PEP, April 2007: Surgical Tech at Abu Ghraib

By JANE LaTOUR

As the American people learned of the hideous tortures inflicted on inmates at the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq, Staff Sergeant Tunde Babawale was among the Army teams sent in to clean up — a strange turn of events for a Nigerian-born New York City clerical worker.

Babawale arrived in the United States at 22, eager to pursue his education. To assist with the costs of college, Babawale — who has since earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science — enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. Finding additional educational opportunities and seeking a field where, “I could save lives,” he said, he became an Emergency Medical Technician and then a skilled Operating Room Technologist.

Babawale, his wife, Bimpe and their children, Sam, 7, and Marian, 5, live in Brooklyn. More members of his extended family have joined him in the U.S.. In 1994, he became a U.S. citizen. By day he is a member of Local 1549, a frontline poverty fighter at the F-26 Food Stamp Center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. There he assesses the eligibility of applicants for the federally-funded Food Stamps program. His other job, with the surgical team at Downstate Hospital, keeps his medical skills sharp.

Both worlds came together in 2005 when he shipped out for duty in Iraq. First, he trained for three months at a Forward Operational Base in Wisconsin, designed to prepare the soldiers for what they were about to encounter. On June 29, he traveled to Kuwait. He and his fellow soldiers spent two weeks acclimatizing their bodies to the high temperatures that ranged from 120 to 140 degrees. Then, his unit flew to Baghdad and from there to Abu Gharib.

Helping soldiers and civilians
“We went there to clean up,” he said. At that point, the scandals were fresh on the minds of the public and the military. “We took care of our soldiers, the coalition forces, the detainees, and Iraqi civilians,” said Babawale.

As the Acting 1st Sergeant for his unit, Task Force 344, Combat Support Hospital, 8th Medical Brigade, 77-Reserve Command, he organized the operating room for surgery and readied the instruments required to save lives. Advance notification allowed him to prepare for the incoming wounded. As the Non-Commissioned Officer in charge, he knew the special skills of the personnel and deployed them according to their capabilities before he scrubbed in to assist.

A tall man, with a compact build and a compassionate heart, Babawale described the patients who came under their care—those who survived and those that didn’t. “Losing any human being is painful,” he said. “But losing our soldiers and seeing the kinds of injuries they suffer is horrible.” The unit, made up of 20 people, maintained a close camaraderie: “We stuck together to get through,” he said.

He proudly showed off photos of Najeem, 12. “We actually brought him back to life. We made him our project,” he said. He told other gratifying survival stories, as well as those of burn victims and other horrific injuries. “Sometimes it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop and then, all hell would break loose. We handled up to 30 patients at a time — from a 77-year-old man to a six-month-old baby. We prepared for the worst and hoped for the best.”

Neither the poverty he worked with in Brooklyn nor all that he learned on the job prepared him for his encounter with the extreme poverty he witnessed in Iraq. “I had never seen that level of poverty,” he said. One Iraqi man, who benefited from a trip to the dentist arranged by Babawale, offered him a gift. “The fact that you’re smiling now is gift enough,” he told the man.

Flying home, the troops landed in Bangor, Maine. “I’ll never forget the people of Maine,” he said. “This was a golden place for me. They all came out to the airport to greet us. They gave us phone cards to call our families.” As a souvenir, he bought a bright red toy lobster for his daughter. “I’ll never forget Maine,” said Babawale.

Now back at his city job and welcomed by his co-workers as George Bush escalates the war, he knows that there is a good chance he will be recalled to Iraq. “Right now, our forces are stretched so thin that I believe there is a possibility of that.”

In the wake of the scandal about Walter Reed Hospital and the systemic problems that soldiers encounter at home after their lives have been saved by first-rate care in the field, he reflected on the travesty: “They deserve the best care,” he said.“I know they are going to rectify this.”

“I thought I would never see my family again,” said Babawale. “You come back and then you reflect on life. Right now,I am just enjoying every moment of it.”

Babawale spoke about the costs of war from the perspective of a soldier who witnessed it at its worst: “War is a thing you go prepared for,” he said. “But soldiers like me are the biggest pacifists.”