A Navy Doctor Goes 'On Call in Hell'

DATE March 7, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Dr. Richard Jadick talks about his deployment as
battalion surgeon during the battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Dr. Richard Jadick, practiced combat medicine under fire in urban
warfare during the battle of Fallujah in November 2004. Instead of setting up
the medical aid stations safely behind the front lines, he set them up in the
battle in order to get to the wounded quickly. American troops faced an
estimated five to 9,000 insurgents in Fallujah. Jadick's battalion, the 1st
Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, lost 21 men killed in action, 200 were too
seriously wounded to carry on the fight. Commander Jadick received a Bronze
Star with a combat V for valor.

Just before deploying to Iraq, Jadick had been working as a surgeon with the
Marines at Camp Lejeune. When he heard there was a shortage of military
doctors going to Iraq, he volunteered, even though he was 38, older than most
battalion soldiers, and his wife was about to have a baby. After returning
home from Iraq, he was the subject of a Newsweek cover story. Now he's
written a memoir called "On Call in Hell: a Doctor's Iraq War Story."

Dr. Jadick, welcome to FRESH AIR. Would you describe what the American
soldiers faced in the battle of Fallujah in 2004?

Dr. RICHARD JADICK: Sure. I think every American soldier, Marine and sailor
who went in was really looking at a well-dug-in defensive system of insurgents
who had been there for quite some time. Fallujah was never really occupied or
patrolled very seriously by the American forces before any of this, and then
it became a hotbed of insurgency. So the insurgents had their way, throughout
the city, to dig whatever defensive systems, perimeters, set up makeshift
hospitals, that kind of thing, for a long time. So we were looking at a
well-entrenched urban fight that, I think, really kind of, as you look at
weapons systems, takes away some of the technical advantage that our military
has.

GROSS: Now, you basically set up aid stations in the heart of the battle of
Fallujah. You were working under enemy fire. Why was it important to you to
set up aid stations in the battle, as opposed to doing it more safely in the
rear, which was typically what's done?

Dr. JADICK: Well, when I began looking at the plan--and I really, I looked
at, every time we went out on our operation or some sort of patrolling system
where we had our troops somewhere, I always looked at it as to how was the
best way for me to care for the Marines that were out there. That's my job,
so it made sense for me to really analyze this urban battlefield and figure
out how can we get the Marines most efficiently to medical care. And what
made sense to me, and what has always made sense to me was not trying to bring
the Marine to the medicine, but bring the medicine to the Marine. And I went,
initially, prior to the battle, we went on a recon. I went with the command
element, and we went out around the perimeter to draw fire. It was obvious to
me that this was a long drive from there back to the surgical hospital to get
any kind of real treatment, and once you got into the middle of the city, you
never knew how long it was going to be from getting a Marine from the point of
injury back to any kind of care. So my thought, and when I presented it to
the colonel, the thought was let's get our people as far forward so that
there's only a five minute difference between the time they're injured and the
time they get some significant medical care.

GROSS: So what kind of places did you set up your aid stations in?

Dr. JADICK: Well, we set--and, really, it was two aid stations. I set up a
very full, robust aid station at the--really at the forward edge of the battle
area, what we call the FEBA. We had an assembly point just behind the FEBA.
I set up with the second physicians--there's two physicians in a
battalion--and he ran most of the corpsmen. I took six other corpsmen into
downtown Fallujah at the government center, and in a little prayer room inside
that government center, we set up our second aid station. And what that did
to us was give us one aid station that would cover the whole southern end of
the battlefield, and one aid station that would cover the northern end. So it
really was, you know, five minutes from point of injury to a physician or a
significant provider with trauma experience.

GROSS: What were the typical wounds that you saw in the battle of Fallujah?

Dr. JADICK: The typical wounds, because of the body armor that we all wore,
were extremity wounds. We saw a lot of, you know, arm, leg wounds, and some
significant head wounds. The wounds, though, that we saw that were really
concerning were anything that got in between the plates in the upper body
armor, which didn't happen, really, too often. I had a couple of shots to the
chest, but the other one that was very life threatening was there was a lot of
wounds to the inner groin area that became--that became the wound that was,
really, the most concerning. Because all the vessels that are packed in
there, and the difficulty it is. You can't put a tourniquet around it, you
have to really just put your hand in there and pack it. So those were the
wounds we saw, and we learned very quickly how to deal successfully with the
groin and kind of chest wounds.

