Commentary
Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down on April 9, 2003. I doubt many civilians old enough to remember it could say where they were when they first saw those images. But for those in the military at the time, even 20 years later, I bet that you do. Before I tell you where I was, I’m going to tell you how I got there.
At the time, I was an Operating Room (OR) nurse in the Air Force (AF) stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base (AFB), Alaska. My previous duty assignment had been a small, outpatient OR at Barksdale AFB, Louisiana (see “‘A Deck of Many Things’: Reflections on Colin Powell and Iraq, 20 Years Later.”) Prior to that, I’d been a civilian OR nurse working at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. And underwriting all of this was the drive to emulate my enigmatic father in a way that was also acceptable to him and my family. Since the 1980s, dad had been a part of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), gone more than he was home, and seemed a part of every contingency and operation from the invasion of Grenada through Desert Storm and into the Global War on Terror….