John Burson is serving a second tour of duty in Iraq at a combat support hospital.

I have been here a month now. As I have said, had I known that I was going to be taking care of detainees, I would likely not be here. But that is the luck of the draw and I plan to make the most of it.

The military people I work with are very professional and the detainees, for the most part, are probably people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I would say the average detainee is in his mid-20s, illiterate or very poorly educated and is probably going to be incarcerated for about a year.

The great majority, probably 90 percent, are Sunnis and from Sunni areas. The rest are Shiites with a few Iranians thrown in. One can usually tell the Iranians because they do not speak Arabic, but Farsi. Most of our interpreters cannot speak Farsi so communication is a problem with them. We usually bring along a Farsi interpreter when we can find one.

There is a very distinct subgroup of older men, 40- to 60-year-olds who are probably the village leaders; they are generally in poor health with a lot of diabetics and hypertensives among them. There are also a fair number of recaptures brought in and many of them have wounds from previous encounters or are people with major health problems. The word gets around that very good health care is provided to detainees so there is a strong motivation for people with health issues to get captured. As far as I can tell, health care is virtually nonexistent in most areas except the major cities and what they get there is usually poor.

We get an occasional MD as a detainee. I was screening a young guy the other day, looked to be about 35, who was well-mannered. Our interpreter asked him if he was on any meds. He said, in perfect English, that he had trigeminal neuralgia and took Tegretol for it, 100 milligrams per day. He then spoke to me in English and gave me all the details of his problem. Allegedly, the detainee MDs do not give out the info to their fellow detainees that they are doctors. It is very unusual to find an educated or higher-income person among the detainees we routinely see; most of them have fled to Jordan or Syria. Compound 5 has our "high-value detainees." For the most part, these are better educated and many speak English.

There is a definite command structure among the detainees, in much the same way any POW group organizes itself. Apparently, the sheiks and the Imams are the usual authority figures. The guards are now segregating the juveniles from the rest and special schools are being set up where these kids are taught to read and write and are given instruction in the Quran.

Many of the older detainees shout across to the juvenile camps not to pay any attention to the infidel propaganda. Maybe 10 percent of the detainees are juveniles, usually 13 to 17 years old. Most of the juveniles have been caught setting off IEDs and reporting on troop activities.

An 8-year-old recently was brought in missing his right forearm. He was dropping mortar rounds down the tube of his dad's mortar and didn't get his arm out of the way in time. He asked if his father was dead and when told that he was, he stoically said he was now in charge.

As far as I can tell, the prime motivation for the detainees is money, not Jihad. Certainly, there are some hard-liners but most of these people are unemployed and will do most anything for money. The insurgents pay well and seem to have a very large labor pool to draw from. I detect very little overt hostility from these detainees. Most have visitation rights and their families visit from time to time. They are fed the same food the rest of us eat and get plenty of rest.

Morale

On my previous tour, I did an exit interview with everyone returning home and I always asked about their tour and their general thoughts about their service. The great majority was very proud to have served and felt really good about themselves and were proud to represent their country. I was very impressed with the quality of the average GI and his/her motivation. Most said they would gladly return, if needed.

This tour is different. I do not do the post-assessment any longer so I do not have the statistical base I did before and my opinions are much more subjective. In my opinion, there has been a definite deterioration in morale, although it still remains very high. There is real frustration in being taken away from job and school multiple times. Most of these GIs that I come in contact with are in the National Guard or Army Reserve and have regular jobs or they are in school. Many are here on their fourth or fifth tour and are fatigued by it all.

There is a certain esprit associated with service in a combat zone and adrenaline levels are chronically higher. But one can only maintain this for a limited time.

Even with some deterioration of morale, there still remains a sense of purpose in these young men and women that is difficult to appreciate without living among them. I am blessed to be having this opportunity. Being quite obviously the oldest guy around seems to motivate a lot of them to come up and chat with me; they are equally amazed that anyone of my age group who would be doing this was of sound mind. They could be right.

Random Thoughts

We had a barbecue today and I spent a lot of time chatting with the troops. They are a fun group to be around. I was kidding them about how bad their graffiti was. As you can imagine, every Porta-potty here, and there are hundreds of them, is decorated with walls full of graffiti. It is really bad — all about Chuck Norris, Harry Potter, Spiderman and a few other characters I have never heard of. A lot of it is not even obscene. Why write graffiti if it is not obscene?

I asked them if they had ever heard of Kilroy. Only one had ever heard of the infamous Kilroy of WWII fame. I told them a few Kilroy sayings and I think they were impressed. Hopefully, a better class of graffiti may emerge.

They were really impressed that I knew so much graffiti. I told them that I learned most of mine from the men's room at the old courthouse in Carrollton. When I was growing up, my grandfather was the tax commissioner and I went to the courthouse a lot to see him and beg Cokes from him. One day, I visited the men's room downstairs and was mesmerized with all the great poetry on the walls. Thereafter, I was a regular visitor to see the latest and the best. I still recall a lot of it but only told them the really tame stuff.

The Surge

Probably the question I am most asked is whether, in my opinion, the surge is working. I can tell you for sure that the number of captures has increased dramatically over the past several weeks. We are now processing about 150 per day, compared to maybe 100 before. The makeup of the captures is now mostly younger guys — 16 to 30, with fewer older ones than before. We are also seeing a lot of recaptures of younger guys — many of them with previous wounds.