GROSS: Well, why were there so many groin injuries? Was there no body armor
in that area of the body?

Dr. JADICK: There is not. You know, it's a joint. It's very difficult to
put any kind of armor in there. You know, you could armor a--you could put a
Marine in complete armor, but then he doesn't move around very well. So
there's trade-offs. You need to armor as much as you can, however you don't
want to--you're giving a guy an extra 12 pounds of body armor, as well as a
very large contingent of ammo and the gear he's going to need to be through
the city and live for anywhere from two to four weeks. So adding more armor
makes it difficult. I thought--I took it as our challenge was to figure out
how to save those people who were shot in those areas, and I think, you know,
we were very successful with that.

GROSS: Were insurgents intentionally targeting the groin area because they
knew that was a vulnerable part of the body?

Dr. JADICK: You know, there's some thoughts to that. I think the insurgents
were very adaptive, and they had come with up any number of ways to get around
some of the innovations, and they still do. But I think--I personally think
that, yes, there were too many wounds in those areas that led me to believe
that maybe there was some targeting going on in the lower extremities,
specifically in the groin region, especially from snipers. There were quite a
few snipers out there that were well trained and taking very good shots.

GROSS: What was it like the first time you treated a severe groin injury,
before you figured out how to treat it?

Dr. JADICK: I'll never forget, the first time was the day after the battle
kicked off, and we had gone into the city. And once in the city, we got a
call. I was in the ambulance, and we were taking one Marine out who'd been
shot in the chest and actually it was a Navy corpsman Force Recon kid. And we
got a call to go into the middle of an ambush area, so we moved the ambulance
down there, and that's when I saw my first groin injury, and it was Sergeant
Lonny Wells. And he came over and--it was relatively chaotic, but I did
everything I could. I packed that wound, I tried to stop the bleeding and I
couldn't. I had six other wounded Marines, so triage became what I had to do,
very dirty work sorting out and moving on. And as I rode back in the
ambulance, I played this over in my mind a million times, what did I do or
didn't do that could've changed this course of events for Sergeant Wells.

And Sergeant Wells became a pivotal point where I realized that we were there
pretty quickly, and I got to him before he lost all, you know, before he
passed on us. But I didn't do the right things to save his life, and I wasn't
sure why I wasn't able to pack that wound tighter or make the move to change
the course of events. So when we got him out of there, I really thought about
it for about an hour, because that's all the time I had before PFC Volpi came
in with the same wound. He had the same wound, he was unconscious, and pale
as a ghost, and in shock. And he came in, and I realized that I didn't pack
tight enough on Sergeant Wells, and that I needed to put my hand in there and
grab everything I can and just keep as much compression on his vessels. And
that's what I did, we pushed some fluid in. The outcome was a lot different
for PFC Volpi.

After that, as I sat down and kind of reworked this thing, I knew that we had
to be as close as we could, because these kids will bleed out in five, 10
minutes. And I also knew that we were going to need to really be aggressive
in treating any kind of bleeding, with tourniquets and compression and IV
fluids.

GROSS: How do you do triage in the middle of a battle?

Dr. JADICK: You look at your wounds, you look at what's around you, and you
assess. Really, my triage was, `Who can I get to and save their life within
the next three minutes by some sort of intervention? Anybody who's going to
require more of my time than that, I don't know if I can spend that much time
with them.' And that's it. I mean, there's NATO and US triage categories, but
I really didn't use many of those. I used those who aren't going to die no
matter what I did and they were just wounded, those were going to die if I
didn't do anything, and those who were going to take too much of my time that
the others may pass away because I spent too much time with them.

GROSS: There's something called the golden hour in battlefield medicine,
which is the hour that you often have to intervene medically if you are to
save somebody's life. But you're saying that it's really not an hour anymore,
it's often, like, three minutes.

