Reaching Past The Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib

8. Prisoner Abuse at Abu Ghraib

Prisoner Abuse at Abu Ghraib News of earlier reported mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib reached us a few days after I arrived. Like most of us, I heard the news from family —my sister sent an e-mail asking what was going on. ≤eports say the mistreatment went on from October 2003 to January 13, 2004. Most of us were new in camp after the first of January. While some had heard rumors, there was no common knowledge by the average soldier of what had happened here. Our reaction to the news was like that of the rest of the world—shock, disbelief, and anger. We could get only one or two English-speaking channels on our television, and they were blasting us. The MPs I worked with every day were as surprised as any of us. It quickly became the main topic of conversation . No one had even heard of Abu Ghraib when we first came here. Now, suddenly, we were in the midst of a definitive moment in this war. Our families were horrified to know that abuse had 67 ★ 8 happened where we were. My husband knew I was at a prison, but I don’t think he thought I was in any more jeopardy than I would have been in any other area of Iraq. Now things seemed di≠erent. More danger was linked to Abu Ghraib. And a stigma was suddenly attached to me, just for being there, that he found himself having to explain away. Even soldiers from home and abroad had a lot of questions for us. “What the hell is going on—it looks bad for all of us,” one soldier friend wrote me. Oh, what a time we faced during those weeks after the news. We couldn’t feel defensive, because there was no defending those abuses. But we felt defensive for our own work. We were battered and bruised by the sensationalism —the accusation by association—the looks, the comments , and the aura of incrimination around us. Our lives as soldiers changed after that. We knew this was a black mark against us as U.S. military personnel. All of us were being judged by the world. The MPs took the brunt of the attention. War is ugly. The MPs had a di∞cult job to do. MPs had to keep order at the tent areas housing thousands of prisoners. They, along with others, were responsible for camp safety and prisoner safety. Protecting us as we gave care to patients, doing the tasks that go with it, and staying with patients as they moved from one location to another—they did it all. They didn’t like taking the patients to the porta potties, but they did it. Processing in new patients was a di∞cult task, too. But they did their job as they were trained. Some of the MPs thought we nurses babied the patients. Some saw us as just being professional, respectful. Some Reaching Past the Wire 68 disliked both their job and the prisoners. Some were detached . But now the big morality question mark had come up. What are we really doing here? How are we doing it? Caring for prisoners is an emotionally charged experience . I saw di∞culties and challenges within our own medical group, who were considered the most inherently empathetic soldiers in the camp. Some of the nurses and medics simply could not handle caring for prisoners. It became a time of self-examination, as we all began watching our unit and ourselves a little more closely. We became more aware of others around us. The camp probably housed two thousand military and civilian personnel, but we worked in little clusters. We were all so busy that we didn’t have the energy to pay attention to anything other than what we were responsible for doing—and we had been encouraged not to ask. But now we began to look around to see who, really, was in this camp. The first soldiers at the hospital were a mix of active duty—the 67th csh from Würzberg, Germany, and the 848th Forward Surgical Team from Ohio. In February 2004, with minimal resources and sta≠, they had started setting up a standard slice of a DepMeds hospital to take care of the prisoner patients and U.S. soldier and Marine patients at Abu...