I think the really big question is whether the Iraqis can ever come together and make the compromises needed to establish a functional government. Historically, Iraq is a hodgepodge of tribes cobbled together by the British after WWI. These are tribal people and they seem to have no allegiance to any central government. I don't think there is such a thing as nationalism among the Iraqis.

The most secular of the group are the Kurds in the north and they have caused the least problems. The Sunnis are the major troublemakers and they are strongly backed by other Sunni nations. Among the Iraqis, historically, the Sunni are the lions and the Shiites are the lambs. The Shiites are the majority and are getting a lot of help from Iran with advanced high-tech weapons and a few elite Guard types who infiltrate among them. Al-Sadr has created a militia of Shiites and they are causing a lot of problems with death squads and the like. We have a few Iranian captures from the Shiite areas and they are easy to spot since their language, Farsi, is so different from Arabic.

Part of the Petraeus strategy has been to appeal more to the tribal nature of the people, especially it seems to the Sunnis, and it seems to have yielded some success — the big question is whether it will last.

Where did we go wrong in this Iraqi business? It seems that the first Gulf War plays a much bigger role in the current Iraq situation than I was aware. The result has been a well-founded and deep mistrust of U.S. motives by the Iraqis.

In retrospect, I think our biggest failing in Iraq was in giving them independence before they were ready for it. I was here before when the voting took place and the purple finger held aloft was to be the symbol of an emerging democracy. It has not happened and is doubtful to happen under the present circumstances, surge or no surge. This all seems almost surreal, that we would give independence to a bunch of people with no sense of country and a deeply ingrained history of graft and corruption.

We had a perfect model available and did not use it. With Japan and Germany in WWII, we put in strong military leaders, four stars with a profound knowledge of the people and their culture, to head a provisional government, and it worked very well. Where are our MacArthurs and Clays today? With time, we could have developed some strong and charismatic Iraqi leaders and turned the country over to them when they were ready for it. In WWII, instead of releasing all the Nazis, we had representatives interview them, and those that were not guilty of war crimes were put to productive use — not turned loose to form bands of insurgents.

A Different Perspective

From a medical standpoint, certainly my first deploy was about as good as it gets. A lot of routine stuff was seen by day at the embassy clinic and heavy trauma at night at the 10th Combat Support Hospital. It was a lot like residency training, when you come home so tired you can't get to sleep for a few hours.

This one, taking care of detainees, is certainly not the medical challenge of the first tour. However, it has given me something that was totally missing on my first deployment and that is a little insight into the Iraqi people. It is difficult to take care of these detainees without developing some sympathy for the Iraqi people and what they have endured for so very long.

We are operating for a month on the Ramadan schedule, in deference to the Muslim tradition of fasting from dawn to dusk. So we go to work at 8 p.m. and get off at 4 a.m. As a part of this, we are releasing a lot of detainees who have been found not culpable for major crimes. At the same time, we are seeing more than 100 new captures every night. The mix of detainees has changed recently and we are seeing many more juveniles than before. I am not sure what this means, if anything. A lot of them are just kids, and I mean kids. They have a deer-in-the-headlights look about them and are clearly very frightened. There are a lot of father-son detainees and they are separated, with the juveniles going to training areas where they are "re-educated" and, hopefully, are less prone to violence. The fathers are sent on to the regular compounds.

I had not fully appreciated what a violent society these people live in until I reviewed their medical records. At least half of those I see have previous gunshot wounds — not necessarily related to this war. Violence is endemic in their society. As an example, when I was at the embassy, the Iraq national soccer team won a big international match. The night sky was literally ablaze for about four hours with tracers, flares and every kind of weapon being fired in the air in what they call celebratory fire. I was living in a trailer at the embassy at that time and heard many spent rounds falling onto our reinforced roof. My interpreter, who was a medical student in Baghdad, told me there were 25 known Iraqis dead from that one incident. A bullet falling from the air can still be very deadly.

Who Are These Insurgents?

There seems to be no one rallying the ragtag band of insurgents — they just seem to come out of the night, do their bad deeds and disappear. Most believe that there is a fairly well-developed command structure consisting mostly of military leaders from Saddam's army with a sprinkling of foreign fighters and confirmed al-Qaida type jihadists. The Internet apparently functions as a very effective and secretive means of communications for them.

Where do they get their weapons? Most of the weaponry apparently comes from weapons caches that were made all over Iraq by Saddam — apparently in anticipation of and preparation for this type of warfare. In fact, we uncovered hundreds of huge weapons caches in our march to Baghdad but did not destroy them — primarily because we were afraid there might be WMDs among them, such as chemical or biological weapons. We are beginning to see an emergence of high-tech shaped charges from Iran. This has largely been a very low-tech but highly effective insurgency.

I have been reading how intolerant the Muslim religion is, not being based on a philosophy of love and forgiveness that we in the West are accustomed to. I have learned a little more about Muslim society. I believe that these people, in many ways, are not a lot different from us. Certainly, there are hard-liners among them but very few of them seem to be overly religious and most are pretty secular in their approach to life. In a typical compound of maybe 50 detainees, they are free to pray five times a day, as is the Muslim custom.

The one unique aspect that I have noted among the Iraqis is a highly developed sense of dignity about things that would seem of less importance in our society. For example, our psych people see a lot of detainees with psychological problems relating to things such as a sister being slandered or other family-related issues. We in the West would probably be upset as well by things of this nature but not to the extent that seems to be prevalent in this society.