Dr. JADICK: I'm certainly saying that an hour is too long. I don't
think--and, really, the hour comes from United States basic trauma studies,
or--it doesn't come from battlefield trauma. It's more about blunt trauma,
and it takes a whole bunch of patients and looks at them saying, `OK, how many
died after an hour and how many died before an hour?' And your survival rate
before an hour is much greater than after an hour. However, the reality of it
is, if somebody's bleeding and they're bleeding from a very large vein or an
artery, they're going to bleed out in five or 10 minutes and they're not going
to come back. And those are very survivable wounds if you have the knowledge
and the ability to be there and make the intervention, which is nothing more
than a tourniquet or compression. None of what I did was rocket science. It
was, `Listen, he's bleeding. We need to stop it, and we need to put something
on his veins to continue to keep his blood pressure up.' And that's what we
did time and time again.

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Richard Jadick. His new memoir is called "On Call in
Hell: a Doctor's Iraq War Story." We'll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dr. Richard Jadick and his new
book, "On Call in Hell," is about being a doctor during the battle of Fallujah
in 2004.

There were things that you learned to improvise in Fallujah, like warming IV
fluids by taping them to people's bodies because it would get cold sometimes,
and the cold IV would be very bad.

Dr. JADICK: Right.

GROSS: So what are some other things you learned to improvise with
experience?

Dr. JADICK: Everything we do out in the military seems to be improvisation.
You've got a certain amount of gear, but there are other things that you can
utilize. We improvise every day by trying to figure out where we're going to
set up our aid station. Our aid station happened to be a perfect place
with--you have to think about access to it, you have to think about putting
stretchers in it and getting gear for it.

We improvised, when it got cold, we improvised with the fires. We had the
engineers kind of open up some holes in the wall, and we built little
fireplaces in the wall. And when we knew that casualties were coming, we
always had embers burning in there and then we'd stoke them up because it got
very cold. It got to 25, 26 degrees after Thanksgiving. So when that
happens, you can't--you're going to--what you're going to wind up doing is
bring a patient in, taking their clothes off, and figuring out where their
wounds are and trying to plug their holes, but you're going to make them
hypothermic. So we had two fireplaces going in our second aid station that we
would just kick up, and you would sweat in the room when those things were
going. So it really did work.

And innovation, it certainly wasn't my innovation. It was the corpsmen's
innovation. They would come up with things that, you know, transfers of
patients into the ambulances and how to use a loading dock was key, because we
could move patients in and out faster when we had that set up. So we looked
at everything out there as the opportunity to kind of improve your situation.

One of the corpsman came up with, you know, we have to make latrines when we
go out, or what we call in the Navy "heads," and he came up with just a
fantastic way to make heads out of sandbags. And it made it a lot more
comfortable for anybody who had to use one.

GROSS: Now, you were talking about how a lot of the injuries that you dealt
with were bleeds, and what you did was often like pack the wound or apply a
tourniquet. But some of the injuries you saw were brain injuries. How do you
deal with those? Like, a tourniquet isn't going to do the job?

Dr. JADICK: Yeah, you just--for the most part, for brain injury, you're
bandaging the head and sending them out and trying to stabilize them as best
you can. And I look at, you know, their airway, their circulation, whether
they've got any other bleeds going on. But I will tell you that, in triage,
if, on the battlefield, somebody is displaying brain tissue or gray matter,
then there's very little you can do for them, and for the most part, comfort
is what you give them. And we did that on occasions.

GROSS: Were you able to call in medevacs? Were they able to arrive quickly
for the injuries like brain injuries, where there wasn't much that you could
do?

Dr. JADICK: There were no helo-evacuations out of the city, which is kind of
where my--as the plan was being put together, we thought about, `Hey, where
are we going to have a helicopter support?' There really wasn't any way they
were going to let helicopters fly over the city where they didn't know what
kind of weapons and RPGs were going to be involved in all these rooftops.
Because they were really trying to prevent a "Black Hawk Down." And I can't
blame them for that. We, on the ground, had to be more innovative about our
evacuations. So I evacuated--we did all self-evacuation. Everybody I had who
was wounded and in the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, went back to an ambulance
exchange point, which was way back about a mile and a half from my forward aid
station. But a lot of times it was through Indian country, so there were--and
the roads weren't good, so I wanted to make sure that my guys were very stable
before they made that trip, and then once they got back there we'd exchange
them with an ambulance that would take them into the combat surgical
hospitals, or Bravo Surgical, which happened to be the surgical company that
was taking care of us in Camp Fallujah.

GROSS: Was it difficult for you to decide--I assume it was like your job to
decide when a Marine should be sent back into battle, if their wound was
manageable enough that they could return to battle. Were those hard decisions
to make?

Dr. JADICK: They are. It is my decision. It was never a decision I took
lightly, and I will tell you that, on one occasion, I had a Marine come in who
had been shot through his helmet and he just walked in with his helmet under
his arm and said, `Doc, I really--my head's killing me,' and we looked at his
head, and he had taken a sniper round that grazed the top of his scalp. He
had splayed it open, but it didn't go through the bone. So he was probably
the luckiest man I'd I've ever seen. The decision that day was, `You need to
go home. At least take the next couple days off and come rejoin the group
after you get that thing washed out.' So we sent him home.

Unfortunately, most of the Marines wanted to go back very quickly, and I
treated, that same day, a young lance corporal, Demarkus Brown, who really
just had a lip laceration. And one of the corpsmen sewed it up, and he wanted
to get back out there. And so we let him go, and his wound was pretty
minimal, and our job is really to maintain the fighting force. That's what we
need. We need people who are putting rounds down range and my job is really
to make sure that that's happening, and that people aren't just leaving. And
I never had that with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. People did want to
leave, and Demarkus Brown wanted to go back to his unit. So we sent him back
out. Unfortunately, Demarkus Brown came in the next day with a chest shot and
didn't make it.

GROSS: Sometimes the Marines who you saw were so mangled you couldn't tell
who they were until reading their dog tags, and because some of these men were
men who you'd known and already worked with, that must've been pretty
upsetting.

Dr. JADICK: Yeah, it was. It's extremely upsetting. I think, for me, as an
older person, it was something I really did compartmentalize and didn't deal
with until I was gone. But I knew that the corpsmen who live with these guys
and knew them well, there was a moment, on almost every Marine, because they
came in very--even if they were OK, they were beaten up, they were bloody and
they were dirty. They were covered in mud, and if they came in and they
weren't with us any more, if they were not alive, then there would certainly
be some very serious wounds that were going on, and nobody really would
understand who the Marine was until we started really look into finding the
dog tags. And there was this, what I call the moment of realization, and it
was sad to watch. Because people didn't know, and all's they knew was they
had a Marine there, and then they would realize that that Marine was somebody
they might've lived over top of them, somebody that they had gone out and
drank beers with back at Camp Lejeune. And it was always a difficult thing to
deal with for these kids, as they'd have to put them in body bags and we'd
have to evacuate them out of there.

GROSS: Dr. Richard Jadick will be back in the second half of the show. His
new memoir is called "On Call in Hell: a Doctor's Iraq War Story."

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

I'm Terry Gross back with Navy commander Dr. Richard Jadick. He set up the
medical aid stations during the battle of Fallujah in Iraq and practiced
combat medicine in the middle of the battle. He received a Bronze Star with a
combat V for valor. His new memoir is called "On Call in Hell: A Doctor's
Iraq War Story."

In addition to treating Marines in the battle of Fallujah, you treated some
civilians. You also treated some insurgents. Why did you treat insurgents
and what do the rules of war have to say about treating the enemy?

Dr. JADICK: Well, the rules are that you're supposed to treat everybody
that's out there on the battlefield. First of all, you know, I'll say that
because of my Hippocratic Oath, the oath that I've taken to become a
physician, I was going to treat everybody anyway. I didn't have a problem
with that. I was able to come to terms with the fact that, you know, if
they're insurgents, I am--it's not my job to judge what--who lives and who
dies. It's my job to put my skills to effectively treat and manage their
wounds. Now there were some bad men who came through my aid station that I
treated, and the way I discussed it with my corpsmen who were having problems
with it was, you know, these are guys who--they wanted--they stayed because
they wanted to become martyrs, to become a martyr you have to die and if we
can keep them alive, then that takes away the only reason they were here. So
it was a little reverse psychology, but in reality our job was, on top of
that, to provide a healthy patient to the intelligence people so they could
talk to them and try and get some sort of information out of it, so that in
the future they--we can save our own, you know, our Marines, our lives. And
then there was always the fact that sometimes a poor guy came in that may have
been caught up, may have not--may be an insurgent, and I just didn't know, and
I wasn't there to make that determination, so I treated everybody very
equally. I never had the situation where I had to make a choice between `Do I
treat a Marine or do I treat an insurgent?' It was always at an appropriate
time that I could treat either one equally.

