Amid war, a story of heart

HADITHA, Iraq – At his home just off Sheik Said Road, Ala Thabit Fattah awaits word from the U.S. about whether doctors can save his 2-year-old daughter, Amenah.

Iraqi doctors had known since she was only a few weeks old that Amenah had an oxygen-deficiency problem in her heart that would probably prove fatal before she was school-age.

But her doctor told Fattah the only doctors he knew who could perform the surgery to save Amenah had fled Iraq.

Fattah and his wife were resigned that the youngest of their four children would not be with them long. The slightest exertion tired her out, her lips and fingers turning bright blue.

“The doctor said even his own sister’s child has the same problem and there is nothing that can be done,” Fattah, 37, who works at the local water department, said this week.

Then Marines from the 3rd battalion, 23rd regiment, a reservist unit attached to the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based Regimental Combat Team 5, stopped on a routine patrol.

The squad leader, Sgt. Bryan Velazques, thought Amenah had been eating blue candy. He was shocked to learn she always turned blue.

“I thought she was the cutest little girl I’d ever seen and that she deserved a chance to live,” he said.

The battalion surgeon, Navy Capt. John Nadeau, a professor at Vanderbilt University, diagnosed a not-uncommon heart defect. “She would have been dead within a year,” he said.

That set off a chain of events that led the Marines to arrange a trip last week by Amenah and her mother to Nashville, Tenn., for surgery at Vanderbilt’s Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital.

Pediatric specialists, who are donating their services, determined Amenah’s condition was considerably more serious. Her heart is backward in her chest, constricting her breathing. She also has a serious infection.

Surgery could be performed within days and recuperation could last several weeks, with Amenah’s mother, Maha Muhamed Bandar, staying with a local family. The Iraqi ambassador to the United States visited the hospital last weekend.

The trip was fraught with bureaucratic, familial and geopolitical problems. U.S. consular officials were reluctant to approve the visit, because the father’s three brothers are in jail on what are called anti-coalition charges. And while the family was driving home from Baghdad after finally obtaining passports, its car was mistakenly peppered by gunfire from the Iraqi army at a checkpoint. No one was hurt, but it was terrifying.

Once home, relatives protested that Amenah’s mother would be traveling without a male relative.

It prompted a dressing-down from Sheik Abdul Hadi Said. “I told them they were ignorant people holding on to the past,” said the sheik, who is a schoolmaster.

In the United States, Kelly Jarrard, wife of the Lima Company commander, Maj. Kevin Jarrard, led a drive in Gainesville, Ga., to raise $30,000 to defray expenses.

The Marines say the military’s official role is limited and ad hoc.

As Amenah undergoes tests in preparation for surgery, her father waits and prays. “It all depends now on the doctors,” he said. “Inshallah” – Arabic for “God willing.”