior to the global war on terror most Americans had never even heard of it. Those who did know of this faraway place recalled that it was used as the transient facility for the Cuban and Haitian flotillas in the 1980s and 1990s. Until we began bringing in the Afghan terrorists most high-ranking officials wanted the base at Gitmo closed because it had no real purpose. Then we needed a place in a real hurry to put the detainees from the war with Afghanistan. Suddenly Gitmo became the epicenter for the growing debate over the human rights of detainees in the war on terror.

Although apologetic about the bind she was putting me in, the commander of the 85th nonetheless requested that Major Leso be allowed to deploy to Cuba as part of her unit. Not surprisingly, she saw him as an outstanding young officer and thought he would be a significant asset for their unit in Cuba. I hesitated before replying, because I knew the 85th’s reputation included many problems that are common to combat stress control companies. The biggest problem was that CSC units had psychiatrists or psychologists as their commanding officers, and most psychologists, social workers, nurses, and psychiatrists didn’t make good field commanders. They had an unrelenting need to be liked, which often got in the way of a successful military command. Most mental health military officers had no real formal training to be military unit field commanders, and they were usually very bad at this endeavor. So she needed Major Leso not just for his capabilities as a psychologist but also for what he could bring to the unit as a capable military officer. Saying yes would create problems on my end, but there was only one right answer. This unit was going into the field and they needed my officer, so I had to allow Major Leso to deploy. I could hear the relief in the commanding officer’s voice when I said yes.

Major Leso was given some leave from his temporary duties at Fort Hood and he returned to my office at Walter Reed posthaste to pack up his furniture and belongings. He was very apologetic.

“Colonel James, sir, you were correct,” he told me. “It looks like I’m going to deploy and I won’t be able to be the director of training this coming year.”

I told him not to worry. “We’ll figure out a way to get it all done,” I said. “Go on down to Cuba and perform your duties like I know you will, soldier. I’ll see you in about six months or so.”

Major Leso had no idea, nor did I at that time, that his future, my future, and the shape and direction of the profession of psychology would never be the same.

Major Leso assumed, given the typical clinical mission of the 85th, that he would work as a clinical psychologist for the next six months down in Cuba—much longer than he had planned to be with the unit, but not all that long for a deployment. He did not know that by the time he departed for Cuba, hell had already begun to engulf the Joint Task Force in Gitmo, and it was waiting to swallow the life and soul of this young, brilliant Army psychologist. His world would be irrevocably altered.

The problems at Gitmo all related to the unusual command structure. Gitmo had a two-star general and a one-star general who did not see eye to eye. In a typical military command, the senior ranking officer, in this case the two-star general, would be in charge of everything. Not at Gitmo. In the haste to prepare for war after 9/11, the command there was thrown together with the already existing Navy personnel at the base, a blend of some active-duty Army staff, and many Army reservists and National Guard troops. At this very early stage in the war, many of these reservists had never deployed and had little experience. Their inexperience was compounded by the two-star general not being in charge of all the staff at Gitmo. The one-star general felt that he did not work for the two-star general and that the two-star couldn’t tell him what to do. This divisiveness hurt morale and got in the way of the troops accomplishing the mission. It would be like the CEO of any American company not having control over all of his or her employees. In any well-functioning military command, one person and only one person has complete control and veto authority over everything—the commanding general. The lack of a clear chain of command at Gitmo left most soldiers asking, “Who’s in charge here?” This sentiment would not be found on any other active-duty Army post anywhere else in the world. Problems between these two generals flowed downhill to affect the mission and every soldier in the whole task force.

Unknown to Leso while he was en route to Joint Task Force Guantanamo, the pressures were mounting on the military to collect “actionable” intelligence that could yield quick results. The top brass wanted intel that would save lives on the battlefield, and units from halfway around the world were delivering plenty of prisoners to Gitmo that looked like hot prospects. But so far, efforts at interrogating these terrorists were not going well. The Army did not have many seasoned old crusty warrant-officer interrogators left. Most of the interrogators from the Vietnam era, those with enough experience to produce good results, were either retired or dead. The majority of interrogators were very young, inexperienced, and did not have the ability to extract accurate and reliable actionable intelligence from the prisoners. Seeing little results from the inexperienced interrogators, the commanding general, Major General John McKipperman, brought a group of former CIA contract psychologists to Cuba—a few months before Major Leso’s assignment—to teach the interrogators harsh and abusive interrogation tactics. The goal was to get the detainees to talk—quickly. Results were marginal, but by the time Leso arrived a culture of severe tactics had taken hold as the norm for much of the Joint Intelligence Group at Gitmo. The bar for what might be considered abusive was raised higher and higher, and the leaders at the base turned their backs on conduct that was, at a minimum, questionable. The interrogators learned that they could try pretty much whatever they wanted to get the prisoner to talk, and a lack of good information often just spurred them to attempt something more extreme.