GROSS: What about the security aspects of the insurgents in the same aid
station as the Marines were, and did you have to worry about security even
though the insurgents were wounded?

Dr. JADICK: Absolutely. We--no insurgent came into the aid station without
having two Marines on them and having been completely strip-searched. Even
then, I had probably four or five known Iraqi insurgents they had dug out of a
house, and they came into us and one was sitting on the ground, blindfolded,
hands tied behind his back and he bit into one of my corpsmen. So even then
safety--I mean, you always have to be on guard, and we always had a very
well-trained force of Marines who would stand off and watch us treat the
patients because the last thing I wanted to do is have my corpsmen with
weapons trying to do that and treat a patient and then the insurgent can
actually get a hold of a weapon. So we were very thorough in how we dealt
with insurgents who came in, and always concern, paramount over everything,
was the security of ourselves, and the Marines did a very good job of that.

GROSS: So when you were treating insurgents who knew that you were an
American doctor, with the Navy, did they look at you like they really would
prefer to kill you, or did they look at you with gratitude for treating them?

Dr. JADICK: There was never--and it was different with different people.
The hard-core insurgents never looked at me with gratitude. They hated
everything I stood for, everything I was about. But, you know, hate's a
painful thing to carry around with you, so I tried very hard not to have that
with me. I wanted to get rid of it, do what I had to do and be proud of what
I did and not walk around with this significant hate that would eat me up
inside. That's what these guys had. I mean, they had a burning hate. There
were quite a few kind of lower-tier insurgents, guys who probably didn't think
that we'd actually come through who were paid to stay in town--not paid a lot
of money but more money than they'd probably see ever in their lives, and
these were guys who did feel relief that they had been captured, relief that
we were treating them and hopefully when they go back and they're offered a
couple hundred bucks to do the same thing again, they think about it and say,
`Well, I don't know. It doesn't make sense.' So that's what we did. We
worked hard at treating them all the same.

GROSS: Fallujah was your first combat experience and what an experience it
was! You describe in your memoir what it was like the first time you had to
like exit your vehicle and go into battle to try to save lives and like how
your body was crying out, `Stay put! Don't move! Don't go there!' Would you
describe that moment and how you kind of got the power to go against your
instincts and go out into fire and do your job?

Dr. JADICK: There was that moment when that door opened, and we had heard
rounds pinging off the side and I was there with an Army specialist who was a
medic, a specialist cook, and he was in the vehicle with me, and we looked
outside and it was crazy outside, chaotic, loud. Something that--I mean, I
think the closest I ever saw was "Saving Private Ryan" when the ramp dropped
and they hit the beach. A round had come into the vehicle, and I was scared.
I mean, I don't think anybody's not scared. I was completely afraid, and it
took every cell in my body to kind of muster up the courage to go outside and
what wound up for me and in my head as I sat there and I was kind of pivotal
on this knife's edge, you know, `Why would I go outside? Why not just go
back? Treat them when they get in here.' I was afraid that I was going to
fail those Marines that really wanted--who I owed my security and my
allegiance to, and that's why I moved. I was afraid to fail. I needed
something to motivate me, and that was it, and I will never forget how, as I
stood there thinking it was for hours but, hopefully, it was only a
split-second, all of a sudden that thought came into my head, that `If you
don't go out now and you don't do what you're trained to do, you have failed
your team,' and I don't know if I could have lived with myself if that had
happened.

GROSS: You wanted combat experience. You felt cheated that you didn't get to
be in combat during the 1991 Gulf War. Can you explain that very human
paradox, that on the one hand, you really want to see combat...

Dr. JADICK: That...

GROSS: ...and do your job in combat? At the same time, when you're in
combat, all your instincts tell you to be safe and not enter combat?

