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Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Fear, future weigh on Baby Noor’s family
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Abu Ghraib, Iraq — Family members of Noor al-Zahra, the baby with a birth defect who underwent lifesaving surgery in Atlanta this week, said Tuesday they were considering moving because of possible retribution by anti-American insurgents.
The family also told soldiers from the Gainesville-based 48th Brigade Combat Team they were worried that they would not be able to provide a lifetime of care for Noor, who doctors expect will be paralyzed from the waist down and will have limited control of her bowels and bladder.
Noor’s grandfather, Khalaf, said the family realized Noor would need specialized care when she returned to Iraq.
But the local hospital in Abu Ghraib is sparsely stocked and has no facilities to treat the kinds of problems Noor might develop.
In the past, soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment’s Charlie Company have helped stock the pharmacy shelves with their own supplies.
Noor’s family may have to take her into Baghdad, where hospitals have better resources.
“She’s likely to need a pediatrician, at least on an annual basis,” said Maj. Susan Robinson, an Army doctor at Camp Liberty who examined Noor before she left for Atlanta.
“Iraq has a lot of good doctors. It’s a matter of getting their facilities together.”
Surgeons at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, which is treating Noor for free, plan to decide today whether to proceed with a second surgery.
They performed a scan Tuesday to check for a buildup of fluid in the baby’s head, common in such cases, but found none, hospital officials said.
Doctors plan to continue monitoring her for evidence of fluid accumulation and will perform surgery today to insert a shunt to drain fluid if they find any buildup. Noor could remain in the hospital for several more days.
In Abu Ghraib, Noor’s mother, Iman, looked at Atlanta Journal-Constitution photographs of her little girl taken Monday after Dr. Roger Hudgins and a colleague removed a growth from her back.
Iman smiled in amazement, showing the photo to several of her sisters-in-law.
“I am very happy that it [the growth] was removed,” Iman said. “I am grateful to the Americans. But I am still very worried for my baby.”
She said she understood that Noor would likely be in a wheelchair and need extra care.
“But at least this is life, not death,” Iman said.
Noor was born in September with a severe form of spina bifida. Her spinal cord had not fully closed during Iman’s pregnancy.
Iman said she wished she could be with Noor but that the family decided it was not proper for a young Iraqi woman to travel so far from home.
“I can take care of Noor. I am her mother,” Iman said. “But about medicine, about money, there is nothing I can do.”
Khalaf said his family was of modest means. He asked Sgt. 1st Class Michael Sonen about setting up a cash flow from donations in the United States to his bank account here.
He said Noor’s father, Haider, who accompanied his daughter to Atlanta, did not graduate from high school and sometimes is unemployed.
Sonen tried to allay Khalaf’s fears by telling him that charitable organizations in Atlanta had collected money for Noor’s care.
But even with financial help, Noor’s life is not likely to be easy in the slums of Abu Ghraib.
“She’ll return to the life she was born into,” Sonen said. “It will be difficult. But I do believe some Americans will maintain contact with the family and try to support her recovery.”
Noor’s family lives in a squalid neighborhood, where clean water and electricity are scarce and violence is common.
The pockmarked road outside Noor’s home was covered in ankle-deep mud and slushy sewage on Tuesday.
The family home is not well-suited for a child in a wheelchair. The bathroom is outdoors, in a courtyard.
Relatives said they were thinking of selling the house.
Noor’s aunt, Hannan, said the family feared that too much publicity surrounding “Baby Noor,” as the soldiers have come to call her, may make them a target for insurgents.
Hannan said the risk was worth it in order to give Noor a chance at a normal life.
“We are grateful and thankful to the Americans but the situation is dangerous in this city,” she said. “It will not be easy for us.”
Robinson said she was concerned that the family might move to a rural area where adequate medical care was lacking.
“That would be a problem,” she said, especially if a shunt is inserted to help drain fluid buildup in the brain. “That would mean a lot more maintenance.”
The family knew when they accepted assistance from the American soldiers that it meant putting the family at risk.
The soldiers who helped rescue Noor also realized their good deed could come at a price.
“Will the insurgency kill her?” Sonen said. “That is my deepest fear. To know that a child was killed just because we gave her help — that’s a heavy burden to carry.”
Staff writer Mark Bixler in Atlanta contributed to this article.
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Soldiers on patrol, on edge
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Khalaf al-Sultan, Iraq - Although he had already spent almost eight months in the combat zone, Spc. Jeffery Campbell knew that on this day, he would be starting over.
After countless patrols into the urban squalor that is Abu Ghraib, soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment’s Charlie Company had been assigned a new area of responsibility.
Campbell and other members of his platoon were about to roar out the gates of Camp Liberty once again in their armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles on patrol. He knew he would face uncertainty, as these 48th Brigade Combat Team soldiers do whenever they go on patrol.
But this would be different. This day, they would be going into an area they had not seen before, and the tension was even more pronounced.
Campbell awoke early, as he does every morning he goes on a mission. After checking his weapon and equipment, he strolled to the chow hall in pre-sunrise darkness to eat a breakfast of Lucky Charms and a cheese omelet before heading to the AT&T trailer.
