Review: Reaching Past the Wire

Here's some fairly old news I wrote, to remind us all to wake up to our surroundings.

The Human Face on War

How will Minnesotans acknowledge Iraq war veterans? At every gathering that recognizes those coming back from the war, there is likely to be a mix of people that are grateful, concerned, and critical.

One grandmother retired from the Army Reserves, and came home to Minnesota and a grateful church and group of friends, a concerned family, and a public very critical of her work at Abu Ghraib prison. Readers from human rights groups like Tackling Torture at the Top and sympathetic peers with military experience alike heard what Deanna Germain had to say at her book reading.

On Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007, Army nurse and author Deanna Germain publicly read from her memoir, Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib, at McKawber's bookstore. The reading was hosted by St. Paul Public Libraries.

Deanna Germain served as an army nurse reservist in Abu Ghraib and Kuwait. Connie Lounsbury had approached Deanna about writing the book on her military service in the prison hospital, after she heard about it from Germain's sisters. Germain agreed to expand on the emails to her sisters that she'd written, hoping, as she said at her book reading, to “put a human face on war.” The proceeds of her memoir's sales go to the Fisher House Foundation. The national private-public foundation builds and keeps 'comfort homes' on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers, for family members to be close to a loved one in the military during hospitalization for an unexpected illness, disease, or injury.

She worked not in “the hard district” of the prison, but in a hospital, separated by an arm's length of razor-wire from about 4,000 detainees. Her patients came in from Fallujah and Ramadi and nearby villages. They were often injured in combat against US forces, according to Germain. Some prisoners didn't want to describe their injuries, perhaps because their past activities could have endangered their families if they had confessed them.

“I knew some detainees were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Germain said. She described the example of Sami, 15 years old, who was on a bus as “insurgents” blew it up-- and became one of her patients. “We tried to sort people, but it couldn't be done fast enough-- frustrating on all sides-- so a lot more ended up behind the wire,” she said, implying that there were a lot more there who shouldn't have been.

Reaching Past The Wire mostly details her relationships with coworkers, translators, and what she learned from the Iraqi prisoners and civilians she treated. The only section she read aloud at McKawber's was about her daily discomforts and weekly inconveniences: wearing armor all the time, seeing rats crawl over her feet as she tried to make a phone call, and having a cell of the prison for a bedroom. “War is hell,” she read.

Before publishing their book, Germain and Lounsbury sent it to the Judge Advocate General, in case they wanted to look it over. The office gave no response.

The small, crowded bookstore was full of questioning listeners. Germain grimaced as audience members bluntly brought the question of the Abu Ghraib prisoner maltreatment scandals up, just as they had been brought up to her so many times before.

She said that she knew no one at “the hard site,” and could find out nothing about it. Germain said, “I found out about the instance of abuse from my sister who emailed me, who said, 'WHAT IS HAPPENING OVER THERE?'

“We were watching BBC and any channel we could get, to find some information.

When we did have the reporters people coming through, it was obvious to the patients. We could not tell any of the prisoners or detainees what was happening, but it was pretty obvious that life had pretty quickly changed in our hospital.”

After piecing together snippets of information from whatever television and Internet time thy could afford, Germain and her coworkers reacted to the prisoner abuse with uncertainty and anger. “I haven't known soldiers who would do things like that!” Germain told the audience. “We did a lot of self-evaluation: What are we doing here? If we can change one heart or mind, that'll be our goal.”

Germain wrote one short chapter about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, in the middle of her memoir: “When I came to Abu Ghraib, I realized that the soldiers here seemed of a different breed, a little independent of the whole, because we had to be, for survival...We just hoped the leaders would keep things in control....If I asked about anything outside the hospital or had questions about who else was in the camp and what they did, I got vague answers.”

She wrote of the possibility that the hospital distracted the International Red Cross, and other organizations that visited and checked on it, from torture interrogations not too far away: “I have wondered if the hospital where I served was set up as a response, a way to counterbalance it by providing better care for detainees.” This profound line of reason on page 79 was not revisited anywhere else in the book.

When asked about the conditions that prompted and allowed prisoner abuse, Germain said, “When strong...leadership presence isn't there, that can happen.” She added that a lot of medics were 19 or 20 years old, on their first job, “and a lot of young people need supervision-- people to guide them. And they didn't have that.”

Germain enlisted when she was young, in 1970. She provided care for soldiers in Vietnam, and then in America, in the Individual Ready Reserve during Desert Storm. “Thirty days before my retirement, I was called into active duty,” she said. She was called to Abu Ghraib, outside of Fallujah, Iraq, to serve 540 more days in the army than she meant to.

Germain expressed little regret, however. “I think I'm much more aware of what service and sacrifice [are], than before I went on this mission... The next chapter: we're a very rich country; we need to share more with those who have less.”

After giving many copies of her book personal autographs, Germain expanded on this idea of a new chapter for the soldiers, whom she looks on not as fighters, but as protectors. She “joined to protect and serve.” When asked what the military protects, she said, “What we have.” When asked what “we have,” she took a moment.

“Democracy, safety-- I guess that's subjective now. I can't... sorry, it's not a complete thought.”

Germain didn't understand what was going on at Abu Ghraib until outside sources caught the scent of scandal and told her, just as we often don't understand what's going on in the next block down from us, until an outside perspective is brought to our attention. Like Germain, we can wake up to our surroundings-- but are not likely to understand the deeper themes that cause our present dilemmas, which are outside and above and obscured from the news of what's going on.