Dr. JADICK: You know, it's a lot easier to sit on the sidelines and say,
`Hey, that's what I want to do,' but when you're actually placed out there,
you realize that there's a lot of things that are not what you expected. But
at the same time, for me, in the first Gulf War, I wanted--I was on a football
team. This is kind of the way I looked at it, and I had trained with the
team. I had practiced with the team. And I wanted to go and I wanted to play
the game, and, unfortunately, back then I didn't even get out of the locker
room, so I felt a little cheated. You don't train and prepare for something
and then when that's--when that event occurs, you want to be a part of it and
you want to be part of history and you want to be a part of things that are
bigger than you. This synergy that occurs on the battlefield that you read
about and that you hear about, you want to feel that, and that's what I
wanted. Now, I will say, that when I first got off that ambulance that
afternoon, I thought about all that and realized that, wow, it's not the glory
that I thought it was going to be.

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Richard Jadick. His new memoir is called "On Call in
Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dr. Richard Jadick. He's a
Naval doctor who saved a lot of lives during the battle of Fallujah in 2004 in
Iraq. He's written a memoir called "On Call in Hell." He got a Bronze Star
with a combat V for valor for his work during the battle of Fallujah.

You know, getting back to what we were talking about before, you know, like
overcoming the instincts to keep safe, how are you changed by seeing so much
death and seeing so many, you know, mangled bodies and severe wounds.

Dr. JADICK: I...

GROSS: I guess what I'm wondering is when you started this, you'd done--you'd
worked in a trauma unit in Baltimore so you had some experience with trauma
but not with combat. As your time went on and you were in the battle of
Fallujah for about a month, what changed in you emotionally that made it
possible for you to keep dealing with this for several weeks nonstop?

Dr. JADICK: Well, I had my wife and my daughter at home, so for me there
was, again, there was no failure. I was going home and I was going to be
normal, so I compartmentalized everything. I put it really somewhere else. I
never though I'd have to deal with it again, and I would probably not have
dealt with it again if the Bronze Star hadn't come out and the Newsweek
article hadn't come out because when I went home, I sat with my wife and my
daughter, and we talked about everything except Iraq and I never talked about
any of that for a year, and then the Bronze Star came out and then the
Newsweek article came out. And I had to talk about it.

It was probably one of the most cathartic interviews I've ever done, and it
was a very painful seven days that I did this every night with Pat Winger, and
that has helped me get through a lot of it. I think that the changes that
I've endured are really--I know how precious life is, every life, and it's
something that makes me want to be home with my family because I need to watch
all that that's going on. I want to see my daughters grow up, I want to see,
you know, see my wife every day. So those are things that I've learned to
appreciate that I don't think I did before. The--I'm in medicine, so I will
always see bad outcomes, and you have to put that aside to deal with the rest
of your life, I guess.

GROSS: You know, your wife was pregnant when you volunteered to go to Iraq,
you know, to be deployed to Iraq, and she had just given birth when you
actually left. That must have been so difficult for her and for you, and I
could see that she might have been upset that you decided to do it, that you
decided to go while she was about to give birth.

Dr. JADICK: She--yeah--she was--she's always been very supportive of what
I've done, or what I've had to do, and that's who I am. That is, she married
a certain person who does those things, and I think she realized it, and you
know, at the same time didn't realize that sometimes the sacrifice was very
large, and you know, having given birth--I had--before even any of this, I
went, you know, I went to the delivery. I was there for all of it, but as
every military guy knows, you know, you really distance yourself from
everything that's going on probably two weeks or so before you deploy, so you
have to separate your emotions from the emotions that are going on around you
or else you'll never get out of there.

GROSS: Can I stop you for a second?

Dr. JADICK: Sure.

GROSS: You're talking about how you distance yourself about two weeks before
you deploy, but isn't it within that two weeks that your wife actually gave
birth?

Dr. JADICK: It is. It is.

GROSS: So you're trying to distance yourself emotionally just as you're
seeing your wife give birth to your daughter.

Dr. JADICK: Yeah--well, you have to or else you're--because I remember when
my wife gave birth and I held my daughter for the first time that there was a
very--if I had not had some sort of mechanism to get over that--I mean, I
could see myself not going. I could see myself going UA. I could see what
happens to kids who do all that, but I didn't, because I have been through
this before and I have the experience of knowing how to put this stuff aside
so that you have to focus on what's going forward. My, you know--hopefully,
my daughter is going to be OK with it when she gets older and says, `You left
me for my first year.' And I--you know, I don't know. We'll see how that
works out but, yeah, you have to do something. You need some mechanism to get
out of town.

