She had recently returned from Iraq, where she spent 4½ months as head nurse at the 28th Combat Support Hospital at Camp Dogwood, 10 miles south of Baghdad.
“The hardest thing was to come home before everyone else,” she says.
Kleinschmidt now lives on a farm near Vass. She and her husband both left the armed forces to help care for his parents, who are in poor health. He served three tours in Afghanistan.
Kleinschmidt says she was “amazingly happy” when the soldiers caught up with Saddam, not because of what he symbolizes or because his capture might hurt the resistance, but because she felt the soldiers deserved it for all their hard work.
“I was just proud of everybody over there,” she says, “proud of my medics. … Saddam was just the cherry on top. All the hard work and everything paid off.”
Saddam’s capture may benefit the soldiers in other ways besides morale, she says.
“Hopefully, he will give us some insight, once they break his will,” she said.
Anything that can help change things in that country, where she says all the people and animals have the look of “stray dogs,” would be a good thing.
Kleinschmidt deployed on March 7 of last year, a few days before all-out war broke out in Iraq. She was in Kuwait as the war began and left four or five days later on a convoy headed across the desert toward Baghdad.
As they drove, she surveyed the land.
“It’s the most God-forsaken armpit,” Kleinschmidt says. “I compare it to the face of Mars or the face of the moon.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine why people would become angry and hopeless in such bleak surroundings, she says.
Struggling With Sand
The convoy stopped at Camp Dogwood, and Kleinschmidt helped direct the establishment of the 28th Combat Support Hospital, which was the northernmost military hospital in Iraq during the combat phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Kleinschmidt’s group put together the first combat hospital equipped with protection from chemical warfare. The tents had plastic lining that the doctors and nurses could seal if needed.
The Iraqis never used chemical weapons, but the plastic protection, which Kleinschmidt says was akin to a Ziplock bag, did come in handy when the medical staff took on a different but quite persistent enemy: sand.
“There was no way to keep anything clean,” she says. “I felt like an ant. A (sandstorm) would destroy everything and you would build it back up, then a few hours later it’d get destroyed again.”
The only way for Kleinschmidt to describe the sandstorms was to say that they were like a thick blizzard — one where people could only see inches in front of their faces. On top of that, it’s “a million degrees,” she says.
“The sand would get everywhere,” she says. “You see stuff on TV, but have no idea of the heat and the sand. It’s just peeling away skin.”
She remembers when a sandstorm came upon Camp Dogwood at dusk one evening. The setting sun shining through the cloud of sand turned the sky blood-red.
“Oh, my God,” Kleinschmidt thought. “Is this the end of the world?”
Sometimes doctors and nurses worked for weeks without a shower. Though it was a hard job, Kleinschmidt says that it was amazing to work with them.
“They were the most clinically proficient,” she says.
They treated coalition forces, Iraqi civilians and enemy prisoners of war — mostly for gunshot wounds and burns.
Many of the civilians, both adults and children, came in with burns, and she says she doesn’t know if the injuries came from coalition or enemy ordinance.
“I know we are very surgical in our strikes,” she says, “but no matter how surgical you are, there are going to be injuries.”
‘No Sense of Security’
Most of the patients were Iraqis, civilians and soldiers. Doctors and nurses got attached to some of the patients, especially the children. Dealing with the prisoners was different.
“It was so weird,” she says, “to be in a care-giving role, and save someone from dying, and they still look at you like they would slit your throat in a second.”
The doctors and nurses had to watch everyone. Even the interpreters who were supposedly on the coalition’s side could turn out to be enemy.
“You can’t get a sense of security,” she says. “As soon as you do, something bad happens.”
The support of those at home helped tremendously, she says.
“They treated us like heroes,” she says.
Now Kleinschmidt is no longer with the military, but she still works at Womack Army Medical Center on Fort Bragg as a civilian nurse. She’s proud of the people she worked with when she was in Iraq, and she’s happy with what America has accomplished so far.
“People that say we shouldn’t have gone over there — well, they haven’t been there,” she says.
When she surveys her farm — two dogs running in the yard, horses neighing, ducks cutting ripples into a reflecting pond — she spreads her arms as if to pull it all toward her and says: “This is worth risking your life for.”