Without fail, Campbell calls his wife, Elizabeth, before he goes “outside the wire,” a term soldiers use for patrols outside military compounds. He and his wife, a pharmacy technician, talked about her work day, about the life he left behind in Royston in North Georgia’s rural Franklin County.
“I think it’s a lot harder for our families,” he said. “I worry more about stuff at home than I do about what we are doing here.”
Always on alert
Outside the Charlie Company command post, 1st Lt. Jeff Moran, a full-time Guard soldier from Ball Ground who was to lead the patrol, gave instructions to his troops.
Moran’s platoon would begin scouring villages south of Abu Ghraib, an area that the regiment’s Alpha Company once roamed.
“It’s much more wide open,” Moran told the soldiers. “So the chances of a triggerman positioning himself is higher.”
A little after 7 a.m., Moran’s two Bradleys rumbled out of Entry Checkpoint No. 7.
Inside the armored vehicle, Campbell was hardly recognizable under his heavy body armor, arms pads and ballistic goggles. He played with his wedding ring, a band of white gold on his left hand. It’s his good-luck charm. It’s his motivation.
It was going to be a long day — at least 12 hours in an area southwest of Baghdad where other soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard have been hit since they arrived in Iraq last June.
Campbell had intended to go to college. He started classes at North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega. But it wasn’t for him. Then he met Elizabeth — a friend of hers had married a friend of his.
At 23, Campbell has made a life with her in a two-story house he built on 5 acres of land adjoining his parents’ property in Royston, where he was born and raised.
He makes his living working sales and installation at a building supply company. He dreams of owning his own business one day soon.
Open area a challenge
With his M-16 locked and loaded, Campbell and the rest of the patrol stood guard on a bridge overlooking what the U.S. military calls Main Supply Route Tampa, scanning the seemingly serene vista for suspicious activity.
Campbell saw date palm groves, lush green fields of crops, mud and concrete houses, irrigation canals and blue skies stretching to the horizon.
“This is so different for us,” he said. “This is the most trees I’ve seen in a while. In Abu Ghraib, there were a thousand windows. We were always looking up at the rooftops.”
Here, Campbell said, it could be easy to get hit by a sniper. But it could also be easy to get complacent.
A handful of boys made it up to the bridge in search of goodies.
“Any time you see a kid running away, that’s a bad sign,” Campbell said, handing out candy from a small pouch hooked onto his body armor.
From a military family
Campbell knew he wanted to be a soldier since he was a young boy. His grandfather served in World War II, and an uncle went to Vietnam. He joined the Georgia Guard three years ago, knowing that world events mandated an eventual overseas deployment.
“I’d probably already have kids if I hadn’t been deployed,” he said, looking at the dust-covered children in front of him. “I’m glad I didn’t. It’s been hard for some of the guys here who have kids at home.”
Campbell said he always stays focused on his job, no matter the surroundings.
“My biggest fear is that someone might get hurt because of me,” he added.
For these soldiers, the mind never stops churning, the body never totally relaxes.
There are dirt roads out here in this new territory for this Gainesville unit. They resemble the country roads many of the soldiers are used to driving their trucks over at home. But in Iraq, they mean only one thing: bombs buried in the ground, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
Moran decided to take his soldiers to check out what looked like old bunkers built in the days of Saddam Hussein. Campbell followed the rest of the crew, trudging through mounds of soft dirt.
“There could be stuff buried all over here,” he said. “It wouldn’t take but a second to dig a hole in this dirt.”
Sweating out the odds
Campbell is the only man in his platoon who hasn’t been hit with a roadside bomb, one of the biggest killers of American soldiers in Iraq. He constantly thinks about how his luck might run out soon.
“It’s getting close to the end,” he said about the brigade’s timetable to go home this spring. “I think about that a lot more — that my number might be coming up real soon.”
After lunch, Charlie Company picked up an interpreter and Capt. Anthony Fournier, a schoolteacher from Augusta who commands the unit, before heading into a rustic hamlet known as Khalaf al-Sultan.
“We’re new here,” Fournier told a villager. “We’re coming out to meet everyone.”
As the captain made his rounds, listening to gripes about lack of water and electricity, Campbell stood guard, handing out more candy to children who rushed the Bradleys when the ramps opened.
“You always gotta wonder who’s worth helping and who we need to watch out for,” Campbell said.
“You can’t ever tell. One day, they are your best friend. The next day, they’re shooting off IEDs. For every thousand people, you’ll get two bad guys.”
He and the other soldiers walked through the entire village, the smell of cow dung wafting through the air. In the distance, there was the metallic clatter of AK-47 fire.
“You feel a lot like a cop,” Campbell said. “You’re walking a beat no one wants to walk. You gotta find the hot spots in your area. Here, we haven’t done that yet.”
This was a better day than others. No one was hurt.
“On bad days,” he said, “you always question yourselves. But if every day was a good day, this wouldn’t be a war.”
