Fixing Hell (3 page)
Until then, the global war on terrorism was ensuring that, as for most people in the military, there was always something to keep me busy. I always loved it when people asked me about my position on the war. Some assumed that because I was an Army colonel, I would be a gung-ho, conservative Republican, over the top in support of the war, praising President Bush at every opportunity. Others assumed that because I was a psychologist, a medical professional dedicated to caring for people’s mental well-being, I would be a liberal Democrat opposed to the war and the president, only begrudgingly following my orders as an Army officer. Plus, I am a black man and everyone knows that black Republicans are about as rare as white running backs in the National Football League. The truth was I didn’t fit any of those templates and many people who knew me well considered me something of a paradox.
My political orientation is best described as conservative Democrat. I carry a gun at all times, even in civilian clothing with a concealed weapon permit, and I believe very strongly in the right to bear arms. But I also believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe in less government but also that all Americans should have health insurance. Those positions made it hard to align myself simply with one political party or the other, but politics didn’t come into play when my country launched the global war on terrorism. As an Army colonel I followed orders and did as my commander in chief instructed, and I was largely supportive of the growing calls to invade Iraq. In 2002 it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein was a modern-day Hitler, killing hundreds of thousands of his own people and committing unspeakable atrocities on men, women, and children. Humanity, in the form of the United States military, had to stop him, and if the president decided to abandon the sanctions, inspections, and talking, I was glad to be part of the effort to go in and stop this dictator. I just wanted President Bush to do a better job of explaining why we might have to go. The oft-cited explanation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was pure nonsense; a group of angry Girl Scouts could have posed more of a threat to our national security than Iraq did. There was a perfectly valid reason to send in U.S. troops, but I cringed every time I heard my commander in chief tell the world that it was weapons of mass destruction.
By May 2002, the U.S. military and our allies had been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for eight months and we were treating many casualties from that operation at Walter Reed, where I was chair of the Department of Psychology. One day in May there was a knock on my door. It was my deputy department chief, Lieutenant Colonel Denise Dobson. Denise wore two hats as my deputy and also as the director of training for the Department of Psychology. I had enjoyed working with her for nearly three years. It had been a long haul and we had been through a lot, notably the tragedy of 9/11, in which Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and I relocated most of our clinical services to the Pentagon to provide mental health services to those who survived the attack and responded during the rescue efforts. I had worked sixteen hours a day for three months, from September 12, 2001, to December. Managing the Department of Psychology also had put Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and me through the wringer with the usual administrative hassles, a hospital-wide power failure, tremendous staff shortages, facilities in disrepair, and even a mold problem that threatened your health when you were merely sitting at your desk.
Dobson had proven herself a tough officer and a valued colleague, but I was worried about her. In spite of her desire and energy to keep up with me, which sometimes is a tall order, she had had a scare with a life-threatening disease and at times didn’t look well. She responded by always taking on more duties, as if trying to prove to herself that she was not weakening. On top of this, the invasion of Afghanistan had produced a type of patient we had never seen before—the Islamic extremist terrorists. Treating them, even understanding their mental health issues, was proving to be exceptionally challenging. Dobson came to my office with a specific intent and a special purpose on this day. She was winding down in her capacity as the director of training for the clinical psychology training program and we needed to select a new director. Lieutenant Colonel Dobson requested permission to assign these new duties to Major (Dr.) John Leso, a slender, good-looking fellow who was about five feet eleven inches tall and gave the appearance of spending a great deal of his off time in the gym. John was a very capable military officer who had the confidence of everyone in the department, and in particular the young Army captains who were interns in my department.
As much as I respected Major Leso’s performance, I was not convinced that he was the appropriate choice to replace Lieutenant Colonel Dobson, because a few weeks earlier he had requested a Professional Filler System (PROFIS) position, a temporary assignment for a medical professional to a field hospital outside of their primary hospital. A PROFIS assignment provides the physician with unique experience outside the walls of Walter Reed, and in this case Major Leso wanted some time with the 85th Combat Stress Control Company (CSC), located in Fort Hood, Texas. A CSC is made up of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, psychiatric nurses, and enlisted psychiatric technicians. Their mission is to provide mental health services to soldiers in the field—sort of a mental health MASH unit. His request was reasonable, and I was inclined to approve it, but letting him go to the field unit might create a problem if that unit deployed. It would be a real shit mess if I appointed him director of training at Walter Reed, on the assumption that he would be away in Texas for only a couple weeks, and then he ended up on a long deployment with the PROFIS unit. It was more than just a matter of needing someone qualified to fill the position here at the hospital. The American Psychological Association has strict standards for accredited training programs like ours that require we maintain continuity in the director of training position, so appointing him and then having him away on deployment could cascade into other problems for us.
I balked at appointing Major Leso, but he and Dobson convinced me that my worries were unfounded because there were no deployments on the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Dobson was enthusiastic about Major Leso’s qualifications for the position, and I had no argument with her on that point, but she had limited experience in thinking out strategically what was about to happen in the Army world around her. She did not see the buildup in the war that was about to occur and how this would affect not only her life, her world, but Major Leso’s and mine as well. She and Major Leso were both hard-charging, highly motivated officers with the best intentions, but they didn’t have enough years in the Army to fully appreciate how the system can kick you in the butt when you least expect it. I was just like them twenty years earlier.
But really, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson argued, how likely was it that the CSC unit would be deployed in the two weeks that Major Leso was assigned to it? I had to agree that would take some colossal bad luck for him to be there when the unit deployed. So finally I relented, but I restated my concern to them both that the war on terror was cranking up and warned that Major Leso might get deployed. Perhaps, just maybe, my nearly twenty years of experience in both the Army and Navy was off base and I was worrying over nothing.