GROSS: When you were in the battle of Fallujah, you carried a gun. I thought
medical personnel weren't supposed to carry a gun. Is that--am I wrong about
that?

Dr. JADICK: Well, we are supposed to carry a gun.

GROSS: You are supposed to carry a gun.

Dr. JADICK: Yes.

GROSS: Yeah.

Dr. JADICK: We have to--we are not supposed to be an aggressive combatant on
the battlefield. However, that has to be taken, you know, with the thought
that we also have to protect ourselves and our patients.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Dr. JADICK: And that's why we carry a weapon. My job is really--my focus is
on the patient. I only carried a sidearm. But my corpsmen all carried M-16s
and were capable of firing them if need be, and they needed to be to protect
themselves against an enemy that was asymmetrical and could be anywhere at
anytime. They needed to protect their patients.

GROSS: So, did you ever have to use the gun?

Dr. JADICK: I never fired my pistol. I used it in defensive--when we were
on patrol down the middle of Fallujah, I used it really to cover corners. I
was ready to shoot it if I had to, but I didn't have to. There was a
situation on the--outside of the aid station in the government center where a
sniper was on a rooftop and had opened fire on us as we were treating
casualties, and I looked up and I saw this very deadly ring of fire coming
from a muzzle. And it was very direct, a very perfect ring, which usually
means, if it's a perfect ring, if it's not off-center, they're firing
somewhere in your direction, and luckily for me, the XO Mark Winn was standing
there and I looked at him. I said, `Hey, Mark, there is a sniper on that
rooftop,' and I pointed to it, and just as we pointed, there was a shot and he
saw it, and he was able to neutralize the sniper.

GROSS: Just one more thing. You said that when you came back to the States,
you didn't really talk to your wife about what you saw in Iraq for about a
year, and it wasn't until the Newsweek cover story on you was published, it
wasn't until you were doing the interviews for that that you really started
talking about it, and it ended up being cathartic. I guess, you know, not
having been in battle myself, it's hard for me to understand how you would not
talk about it after getting--and I know it's really typical for soldiers when
they get back to not want to talk about it with their families, but when the
most extraordinary and dangerous thing you've ever experienced has happened to
you and survived, how do you not talk about it?

Dr. JADICK: Well, there was no reason for me to talk about it. My wife, at
that point, didn't know that I had gone into the battle of Fallujah, and I had
never told her. I said, `Yes, we are a part of that battle, but I am on base
camp.' So there was no reason to go into it any further. She knew that there
was more to it because I had called her once on a satellite phone when--it was
a quiet night, and as we were talking, there were--became very loud with
explosions from the point of--the C-130s overhead had been bombing some
insurgents on a rooftop. So she knew something was up and she never asked me
because she knew that sooner or later we would talk about it, but you can't
talk to just anybody about it because people don't understand. They--and I've
known now--now that I've spoken to people who've never been in combat that
they look at you very funny as you tell the story. They look at you in
disbelief that, you know, you had to make some decisions, and then they always
ask questions that I'm not sure I'm ready to answer. So I think for most of
us, when we come back, we don't even know how to talk about it. We don't know
how--you don't just tell the story. You don't--well, you don't want to admit
the fear so the only people you really can talk to are those people who have
experienced it because it's easy to walk up to somebody and say--who's been in
combat and as you're talking say, `Gosh, I was so scared.' But it's hard to
look at somebody that hasn't experienced it and say that same thing because
they don't know how to take it. So I think a lot of kids just don't bring it
up and don't talk about it.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us and wish you
good luck. Thank you.

Dr. JADICK: Well, thank you very much. It's been great to be on the show.

GROSS: Dr. Richard Jadick's new memoir is called "On Call in Hell."

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews the first album in nearly 35 years by Iggy Pop &
The Stooges.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

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Review: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Iggy Pop & The Stooges'
new album, "The Weirdness"
TERRY GROSS, host:

The Stooges, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-born rock band led by singer Iggy Pop,
have just released their first album in almost 35 years called "The
Weirdness." These days Iggy Pop's best-known piece of music may be the riff
for his song "Lust for Life," which was used prominently in the movie
"Trainspotting" and more recently in a TV commercial for a cruise ship line.
But with the Stooges, in the late '60s and the early '70s, Pop was a
forerunner of much of the punk and metal music that followed. Rock critic Ken
Tucker listens to the new Stooges album to hear how it measures up.

