Our Best: Babe Edition for today features a doc who has written a book that ought to be required reading. Why feature her? She held Jason Dunham’s hand at the evac hospital.
Navy Times
During the last week of her seven-month deployment to Iraq in the fall of 2004, psychologist Cmdr. Heidi Squier Kraft and a second Navy psychologist passed a group of young Marines headed for breakfast.
“Ooh-rah, ma’am,” they shouted in unison.
“Aren’t you going to miss that?” Kraft asked her colleague. When Kraft got back to her room, she told him she was going to start a list of things she would miss about Iraq — and another list of things she would not.
“He said, ‘That is going to be a lopsided list.’”
But when Kraft, who has since left the Navy and works as a civilian psychologist at Naval Medical Center San Diego, finished the list, it was not as lopsided as her friend thought it would be, and it had grown into a poem of sorts.
Its wide range — from the vivid redness of the Iraqi sunset, to the frustration caused by random power outages at the hospital, to the sight of a Marine colonel sobbing at a hospital because one of his leathernecks was wounded — captured both the horror and the emotional complexities of war from the perspective of someone uniquely equipped to deal with it.
Kraft e-mailed the list to several family members and friends who passed it along to other friends and family, and soon it caught the attention of Otto Lehrak, a retired Marine colonel who had written a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his infantry unit’s actions during the Vietnam War.
When Kraft returned home at the end of her deployment, Lehrak got in touch with her and encouraged her to expand the poem into a book. Kraft, struggling to connect with civilian patients whose concerns seemed trivial in comparison to the combat Marines she had treated, had never considered writing what would be the only account of the Iraq War so far from the perspective of a psychologist.
“I was very ambivalent at first, but 250 pages and one year later, it ended up being very good therapy for me,” she told Marine Corps Times. “I felt like I got back to being myself.”