Major Leso jumped right into his role as a clinical psychologist with the 85th CSC in Cuba, seeing patients immediately and maintaining optimism about his deployment. In less than a month, though, his assignment changed drastically. He was removed from his clinical duties and reassigned to work with the Intelligence Control Element section of the Joint Intelligence Group. The commanding general realized that there were problems with the intel unit’s productivity, cohesion, and focus, so he directed Major Leso to assist with improving the unit’s interrogations. Major Leso’s concern was that he had never been trained to perform these duties, had no real strong in-depth forensic background, and had never consulted or received extensive training with police detectives in his doctoral work. The task force surgeon, the chief doctor of the task force and Leso’s superior at the time, expressed concern about putting him in this position, but the general insisted. This was the moment when a bright, promising young officer’s future was stolen. Within a matter of days, he was reassigned from his clinical duties as a doctor, helping soldiers cope with the stresses of working at Gitmo and being away from home, to advising interrogators on how to interrogate prisoners.

In August 2002, I got a phone call from John Leso. I knew immediately that something was wrong and this was not the same eager young man I had last seen in my office. I was shocked at the voice I heard on the line. I could hear and almost feel the anxiety, hopelessness, uncertainty, and terror in his voice. He briefed me on what had transpired and his new mission and told me how uncomfortable he was in his new role. I told him that I would consult Colonel Morgan Banks down at the Fort Bragg Special Operations Command to see if Major Leso could be reassigned. Colonel Banks oversaw all psychologists working in the special operations community, and now Major Leso had become a part of that community, involuntarily, overnight, and without the proper training.

When I spoke with Colonel Banks, we agreed that we had grave concerns about Leso’s lack of preparation for his new role, but we also saw this as an opportunity for psychologists to do the right thing and influence the interrogation process, assuming we could get Major Leso the appropriate training. Colonel Banks and I agreed that the right thing to do was to bring Leso to Fort Bragg as soon as possible and provide him training so that he could help what was rapidly starting to look like a sinking ship at Cuba. During the week of September 16, 2002, Leso was sent to Fort Bragg for briefing on the appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, the rules of engagement, what was legal and not legal, and, most importantly, the Geneva Conventions. Colonel Banks emphasized to Major Leso that it was imperative for him to teach interrogators how to treat all prisoners with decency and respect and how to use incentive-based interviews rather than harsh interrogation tactics. This was the first training of its kind in the country, to teach psychologists how to ethically work with interrogators, and I hoped it would give Major Leso more confidence in his ability to contribute in a meaningful way as a psychologist, rather than feeling that he had been thrown into a role wholly inconsistent with his background.

Meanwhile I still had to run my department. With Leso deployed to Cuba for a six-month assignment, he would be away from Walter Reed from approximately June to December 2002. Given that Cuba was in the Atlantic region of the country, this new deployment would be an ongoing responsibility of my psychology department at Walter Reed. So in addition to getting by without Major Leso while he was in Cuba, I also had to begin searching for a suitable replacement, most likely from within my department, for when Leso returned from Cuba. And I had to get moving on it because Leso’s six-month tour of duty was going to go by fast, at least for me.

Indeed, it seemed as though September and October 2002 passed in a flash. My wife and I began the exciting process of planning our return to Hawaii around September 2003. Thinking about the freshness of Hawaii, the joy of being around our granddaughter, and the pleasantries of visiting with old friends served as a respite from the tragedy of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, any leftover problems from 9/11, and the daily grind at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In the first week of October my phone rang, and it was Colonel Cooper. He began emphasizing the importance of coming up with a suitable replacement for Major Leso, whom, it was clear, would be another psychologist from my department.

I told Ed I would make it happen, confident because I had a hard-charging young officer who was at my door every day eager to take the assignment. I had complete trust and faith in him. But then he found out that he had a serious medical condition that would prevent his deployment. There were two more officers I might send, but neither was a promising choice. One was a young female captain who had a six-month-old baby at home. The other was the oldest psychologist in the Army and his wife had just completed a round of chemotherapy. I considered every possible solution, but in the end it was clear that there was only one right answer. I would have to deploy to Cuba and replace Major Leso myself. Colonel Cooper and Colonel Banks agreed that this was the right course of action, particularly because things were getting worse down there. Gitmo needed an experienced senior Army psychologist with a significant background in correctional and forensic psychology. Once the matter was settled, I started making arrangements to go down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and receive many classified briefings and review relevant documents.

