E-mail this page Reader Comments (below)

By BILL NEMITZ, Staff Columnist Wednesday, April 11, 2007

TIKRIT, Iraq - This was not what Maj. Cathy McKenney expected. While training for Iraq duty last summer with the Army Reserve's 399th Combat Support Hospital, the registered nurse from Portland envisioned a steady stream of injured soldiers, along with the occasional Iraqi civilian.

But children?

"The first time we transferred him to a wheelchair, he was washboard rigid. All of his muscles just tightened up," McKenney said Monday while 10-year-old Eisa Taha tentatively leaned on his crutches for the first time. "It was fear, really."

Now, ever so slowly, Eisa was taking his first step without a lower right leg. And despite the applause from those watching in the hospital's intermediate care ward, his young face remained dead serious, his eyes fixed on the floor ahead of him.

"We're still working on the smile part," said McKenney, one of about 20 Mainers stationed here with the Massachusetts-based 399th. "But that's OK. He'll come around."

Since they arrived here last September, the doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff of the 399th have treated thousands of patients.

Many arrive via the helicopter pad just outside the door to the hospital's EMT -- emergency medical treatment unit. Often, they're on the edge of death from a sniper's bullet, an improvised explosive device or one of the countless other calamities that occur daily outside the gates of Contingency Operating Base Speicher, where the 399th is based.

Roughly half of the patients are indeed U.S. soldiers. The other half are Iraqis -- local police officers, soldiers in the fledgling Iraq Army, contractors working in the country's reconstruction effort and civilians struggling to survive between Operation Iraqi Freedom and an insurgency that targets all of the above.

Eisa was run over by a truck.

It happened April 2. A convoy of U.S. military and private contractor trucks had stopped briefly in the village of Skoor, just outside COB Speicher. Soldiers, as usual, were tossing candy to a horde of gleeful children.

Then, just as the trucks started rolling again, Eisa dove to pick up one last sweet. A large truck -- an Army investigation has yet to determine whether it was a military or private vehicle -- rolled over his leg.

Eisa's father, Adnan Taha, came running from a nearby barbershop. His mother, Sadia Taha, was home with her three other children. She too heard the screams. Arriving to find her son writhing on the ground while Army medics applied a tourniquet, she passed out on the sidewalk.

"Eisa go there because he love the Army American," said Sadia Taha, who speaks broken English and has rarely left her son's side in the past eight days. "And the street, it is very, very narrow."

Spc. James Elliott, a medic from Bangor, was on duty in the EMT when Eisa and his family arrived. Two things struck Elliott immediately -- how calm Eisa seemed to be as the trauma team quickly prepared him for surgery, and how distraught the boy's father was.

"The dad was pretty tore up," Elliott said. "So I went over and kind of baby-sat him" while the trauma team prepared Eisa for surgery.

It was hardly the first time Elliott, 21, had seen a child come through the door. Two weeks ago, seven victims of a suicide bombing in the northern Iraq city of Tal Afar ended up here. Four were children. "It's really sad to see these kids with lacerations all over their heads, sutures everywhere," Elliott said. "These insurgents have no heart whatsoever. It makes me angry. Really angry."

It's a common theme here. Ask soldiers in the 399th about the hardest part of this deployment and inevitably the subject turns to children.

"There's a huge pucker factor when it comes to kids," said Sgt. Michael MacArthur, an anesthesia technician who has twin 14-year-old daughters back home in Presque Isle, where he is a nurse at Aroostook Medical Center.

"I do not like dealing with the kids."

Why not?

"You can't tell me that a 3-year-old or a 5-year-old is out trying to kill Americans," MacArthur replied. "They're just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Lt. Col. Darryl Burton, commander of the hospital, readily agrees.

"I think the biggest challenge most of us have seen has been the children and the types of injuries they receive," said Burton, a father of three from San Francisco. "They don't prepare you for that."

All this week, Burton has hovered over Eisa and his parents, checking on the boy's progress and doing what he can to point them in the right direction once Eisa is discharged.

There's the Tikrit Teaching Hospital, which is barely up and running. There's the National Iraqi Assistance Center in Baghdad, which might be able to help -- and then again might not.

There even could be a settlement from the U.S. government once the details of the accident are sorted out, but it will be a fraction of what Eisa might expect if he were an American kid injured on a street in the United States.

"They might get, say, $3,000," Burton said. "But it won't be enough."

As Burton spoke, Eisa and his parents sat in a small courtyard under the Tuesday afternoon sun, trying to figure out where to go from here. Like so many Iraqi families these days, it's become the story of their lives.

They came here six months ago from their home in Baghdad, 100 miles to the south. Their old neighborhood was largely Shiite, and the Tahas are Sunnis.

"It became too dangerous," Sadia Taha said, now speaking through an interpreter. "So we came here because Tikrit is Sunni and it would be safer for our children."

But heartbreak has stalked them. Last month, Sadia Taha received word that her sister's husband, who worked for a Baghdad newspaper, had been shot in the back by gunmen on the street outside his office.

He was taken to Jordan for treatment but died March 31 -- two days before the truck ran over Eisa's leg.

"That is why I dress like this," Taha said, sweeping her hand over her all-black attire. "I am in mourning for my brother-in-law."

And now this.

Taha, who worked as a school teacher in Baghdad, has yet to find work here. Neither has her husband. They live in a small house in Skoor with another family -- each has one room.

"The water there is very dirty," said Sadia Taha. "Sometimes there is no water at all."

So what will become of Eisa?

"It's an answer I don't have. I don't think we have a lot of those answers," said nurse McKenney. "We do our best to try to hook them up with whatever we know is out there -- but there isn't a whole lot."

Even the discharge plan leaves much to be desired: An Army ambulance will pick up Eisa and his parents this morning and drive them to the gate of COB Speicher. There, Iraqi police will load them into whatever vehicle they can muster and take them home.

Then in a week or so, Eisa will come back here for a checkup.

"Technically, the rules say we aren't supposed to do that," said Burton. "But I don't care."

Nor do the rules allow for the makeshift wheelchair -- the seat is a molded plastic lawn chair -- that Eisa will take home with him. But again, Burton is putting compassion over compliance.

The biggest thing Eisa has going for him at this point, Burton said, is his mother.

"She's been a very strong advocate for her son," Burton said. "She's demanding information, which she should be doing as a good mother, and she's asking the right questions."

And answering them. Sitting in his wheelchair, his chin resting on an Adidas T-shirt with the slogan "Impossible Is Nothing" on the front, Eisa looked across the courtyard at a bicycle and asked his mother if he'll ever ride a bike again.

"Yes," she replied. "You'll ride wherever you want."

"And will I swim?"

"Yes, Eisa," she said, her eyes pained but her voice steady. "You'll swim like you always did."

Her husband nodded in solemn agreement. It was part promise, part prayer.

Staff Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at: