A Soldier Drawn by Duty and Changed by the Sacrifice

O n the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Patrick Campbell walked over to the Pentagon and asked if he could help search for bodies. Only if you're a medic or a firefighter, he was told. That day, Campbell decided to become a medic.

So you know Campbell has, as he puts it, "a bad habit of running towards problems."

This country has been at war for four years, and during that time, less than 1 percent of Americans have served in the conflict. Maybe 5 percent have family or close friends fighting in Iraq. For the rest of us, the war is something that happens to other people. Patrick Campbell came from the 95 percent.

He grew up in a house in Southern California where a child wasn't even allowed to have a squirt gun. His father called Boy Scout camp "death camp." When Patrick announced he intended to join the Army, his father tried to bribe him not to enlist, offering to cover civilian EMT training and replace what the military would pay toward Patrick's law school tuition.

Despite his background, despite the fact that he had been student body president at the University of California at Berkeley, a campus where he knew of not a single graduate who had joined the military, Campbell enlisted. He had spent too many hard minutes looking at the "Faces of the Fallen" feature in this newspaper, the gallery of photos of men and women who died because they accepted the mantle of duty, and Campbell couldn't figure out why it was okay for him not to be there with them.

The war began a month after Campbell signed up. But because Campbell had finished his first year of law school at Catholic University and because he was the kind of recruit who was officer material, the Army was inclined to put him in a safe, easy place. Supply clerk, desk jockey. Campbell insisted on becoming a medic on the frontlines. He ended up with a Louisiana National Guard infantry unit in which almost everyone else knew one another and almost no one else had been to college. The other guys called him "Tootsie."

Campbell spent a year in Iraq, mostly sewing up Iraqi civilians. Sixteen times, he came closer than he'd care to remember to bullets, bombs or mines. He counted. His life was a bewildering series of abrupt shifts from the weird, dormlike comforts of a U.S. base -- 30-inch TVs, networked Xboxes, a full array of ice cream flavors -- to the guts-in-your-throat fear of patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods where anyone could be the enemy and only the little kids could be trusted. "It was back and forth every day: college, war, college, war."

"At no point did I ever see my enemy," he says. "You're sitting on all this anxiety, and you have nowhere to focus it. . . . My mission over there was for the most part to not die. I was definitely inspired to accomplish that mission, but that mission is not inspiring."

Being at war in Iraq is not like other wars. There are very few moments of victory. There is no place out there on the horizon where the thing will be won. Campbell and his fellow soldiers had to get accustomed instead to orders that said you will patrol all day and you will respond only to a "spectacular event." One day in 2005, hundreds of Iraqis died in a bridge collapse. Campbell says his unit was told not to respond "because we wanted to show the American people that the Iraqi Army could handle it. I believe I could have saved 100 people that day."

He kept a blog. He wrote everything down. And when he came home later that year, his friends loved to hear the story about how he peed on a bomb, realized what he was doing and scampered away with his pants down at his ankles.

But his friends didn't care to hear most of Campbell's stories. "Me and my friend who works on avian bird flu," he says, "we called ourselves the party-killers. We'd talk, and there'd be this uncomfortable silence."

Example: A friend asked Campbell if he would wear one of the "Save Darfur" rubber bracelets she was handing out. "No," Campbell replied, "I had a negative experience with those." She looked at him like he was nuts. And he explained that he had inadvertently left his "Save Darfur" bracelet inside the head of an Iraqi on whom he was operating. The civilian had been shot in the head, and Campbell couldn't save him. Somewhere in the frenzied rush to operate, the bracelet had slipped off. It was "probably the worst experience in my life, when I lost my first patient," Campbell says. "I had to be okay with the fact that this guy died so we could feel more safe about ourselves."