I was less than thrilled about going to Cuba instead of Hawaii, and I knew my wife wouldn’t be happy either. But when I informed her of my pending deployment she was undaunted. With approximately six years in the Navy prior to transferring over to the Army, we were veterans of many deployments. We both felt that a six-month deployment was a long weekend as deployments go. No sweat, we thought. Six months in Cuba and then back to our plan to go home to Hawaii.

The remainder of October and November 2002 continued to fly by like a runaway freight train going downhill. I occupied myself with making sure that I was in the best physical shape of my life and reading everything that I could read about the new mission at Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

In the first week of January 2003 I boarded a civilian plane out of Baltimore-Washington International Airport and headed south for the Combat Redeployment Center, which was a training and mobilization center down at Fort Benning, Georgia. My civilian plane from Baltimore arrived at 7 p.m. at the Columbus, Georgia, airport. I got my bags, then sat on a huge bus with what seemed like three hundred soldiers. Why do soldiers need so many goddamn bags, I thought as I sat crammed on this unheated bus on a cold Georgia night. It seemed that these soldiers had a thousand suitcases and duffel bags on a bus that was designed to seat thirty or forty people. We waited for three hours until every seat on the bus was filled because the contract driver, Mr. Pete, was getting paid by the head and did not want to go back to Fort Benning with seats unfilled. Finally, Mr. Pete started the bus and we arrived at Fort Benning, about two hours south of Atlanta, late on a Sunday night. It was dark, cold, raining, and we were met by a first sergeant who seemed angry at the world but toned down the vitriol when he saw a colonel standing in front of him. He showed me to my barracks, wanting to provide me with a finer touch because of my rank. He thought that somehow, if he assigned me to a single room that night, I would overlook this dump of a barracks. It didn’t work.

My barracks room had holes in the walls, broken windows, and water dripping from the ceiling. The shower facilities were filthy. I was simply appalled that we had young soldiers going to—and more importantly, returning from—a combat zone living in these barracks. I looked around and thought I wouldn’t want to let a cat or dog live in this building for fear of it being eaten by a rat. I called the concierge over and told him so.

“First Sergeant, these berths are unfit for human habitation!” I barked at him.

He was unimpressed with my opinion and my attitude on this late Sunday night in Georgia. “It’s what we got, sir.” And with that he went away to yell some more at the other soldiers grousing about their accommodations.

I stayed in the barracks for about three of the ten days I was scheduled to be at Fort Benning. After that, I just couldn’t take it anymore. The mixture of alcohol, women, and young soldiers filled with testosterone at this remote part of the post was a bad combination. I would be awakened in the night by brawls, women screaming, and the sound of beer bottles breaking. On the third night of my stay I was given a roommate, a lieutenant colonel who farted louder than the detonation of any hand grenade I had ever heard. His snoring could have competed with the sound of an Amtrak train struggling to make up time in the snow. That next morning, I found my way to the first sergeant’s office and saw that his mood was still as foul as mine.

“First Sergeant, I’ll be back in formation at 0500, but I’m not going to spend another night in this roach motel,” I told him. He mumbled a “yes sir” without hardly looking at me, but I suspect he said more to my back as I walked out. I spent the remaining nights basking in the luxury of the local Motel 6. I could at least get to sleep.

The next morning, I was in formation at 5 a.m. with about five hundred other soldiers who were all freezing their asses off. I, on the other hand, was not. I had learned nearly twenty years ago never to deploy anywhere in the world without long underwear. It doesn’t matter if they tell you you’re going to Hot As Hell, Texas, or an expedition to the sun, take some long underwear because it’s going to be cold at night. The first sergeant barked out instructions and told us the plan of the day, adding comments that indicated to this experienced psychologist that he was either seriously delusional or just enjoyed messing with us.

“And to anyone who wants to come to me with some bullshit complaints about your barracks, just do yourself a favor and keep it to yourself,” he yelled. “The accommodations here at Fort Benning are top-notch, five-star housing and damn near luxurious. So I’m not interested in your complaining.”

We crammed on the bus and spent the rest of our six days getting equipment, shots, and disrobing in a room filled with thirty of my closest friends who I had just met. Of course, a variety of more medical exams, more shots, getting more equipment, going to more meetings and more briefings were to follow. On the tenth day, I was scheduled to fly out of Fort Benning, down to the naval air station in Jacksonville, Florida. There, I would board a military-chartered Continental Airlines 737 to Cuba.

About two hundred or so passengers boarded the 737 that morning for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As we reached Cuba and flew over the Caribbean island, I couldn’t help but notice the beauty of the place. The coral reefs were mesmerizing, with a bluish, turquoise water similar to Maui, Hawaii. Upon landing I was quickly escorted through the in-processing—my rank usually got me the fast-lane treatment in these situations—and given my badge. I was officially part of the staff at Gitmo.

