I recently spoke by phone with a military friend who's currently a nursing student at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He talked about how being with the war's wounded every day affects him, both on a human level and as someone who may be deployed to Iraq in the future. Of the scandal which broke last February at the hospital, he assumes the media blew it out of proportion and hasn't seen any negative conditions at the facility. 

What's interesting about his words is how in some cases they could be applied to any civilian hospital worker in the country, and in others we see how his position as a soldier informs his experiences. As he is still on active duty in the Army, he's asked for anonymity. Excerpts:


On working as a stateside medic and nursing student:

Personally I’d say that you get to see another side of the war from being on the health care side. [The wounded soldiers] are treated with a lot of respect. They’re really cared for. On an emotional level sometimes the reality of it catches you. You try to be professional, but you’re still human. And sometimes it dawns on you the situation that person’s in is a very harsh one…There are situations that I’m very happy these people are alive and everything else, but sometimes you wonder if there are fates worse than death. 


On his thoughts during off-duty time:

I think off-duty I think about it more. I think about the possibility–you know, I wear the same uniform as they do. These guys are younger than us. They’re kids. It scares me because I know that I’m still gonna be in the Army until 2010, and I’m pretty sure I’m going back over [to Iraq]. And to be faced with that reality every day looking at the people you’re looking at, and knowing that this is a very indiscriminate war; knowing that you can be walking to the bathroom and just get hit by something in any kind of zone. It's guerrilla warfare. It’s ugly. Your chances are very good that you can be that guy. There’s a lot more people injured than are coming up dead. 


On conversations with patients:

They’re pretty honest about what happened, or what they remember–which they usually don’t. They’re usually like, “yeah, I was driving or doing this and then I woke up and I was in Germany.” They like to talk it out. They love to try to relate to you [as an Army soldier].


On how he comforts a patient's fears:

I think it’d be safe to say it’s kind of like, you know how us infantryman have that black humor. I think humor is one of the things I use. 


On controlling his own fears:

I think the biggest thing that affects me is my fears. I mean, honestly, I get nightmares and stuff. But I think that’s more my anxiety of what my future holds. Sometimes you just need to indulge in the work and do whatever it is to help that person. Sometimes you focus on that person, and that’s how you get by.


On the worst he’s seen in a stateside military hospital:

The burn ward–it was just gruesome, you know. Everything was rearranged and changed. They have pictures [of the soldiers beforehand]–you know, a family puts up pictures. It’s a common practice. You look at someone who’s burnt severely and it’s hard to ever imagine they’re a human. And then right next to that patient–that slab of meat, rearranged face, it’s almost monstrous–right next to that, only to make it more melancholy, is the picture of the young kid with his future ahead of him. Not to sound so cliché. But, you know that person has the future ahead of him. That look that says, ‘look at me I just joined the Army, I’ve got my new uniform, a young girlfriend.’ And they’re not kind of robbed, they’re a hundred percent robbed of that. I think that’s a dark reality right there. 


On the best he’s seen:

The best moment I’ve had was one of my first patients I had. I actually watched him for three weeks.  I took care of him. He was one of my harder cases, and I purposely took him for academic reasons. And I watched him go from being very immobile and sick–just looking like hell to now he’s talking.  That was powerful. You actually watch your accomplishment by giving care, you actually nourish something back to life.

Today's post is the last in a three-part series of interviews with filmmaker Ken Burns.  His 15-hour documentary, "The War," looked at life on the battlefield and homefront during WWII. Excerpts: 

S.H.: What was it like living with the images of war for six years during the making of the film?

BURNS: It was very very tough. I mean we like to say, and it’s a dishonor to anyone within the sound of my voice who’s actually experienced combat, to say we used to have kind of our own minor versions of PTSD because we had to look at horrible footage. We looked at thousands of hours of footage to get our 15 hours of film. We looked at tens of thousands of still photographs, some of the most gruesome carnage.  And while our film is difficult to watch, and shows in an unmitigated, unmediated fashion the horror of war, nonetheless it isn’t the worst we’ve seen.  

We didn’t want to gratuitously shock anybody. There are difficult images, but we left the most difficult images of children, of women, of soldiers deeply maimed, guts spilling out on the battlefield, of the worst kind of depravity that takes place in war, out of our film. But we ourselves had to find out what it was like. And we’d often, many of us, recount the stories of in the editing process, the long solitary editing process, of going home at night and dreaming--finding ourselves not just filmmakers in the editing room trying to solve the problems of the Battle of Peleliu, for example, or the Battle of the Bulge, but finding ourselves in that battle.  [We were] realizing, ‘wait a second, we’re filmmakers without guns--why are we here?’ And waking up in cold sweats with nightmares, coming in hollow-eyed with sleep and finding out the editor, or producer across the table had felt the same thing, or something similar in a different battle.

It was very difficult, but what kept us going, and I don’t mean to play up any real difficulties--we had the luxury of being at home, none of us were called up to do the actual fighting that takes place--is that we were compelled along, carried along, buoyed by the stories that we had collected.  [From] the 40-odd people that we’d gotten to know intimately, people we’d said in our early boiler plate language paid lip service to the notion that these people would be like family members, somebody you might have had Thanksgiving with. By the end I can tell you that they do feel like family members. We lost Earl Burke. We lost Ray Leopold in the last few months.  And we all felt a great deal of sadness as if someone really close to us had died. With Ray Leopold, from Waterbury, I actually broke down and cried, as if it had been my own grandfather.

[Part 1] [Part 2]

Earlier in the week I interviewed Erica, the wife of Jim, a fellow Marine from my old unit. I asked about her experiences being in a relationship with Jim while he was deployed to Iraq in 2003. Today we have my interview with Jim. Among the things he talks about is leaving her a knife to keep at home, family drama, and a surge of anger while eating at a diner.