In A Hole

By Jason Green

By the time SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden exactly 543.2 miles to the southeast of our base in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, none of us really gave a shit. It was May of 2011 and we were ten months into our one year deployment as part of the “President's Surge” to finish rooting out the last of the Taliban. Most of us didn't give a shit about that either. I was leading the charge in not giving a shit as I physically was not shitting. It had been so long since I had even needed to walk the 50 yards from my sleep tent to the latrine trailers that I asked my platoon sergeant to go ahead and take all seven of my ammunition magazines from me. I could keep my weapon. I just didn't need the bullets for right now. I was in a lot of pain, virtually bed-ridden, constipated, and depression had fully set in. I didn't trust myself.

A few weeks before they “got” bin Laden, I joined the list of soldiers in my platoon who had their organs give out on them. Mine was different, in a way, because it was an appendix. We only had a few of those. Some were gall bladders. Some were other things that Army guys make up because they're too stupid to remember the real thing so they just say shit like “Gorham had to be flown to Germany because he had a dick infection.” I didn't get to fly to Germany. Nor did I get to post pictures on Facebook of me smiling with Angelina Jolie from a hospital bed in Ramstein because I had my appendix removed. I wish Gorham really had gotten a dick infection.

I had my appendix removed at a small, German military “hospital” at Camp Marmal on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. Our base was in the shadow of the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains. The Americans were newer to the base, so we lived and worked in tents. Our NATO allies had mostly hardstand or metal buildings. It would be nice to say that the barn-sized, metallic Krankenhaus was the lone clean spot on the four-year-old base somehow covered in centuries of sand and detritus. It was not.

I was rushed into surgery in a lot of pain and really didn't have time to worry about whether the “operating room” was cloaked in a layer of the same flour-like sand that our entire lives had been for almost a year. I woke up in a recovery room with eight or nine other people and several very large staples in the lower, right side of my stomach. After several days I was able to head back to the U.S. side of camp. I would stay in my tent and walk gingerly across 200 yards of desert to get to our medic tent to check my staples each day for two weeks.

With little in the way of “action,” I had worked hard in the gym over the course of the deployment. The American surgeon who assisted in my surgery even commented that my abs were some of the “toughest they'd had to work through” all year. The compliment meant little as I laid in my bunk and watched my stomach grow more and more distended and yellow. It got to the point that even putting a shirt on felt like it could be the last straw that finally made my bloated belly burst. Every day I pointed out that the staples seemed to be oozing. Every day the medics told me it was “normal.”

Fourteen days later I headed back to the “hospital” to have my staples removed by the German doctor who had done the surgery.

“Why are 'zay so red?”

“I was kind of hoping you could tell me that, Doc.” I said with a chuckle. “The medics have told me they were fine for weeks.”

“'Zay are not fine.”

“Well, that's good to hear,” I replied as I lay flat on the same table where the surgery took place, staring up at the bright light telescoping toward my stomach, my sarcasm clearly missing the mark mit der Chirurgin.

“Here we go 'zen,” the doctor said and I felt a small tug at my stomach.

There was no pain. None at all. Just a tug. I lay there on my back with my Army PT uniform shirt pulled up to my chest and felt like an alien just burst from my stomach. No, I think a more exact description would be, I felt like I peed from my stomach, all over myself, and then sat there and listened as the residual pee dripped on the floor from the gurney I was on and the German doctor just stared blankly at the hole in my stomach. Yeah. That pretty much describes it. The room suddenly smelled like rusted metal and the German doctor, who spent most days treating Afghan civilians who had lost limbs to land mines, had a look of panic in her eyes that left me a little shaken up.

I was told the doctor had nicked something inside of me during surgery and the whole time I thought the staples had been leaking, they were. The relief I felt after all of the blood that had filled my stomach cavity for weeks was dispensed all over the room is almost indescribable. It's probably akin to how it would have felt had they killed bin Laden exactly 543.2 miles away from you while you were in Afghanistan in maybe like 2003, and if his death somehow meant that you and your fellow soldiers would be going home ahead of schedule to be with your family and friends again. Alas, they didn't “get him” then and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Nobody was going home.

After calling my unit to get somebody to bring me some more clothes, and going to change herself, the doctor came back and informed me that what I had was called a hematoma. It was something that could have probably been avoided if I had my surgery in Germany with Angelina Jolie in attendance. However, having to do my surgery in the “old way,” sans Jolie (and not using laparoscopy) meant that I would have to have a “wet to dry” dressing in my stomach for several weeks. This consisted of inserting as much wet gauze as the four inch hole in my lower abdomen could hold and then letting it dry until time to be changed again. This would be done daily at the medic tent where I was told that my staples were fine for the last two weeks.

Back at my unit's aid station, I felt like the bearded lady in an old-time carnival side show.

“Holy shit! Doc, come look at this!”

“That's exactly what you want to hear,” I said in response to my Specialist Roberts shouting out across the medical tent the next day after I woke up and drug myself over to the tent with the big red cross on it.

“Dude, I've never seen this far into a living person,” he said as he turned back to see CPT Handler walking through the curtain that separated my gaping wound from three soldiers coughing in the “waiting room” of the tent.

“The German doctor called me,” said the young doctor with way too big of a smile. “We're gonna be doing a wet to dry on this for a few weeks.”

“Sucks for you,” said Roberts as he patted me on the chest.

“Nah,” said 'Doc' Handler. “I'm giving him morphine.”

After giving the pill time to work, the dynamic duo came back in and went to work stuffing my hole. Yes, I said “stuffing my hole.” It's the Army. Trust me. In a tent with eleven other guys and me being bed-ridden for more than a month, I heard every joke in the book about “stuffing my hole.” I almost started charging money to see it. I took daily antibiotics and managed to not get an infection. I have a feeling I'm still carrying around about three pounds of Afghan sand inside me, though. Antibiotics can't stop your stomach hole from catching all that shit in the air.

As luck would have it, it turns out that you can't fly with a big, oozing wound in your stomach. So I was stuck there until it was healed enough to fly. Incidentally, that ended up being close enough to June when our year was up that I just got to go ahead and stay the whole fucking time! Yay! Did Angelina Jolie come visit? Nope! But, we did get Ralphie from A Christmas Story and some dude who was a runner-up from a singing reality show we had never heard of. The guy walked around the American side of the base and acted like everybody should know him, totally forgetting the fact that we had been there for almost a year with no television and if we had television we wouldn't have been watching whatever the fuck it was he was on to begin with.

It turns out that Doc felt so bad for me that he gave me morphine to take when I needed it. It turns out that when you're laying in a tent alone for weeks and weeks and can't walk most days and your squad members forget to bring you meals half the time and you have nightmares about your previous deployment to Iraq every fucking time you take a nap or try to sleep at night – well, then it turns out that you need a lot of morphine. You don't need your bullets. You don't need to shit either because opioids constipate you. They can also send you spiraling into worse depression as all of the symptoms of your as yet undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder begin to manifest. To the point that you really do not give a shit, even eleven years later, that SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden exactly 543.2 miles away from you. Some holes, like the one in my stomach, close up and become scars eventually. Some holes are just going to be holes forever.

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Jason Green is a retired Army veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He holds a B.A. in Multimedia Journalism from UTEP and an M.A. in Professional Creative Writing from the University of Denver. He has been published in Potato Soup Journal and Potato Soup Journal The Best of 2023 Anthology, As You Were: The Military Review, vol. 16, and Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors, vol. 11.