By Patricia Sullivan/Photos by Simon Griffiths

Improvised explosive devices, a favorite weapon of Iraqi insurgents, have a unique ability to blow off limbs and cut unimaginable holes in human bodies. They inflict terrible burns and draw gallons of blood. Due to medical advances, more war-wounded survive now than at any other time in history. It is up to doctors and nurses to piece people back together as best they can.

You can’t prepare for the horror of the U.S. Army hospital in Baghdad, says Lieutenant Colonel Judith Lee ’86. Lee was chief nurse at the 86th Combat Support Hospital in 2005. There she saw heart-rending injuries and brutal amputations, and when medicine failed, she witnessed the painful deaths of many young soldiers.
Lee recalls one soldier who miraculously survived. “The ER was totally quiet, and that never happens; it’s a noisy place. This boy, this soldier, was sitting up on the table, but he had no face. It had been blown off, and he was holding what was left in his hands,” says Lee.

“That was the one time I went into my commander’s office in tears.” As a leader, Lee needed to keep her composure and remain a source of strength and empathy for the 112 nurses, 100 medics, and others under her command.

“I’m a pretty strong individual,” she says. “My mother died young; I lost my husband; my father died in my arms. But just because I have coping skills doesn’t mean I wasn’t affected. When a soldier didn’t make it, it was really hard for me. I thought about what it was going to be like for the families. I’ve been there.”

Captain Kellie Norris, who served under her in Iraq, says Lee was far from the stereotypical hardened Army nurse. “The way you get through it is that you all have each other, and she was at the forefront with that,” Norris says. “I often saw her pull nurses aside after mass casualties came in to see how the nurses were doing.”

The incredible mettle of Lee and the Army’s medical personnel is captured in the HBO documentary Baghdad ER, filmed during her deployment.

Lee’s days in Baghdad began at 4 a.m. with a half-mile walk, armed and in full-body armor, to work out in the military gym. Next she made her hospital rounds, including all the wards, the lab, the outpatient clinic, and the pharmacy. Lee ensured that her staff was ready to treat high-risk patients, transport critically wounded soldiers, and cope with death. “The number one rule is ‘a soldier never dies alone,’” she says. Under Lee’s leadership, the hospital put a computerized medical record system in place, the first time this had been done amid the chaos of combat. After 14-hour workdays, Lee wore headphones to bed to shut out the din from helicopters.

“I don’t know when she ever didn’t work,” says Captain Rachel Greve, an ICU nurse on the night shift. “She seemed to always be there, holding us up. In 19 years in the military, I’ve never seen anyone excel as both a nurse and a soldier as Lieutenant Lee does.”

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Judith Lacourse Lee, 50, was born and raised in tiny Haydenville, Massachusetts, just over the river from Amherst. She completed high school in three years and started college in Maine, but a craving to travel overwhelmed her desire to stay in school. She worked on a cargo ship out of Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy, traveling up and down the East Coast all the way to the Caribbean. She studied pottery for a time, then hitchhiked in Europe.

“I was kind of a free spirit,” Lee says, “but in my late twenties, I saw I needed to do something with my life.” She remembered the positive experience she had working in the veterans’ hospital in high school and thought, “Let me try nursing.” She completed a two-year community college program and then went on to the School of Nursing at UMass Amherst.

At 29, she graduated and enlisted in the Army. But she still wasn’t foreseeing a future as a lieutenant colonel. “A big part of it was because I wanted to try the Ironman triathlon in Hawaii and the Army could send me there,” she admits.

Lee served in Hawaii and completed the Ironman (2.4-mile swim, 26.2-mile marathon, 112-mile bike race). Soon after, she volunteered to nurse in Honduras. “It was the time of the Sandinistas, and being there was a little like a minimum security prison,” she recalls. In Honduras, she fell in love with Army pilot Rick Lee and married him in 1988.

Three years later, Rick’s helicopter crashed in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm, and he was killed. Because of deployments, the couple had lived together just one year of their marriage.

Instead of making her bitter, losing her husband “solidified my commitment to the Army,” says Lee. The support and understanding from her military family drew her deeper into its fold.

For the next 14 years, Lee plunged into life as an adventure-seeking, hard-working Army nurse: She finished another Ironman; she rappelled out of helicopters in air assault school; she rose to clinical head nurse in Hawaii; she trained in Korea; she earned her master’s degree in nursing and became a nurse practitioner; she worked as a chief nurse at Fort Benning in Georgia; she coordinated medical evacuation missions in Afghanistan. Along the way, she earned awards and decorations, including the ultra-prestigious expert field medical badge.

When the call came to deploy to Iraq, Lee embraced the duty. “In Iraq you get to serve soldiers who really, really need you,” she explains. The hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone has treated thousands of wounded American soldiers as well as Iraqi civilians, security internees, and coalition soldiers. But medical personnel remain blind to those distinctions; “To us, each person is just a patient. No expense is spared,” Lee says.

The most difficult thing about wartime nursing, Lee learned, is its ceaseless emotional toll. She insisted her staff take scheduled leaves during their 11-month deployment. “Day after day, the medical corps has no downtime,” she says. “They are dealing with horrors six or even seven days a week. You never know when the next helicopter is coming in and what it will bring.”

Lee is proud that none of her nurses left the Army because of their experiences in Baghdad; most went on to further health care training. Before leaving Iraq, she sat down with each nurse and asked: “What do you want to do with your life?”

Now she is asking herself that same question. This spring, she’s up for promotion to colonel. In December 2007, she will have completed 20 years of service and be qualified for retirement. A visit to UMass Amherst last fall got her pondering the possibility of a PhD. Currently she’s “back in battle mode” as chief of medical-surgical inpatient services at Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. In her spare time, she makes quilts, cares for her four Jack Russell terriers, and often thinks of the medical personnel in Iraq.

“Soon after I enlisted, I got a laminated card that lists the Army values,” Lee says. “They are loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. I’ve carried this card in my wallet for almost 20 years.” Lee says she would readily return to Iraq. “It was the first time I saw those values in action and lived them every single day.”