(Soundbite from "Free and Freaky")

IGGY POP: (Singing) "I'm the kind of guy...(unintelligible)...on the phone.
I sweep around the room. I bitch around and moan. People think I'm nervous.
(Unintelligible)...leave me alone. Free and freaky in the USA, my sister with
a washtub and a guy up on the roof. I think about it sometimes while sitting
on the beach. I hate it when people look at me the wrong way. Free and
freaky in the USA, free and freaky in the USA

(End of soundbite)

Mr. KEN TUCKER: "Free and freaky in the USA," Iggy Pop sings on that new
song. It's an image Iggy has certainly reveled in in the past. To some Iggy
is as well-known for his on-stage antics, such as rolling around in broken
glass or smearing himself with peanut butter, as he is for his music. But
these days, "Free and Freaky" is the coin of the realm, and you have to back
it up with craft and novel ideas. I'm not sure a song like this achieves
those things.

(Soundbite from "My Idea of Fun")

IGGY POP: (Singing) "Attention thrills and then it kills. Then make you
king, then make you ill. Till you're alone dead on your throne. So my idea
of fun is killing everyone. My idea of fun is killing everyone. My idea of
fun is killing everyone."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: The chorus there, in case you couldn't make it out, is "My idea
of fun is killing everyone." Come on, Iggy, you can do better than that.
Cheap nihilism was always the most irritatingly lazy trait of Stooges' music.
And indeed, elsewhere on "The Weirdness," Iggy and the Stooges do get better,
as on this song called "Trolling."

(Soundbite from "Trollin'")

IGGY POP: (Singing) "Hey, baby...(unintelligible). My heart's as lonely as I
can be. (Unintelligible) My mind has grown. Nothing is true. The ones that
don't always say they do. There's a reason you gotta look. It's the action,
never the book. You can't tell me...(unintelligible)...doesn't
matter...(unintelligible). You can't tell me 'cause you know you do it, too.
I'm trollin', I'm trollin'. We're trollin', we're trollin'."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: At one point on that song, Iggy bellows, "Rock critics wouldn't
like this at all." But me thinks Iggy protests too knowingly. It was rock
criticism, after all, that helped keep Iggy's reputation alive until his great
mid-70s collaborations with David Bowie. Their albums "The Idiot" and "Lust
for Life" refine the sound described by the title of the definitive Stooges'
album 1973's "Raw Power." For years this guy who is making music designed to
turn on big crowds without managing to attract a large audience had his name
invoked respectfully by rock writers who heard him as an influence,
acknowledged or not, on everyone from the Sex Pistols to Metallica. Now the
challenge is to make good on all those decades of goodwill with good music.

(Soundbite from "The Weirdness")

IGGY POP: (Singing) "I feel so strange. Fear runs around my brain. I can't
believe I could not stand the heat. They look at me with scorn on more than
luck was born. Born from the clay of their unhappy ways. One word to thus
describe...(unintelligible)...comes to mind. This world alone, it's the ache
in my bones. It's weirdness, my weirdness. Weirdness..."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: That's Iggy Pop channeling his inner David Bowie on one of "The
Weirdness"'s rare midtempo songs, the title tune and also one of the album's
best.

The new recording features original guitarist Ron Asheton, his brother,
drummer Scott Asheton and saxophonist Steve Mackay, with Mike Watt from the
punk band the Minutemen on bass. The Stooges' original bassist Dave Alexander
died in 1975. They play with a lot of precise crunch. The Stooges know that
in this age of technical precision, raw power doesn't really mean playing with
artless rawness. You have to try and hear past Iggy's tired lyrical subjects:
fair-weather friends hit you up for money, women can't be trusted, people are,
to quote and in general "greedy and awful." Instead, you need to let the words
fade away and listen to the aged grain of Iggy's voice and the slam and tickle
of the guitars and drums. If you can do that, the Stooges sound, if not like
legends reborn, at least a better, more raucous hard-rock band than most of
the current ones that are 20 years younger than the Stooges are.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is editor at large at Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
the Stooges' new album, "The Weirdness."

You can now download podcasts of our show on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music)
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