By Jonathan Kaplan,
the author of "The Dressing Station" and "Contact Wounds," on his experiences as a volunteer surgeon in Iraq and other wars
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

BLOOD BROTHERS

Among the Soldiers of Ward 57

By Michael Weisskopf

Henry Holt. 301 pp. $25

The war in Iraq has meant new patterns of injury. Better U.S. body armor often keeps soldiers alive despite the massive force of explosions that rip off arms and legs; such victims would have died from multiple organ rupture in earlier conflicts. Meanwhile, the very nature of the war, with its prolonged exposure to relentless tension in a conflict with few clear front lines, is likely to induce post-traumatic stress disorder in many soldiers; a recent review revealed that 9 percent of Vietnam veterans still suffered from PTSD a dozen years after that war ended.

To those who do not know personally the effects of war, this world of suffering is easy to ignore; the maimed -- not the glorious dead who will never age, but the casualties whose bodies and lives have been violently, irreparably disrupted -- often face unreported obscurity. Time magazine correspondent Michael Weisskopf is uniquely placed to change that. He has, tragically, been vouchsafed an intimate experience of war's violence. Embedded with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, out on night patrol in 2003, Weisskopf saw something land in his vehicle; as he tried to throw the object out, it exploded, blowing off his right hand and wounding others nearby. He was resuscitated and evacuated back to the United States, where he endured a period of surgery and rehabilitation, much of it spent in the company of other casualties of the Iraq war in Ward 57, the amputation ward of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Weisskopf has unique, personal insight into the world of the wounded; he knows of what he writes and writes, unerringly, about what he knows.

And therein lies the book's limit. A winner of journalistic awards for his ability to inform, Weisskopf here often prefers trusted imagery to insight. The prologue's opening sets the tone: Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, a simple headstone, a veteran with a hook for a hand planting a small American flag at the grave's foot. This is a book about a war in which such "defenders of American freedom" are its heroes and its only apparent victims. Weisskopf describes his brisk transfer -- via a Baghdad combat support hospital and a medical center in Germany -- to specialist care back in the United States as "the journey of every soldier wounded in Iraq," forgetting that such proficient evacuation and state-of-the-art treatment cannot be relied upon by non-American troops fighting the same insurgency. And for the conflict's uncounted scores of thousands of Iraqi civilian victims, the collapse of social order in their country has meant minimal emergency treatment and scant medical resources, with no option of evacuation.

The book expands on the stories of Weisskopf's comrades on Ward 57 -- men who, like himself, have abruptly crossed a gulf from wholeness to mutilation and are struggling to reconstitute themselves on the other side. The ward is a place of pain, repeated sessions of surgery and grueling rehabilitation programs, where patients struggle to recover a sense of meaning in their lives. A surprising number of those he encounters or hears about have met their fates through mishaps -- helicopter crashes, high-pressure tire bursts, grenade accidents -- that highlight the randomness of war's cruelties. Indeed, all of the war's maimings, even those inflicted by design, seem as contextless as industrial accidents; Weisskopf portrays the U.S. invasion of Iraq as morally neutral and the resulting insurgency as something outside human agency. Early on, observing repairs to the tower of a Sunni shrine that U.S. tanks had "poked a hole in," Weisskopf wonders "if the heart of this ancient capital would mend as easily." No deeper insight is proffered.

Equally brief is Weisskopf's questioning of his own professional judgment -- embedding with the Army for the "dream assignment" of writing Time magazine's "Person of the Year" feature on the American soldier. Acknowledging that the choice had cost his journalistic objectivity as well as his hand, Weisskopf nonetheless finds himself a couple of paragraphs later at a New York banquet accepting the accolades of colleagues for "intrepid reporting": As he observes without irony, "the gold-standard of journalism is truth telling, not bodily sacrifice." Read "Blood Brothers" not for insight, but rather as an expert piece of journalism by a brave man about brave men, for unhappy is the land without heroes.