Major Leso met me at the airport when I was finished with all the arrival processing. As I looked at him coming across the terminal, I knew something was wrong. I had hoped that he was coping better in the new position after his training, but my first look at him erased that idea. Major Leso did not look like himself. He had lost the innocent, naïve look that I remembered seeing in my office so often. The insatiable energy and optimism that had surrounded him every moment were gone. He no longer had a brightness in his eyes. He was worn physically and, I suspected, tattered emotionally as a person and human being. After chatting with him for half an hour, I began to feel a loss for the young John Leso I once knew. Major Leso welcomed me to Cuba, but it was a formality. He spoke softly, with no energy, in the voice of the deeply depressed.

What in the hell is so wrong? I asked myself. This isn’t just a stressed-out soldier or someone who’s tired from being in the field. My God . . . This man has been traumatized.

I didn’t let on right away that I was concerned about Major Leso and just allowed him to go through the motions of showing me around the base. The post at Cuba consists of two almost completely separate sections separated by a huge bay spread across approximately forty-five miles. One of the ironies about this base in a Communist country, home to the military prison that housed some of the worst terrorists in the world, was that it had many familiar touches from home. A McDonald’s restaurant offered the same Big Macs and fries that any soldier knew from home, and the post exchange (PX) carried everyone’s favorite magazines and snacks. There was a movie theater, good roads, beautiful beaches, some limited Internet access and e-mail. The air terminal that soldiers flew into was on the leeward side of Guantanamo Bay across the water from the main part of the post, on the windward side of the island. This required all personnel to ferry from the airport to the main post. While we were in our SUV on the ferry, Major Leso began to share with me some of the horrors and tragedies he was neither trained to deal with nor had emotionally expected. There was something different about him when he talked about those issues. He seemed angry, depressed, exhausted, disappointed, and afraid all at once. He was also goddamned glad to see me, partly because my arrival marked his imminent departure.

We disembarked the ferry in the SUV and headed for my quarters. When we arrived at my barracks room John and I unloaded my gear into my hooch. Every passing moment made it more clear to me that this once vibrant, young, hard-charging, almost naïve officer and psychologist was not himself.

Don’t force the conversation, Larry, I told myself as we hauled my gear inside. Remember to let it happen when he’s ready. Just follow where this takes you.

I did. Leso obviously welcomed me as a familiar face, a fellow medical professional, and a superior he trusted. I could tell he needed to talk, and once we started to relax at my new home, it was only a matter of time. Within the first thirty minutes in my hooch, his eyes began to tear up. He told me he felt that he had received increasing pressure to teach interrogators procedures and tactics that were a challenge to his ethics as a psychologist and moral fiber as a human being. He was devastated to have been a part of this. As a fellow mental health professional, I related strongly to what he must have gone through with trying to be both a healer and a soldier. Major Leso had been thrown right into the jaws of what had been for me mostly a theoretical, what-if type of debate.

He witnessed many harsh and inhumane interrogation tactics, such as sexual humiliation, stress positions, detainees being stripped naked, and the use of K-9 dogs to terrorize detainees. He had no command authority, meaning he felt as though he had no legal right to tell anyone what to do or not do. There were no guides or reference books he could refer to, nor old college professors he could consult. This young officer was dropped in this horrible situation without the training, informational background, senior military rank, or experience that would be necessary to derail this broken downhill train. Nevertheless, he had garnered the trust of the interrogators over time and was able to make some changes. Though the changes sometimes came only after a fight, he had convinced the intel unit that he should be involved in the interrogation process as a consultant and was successful in cutting back on some of the abusive practices.

I spoke with John for a long time that first night, letting him pour out a lot of frustrations and offering advice on how to cope with the difficulty of being both a soldier and a doctor. I shared with him my own concerns about how to balance those two roles, and he was relieved to hear that a colonel with years of experience still struggled with that dilemma.

Major Leso told me he would remain in Cuba for two weeks, completing the administrative processing prior to his departure from JTF Guantanamo and his return to Walter Reed. That was ideal, I thought, because this would give me about two weeks to uncover what in the hell had happened on this island. As I would often do with others around me, especially those in pain, I began telling Major Leso old stories, filled with laughter and good fun. His emotional pain paused for the time being as we got back in the SUV and headed for the chow hall.

We had been driving for a few minutes when he looked over to me and said, “Colonel . . .” and then paused, obviously wanting to tell me something important. I will never forget the hurt in his eyes.

“Colonel, you need to be real careful down here, sir,” he said softly, but intently. “You can step in a minefield every hour of the day at this place.”

For a second I thought he was talking about actual minefields, warning me with another housekeeping detail about life in Cuba, but I quickly realized he wasn’t talking about explosive ordnance.

“Thanks, John,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”