Emergency! Trying to Save a Life in Baghdad

Mar. 24, 2004 had been an active morning in Baghdad (we had gotten used to having explosions as wake-up calls) and so we thought nothing of a series of shots that broke the chilly morning air just blocks away as we sipped coffee in our little garden at the TIME bureau in the Mansour neighborhood. I had gone up to the roof to make a phone call on my satellite phone when I saw the guards and staff pacing the yard below and looking up at me anxiously. Someone had just called the bureau from a phone that belonged to Omar Jaber, our Iraqi bureau manager, that the phone's owner had been shot and taken to a local hospital. Omar's condition was very bad. He had been shot in the head and was alive but unconscious.

I called my contacts to see if we could get Omar into the Green Zone combat support hospital (CSH). The American facility mainly treated military casualties and was light years ahead of any local facility. For the next couple hours we dealt with a volley of phone calls as we tried to determine whether it would be safe or too late to transport Omar in his critical state. Dr. Jeff Poffenbarger, a neurosurgeon, told me he if I could get Omar to the CSH, he would see him. I was told that Omar would surely die if we didn't attempt it. But I was also told that but he could well die while being transported there because getting an Iraqi civilian into the Green Zone, through layers of American military security, is complicated even under normal conditions. The decision fell on me — should I keep him in the Iraqi hospital or get him to American doctors in the Green Zone. To this day, it is one of the hardest choices I've ever faced.

We were well aware of the chasm between the Green Zone and unofficially named Red Zone (what Green Zone residents called the rest of Iraq, with a complete lack of sarcasm). But it never seemed so wide as that day when Omar was between life and death. I raced to the North Gate and waited for TIME's Iraqi staff to get him to the gate where, with my American passport, I'd facilitate him through the checkpoint. An hour went by before I got a phone call saying the Iraqi hospital wouldn't transport him by ambulance. I told the TIME staffers to offer $100 to an ambulance driver and only after taht did the hospital agree to move Omar.

Meanwhile I told the young soldiers manning the checkpoint that an ambulance would be arriving soon and could they please check it as quickly as possible. They laughed at me. You aren't getting an ambulance in here, they said. I called the CSH. They again told me that they would treat Omar if we got him to their door. In the drama of the morning, I hadn't realized they meant literally their door — not the door to the Green Zone. One of tightest checkpoints in the world and about two miles separated me from that magic door. A wave of fear came over me: I may have just killed Omar. He was on his way and I might have to send him back. Salam, my friend, driver, translator and bodyguard was the only thing keeping me from an all-out breakdown in front of the 18 year-old soldiers as they chewed tobacco and smoked bad Iraqi cigarettes in their thankless job.

Just then a K-9 unit pulled up to the gate and began the long, thorough checkpoint process. Everyone got out of the three-car convoy as per protocol and the soldiers checked the cars. They had undoubtedly been up most of the night and were just now returning home. They stretched and yawned in the mid-day warmth and were a bit surprised when I approached them and asked if they could help me drive an injured man through the checkpoint. Most of them were clearly exhausted and annoyed but one man said yes and told the other cars to just go on ahead. A female medic who had been attached to the convoy also offered to stay and help.

As we waited for the ambulance, I watched the bored soldiers and kind but passive K-9 unit and was struck by our different states of mind. Of course they had had dangerous and traumatic days of their own, but this one was mine. In Iraq, one doesn't have the energy to be empathetic to every drama, every injury, every death. You wouldn't last a week there if you did. War is not about being able to be fearless, it's about a capacity for handling stress. Your body instinctively chooses where to spend its adrenaline. We were all waiting for the same thing but in absolute opposite states of stress.