After we gave Major Leso the good news, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson and I returned from lunch and were soon joined by the major, who was ecstatic about the opportunities he would be afforded and wanted to thank me. He was very excited that he was going to be able to go to Fort Hood for a two-week field training exercise and then be allowed to return to Walter Reed and assume duties as the director of training. I again expressed my concern to him, still worried even after granting permission.
“Sir, don’t worry. It’s not a problem,” the major told me. “I spoke to the commanding officer of the 85th CSC down there in Texas and she assured me that it is not a problem at all. I’ll be gone for two weeks, sir, and then I’ll be back in time to greet the new incoming intern class.”
Even though I had some regrets about letting him go, I needed to express confidence in this young officer, so I said, “John, I know you’ll do a great job in Texas with the 85th. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”
Almost in a sprint, Major Leso left my office and busied himself with getting to Texas. After he left my office, my phone rang. It was Colonel Ed Cooper, the chief psychologist of the Army. Chief psychologists were known for how they could sell snow to Eskimos, and on this occasion, I was the Eskimo. Colonel Cooper was encouraging me to remain at Walter Reed and replace him because he was ready to retire. I was quite flattered, but I had to laugh.
“Ed, there’s no way in hell I’m going to stay at Walter Reed and be psychologist of the Army,” I said. “I’m tired, my wife is tired, and we just want to go home to Hawaii and be with our granddaughter. I’m supposed to head home in about six months.”
Colonel Cooper laughed and said he couldn’t blame me, that he just had to try to make his exit smoother by finding a good replacement. “Hell, I’d get myself reassigned to Hawaii if I could,” he said.
Major Leso soon left for his brief training assignment with the 85th CSC in Texas. He hadn’t even been gone for four days when I received a call from the commanding officer of the 85th informing me that the unit had received its orders to deploy to Cuba. The unit would be providing mental health services to the soldiers and enemy combatants being held at the prison on the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Known as “Gitmo” from its military abbreviation GTMO, this Cuban base was a strategic stronghold in one of the last Communist dictatorships still on earth, and in recent years it had been used to house terrorist prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Located in the southeastern part of Cuba, Gitmo had an interesting history. Beginning in 1903 the U.S. military leased it from the Cuban government. Prior to the global war on terror most Americans had never even heard of it. Those who did know of this faraway place recalled that it was used as the transient facility for the Cuban and Haitian flotillas in the 1980s and 1990s. Until we began bringing in the Afghan terrorists most high-ranking officials wanted the base at Gitmo closed because it had no real purpose. Then we needed a place in a real hurry to put the detainees from the war with Afghanistan. Suddenly Gitmo became the epicenter for the growing debate over the human rights of detainees in the war on terror.
Although apologetic about the bind she was putting me in, the commander of the 85th nonetheless requested that Major Leso be allowed to deploy to Cuba as part of her unit. Not surprisingly, she saw him as an outstanding young officer and thought he would be a significant asset for their unit in Cuba. I hesitated before replying, because I knew the 85th’s reputation included many problems that are common to combat stress control companies. The biggest problem was that CSC units had psychiatrists or psychologists as their commanding officers, and most psychologists, social workers, nurses, and psychiatrists didn’t make good field commanders. They had an unrelenting need to be liked, which often got in the way of a successful military command. Most mental health military officers had no real formal training to be military unit field commanders, and they were usually very bad at this endeavor. So she needed Major Leso not just for his capabilities as a psychologist but also for what he could bring to the unit as a capable military officer. Saying yes would create problems on my end, but there was only one right answer. This unit was going into the field and they needed my officer, so I had to allow Major Leso to deploy. I could hear the relief in the commanding officer’s voice when I said yes.
Major Leso was given some leave from his temporary duties at Fort Hood and he returned to my office at Walter Reed posthaste to pack up his furniture and belongings. He was very apologetic.
“Colonel James, sir, you were correct,” he told me. “It looks like I’m going to deploy and I won’t be able to be the director of training this coming year.”
I told him not to worry. “We’ll figure out a way to get it all done,” I said. “Go on down to Cuba and perform your duties like I know you will, soldier. I’ll see you in about six months or so.”
Major Leso had no idea, nor did I at that time, that his future, my future, and the shape and direction of the profession of psychology would never be the same.
Major Leso assumed, given the typical clinical mission of the 85th, that he would work as a clinical psychologist for the next six months down in Cuba—much longer than he had planned to be with the unit, but not all that long for a deployment. He did not know that by the time he departed for Cuba, hell had already begun to engulf the Joint Task Force in Gitmo, and it was waiting to swallow the life and soul of this young, brilliant Army psychologist. His world would be irrevocably altered.
The problems at Gitmo all related to the unusual command structure. Gitmo had a two-star general and a one-star general who did not see eye to eye. In a typical military command, the senior ranking officer, in this case the two-star general, would be in charge of everything. Not at Gitmo. In the haste to prepare for war after 9/11, the command there was thrown together with the already existing Navy personnel at the base, a blend of some active-duty Army staff, and many Army reservists and National Guard troops. At this very early stage in the war, many of these reservists had never deployed and had little experience. Their inexperience was compounded by the two-star general not being in charge of all the staff at Gitmo. The one-star general felt that he did not work for the two-star general and that the two-star couldn’t tell him what to do. This divisiveness hurt morale and got in the way of the troops accomplishing the mission. It would be like the CEO of any American company not having control over all of his or her employees. In any well-functioning military command, one person and only one person has complete control and veto authority over everything—the commanding general. The lack of a clear chain of command at Gitmo left most soldiers asking, “Who’s in charge here?” This sentiment would not be found on any other active-duty Army post anywhere else in the world. Problems between these two generals flowed downhill to affect the mission and every soldier in the whole task force.