Fresno Bee (California)
February 14, 2005, Monday FINAL EDITION
Fresnans celebrate son’s safe return from Iraq war
by Diana Marcum THE FRESNO BEE
In Balad, Iraq, on the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s former airport,
Air Force surgeons — including Fresno native Lt. Col. Greg
Abrahamian — made history over the past five months.
The surgeons established the first Air Force casualty-receiving
hospital since the Vietnam War; and during the first rotation, a
highly trained team with a wide range of specialties never lost an
American they operated on — including during the battle of Fallujah,
when Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters delivered patients every five
minutes and mortars hit close enough to shake the buildings.
During that six-day period, Air Force doctors performed 600
operations and handled 99% of the Marine casualties.
Any soldier who came back from Fallujah injured, but alive, probably
passed through the 332 Air Force Theatre Hospital.
“It was historic. The Air Force sent their best, and they sent a lot
of us, and we were able to save lives,” said Abrahamian, 40, in a
phone call from his home in San Antonio.
“We had lower death rates than have been seen in war before.”
He might have saved one more life when last week he made it home
safely from his tour of duty.
For the first time in five months, his 72-year-old father, Albert
Abrahamian, can sleep. Albert still doesn’t drive by a church without
praying, only now he no longer asks, “God, please help Greg get
home.”
Instead, he whispers, “Give the soldiers the strength they need to
come home to their families.”
In the same house near Huntington Boulevard where Greg Abrahamian
grew up, Albert Abrahamian sits at the dining room table and pulls
out pictures from his son’s time in Iraq; Greg’s sisters printed them
off e-mails.
“I’m not that sophisticated, what with computers and e-mails. They
had to bring me Greg’s letters,” he says.
Greg never wrote details about the war. He always said, “I’ll tell
you when I get back.” But Albert knows war. He grew up in Russia
during World War II and lived through the Nazi invasion. He was
drafted into the U.S. Army in the 1950s and served in France and
Turkey as a translator.
“I’ve seen war. I hate this war. I hate all war,” he says. “But when
you are in war, at first, you are scared, and then you get used to
it. When your child is in war, you never stop being scared.”
Albert knew that as a surgeon, Greg was a little more protected than
front-line soldiers. But after a December mess hall bombing in
northern Iraq, Albert grew more nervous, convinced anything could
happen anywhere.
Albert’s wife Alice wouldn’t even tell her friends that Greg was in
Iraq. She’s the superstitious sort; she believed it might jinx him.
Even when Greg was in Germany two weeks ago on his way back to the
states and Albert wanted to celebrate, Alice said, no, not until Greg
was really home.
“The way she thinks, the plane might still crash, see?” Albert says.
In 45 years of marriage, he’s seldom seen her cry.
“Me? I watch a movie, I cry. I watch sports and there’s a beautiful
pass, and I cry. But her, I never see her cry.”
Until they got the call that Greg was home in San Antonio with his
wife and two daughters. Then Alice cried, and Albert brought out a
really good bottle of wine.
Greg, a Roosevelt High School and California State University,
Fresno, graduate, joined the Air Force knowing it would help him pay
for medical school. It did, and later it sent him to Harvard to
specialize in organ transplants. Since 1998, he has been the Air
Force’s only transplant surgeon. Albert says that for an Armenian
immigrant family, a son at Harvard was a very big deal.
“It meant that you can make it in this country if you work.”
Greg Abrahamian expected to serve in combat, but the call came much
later than he had anticipated, with less than a year left in his
13-year military commitment.
“It would have been easier 10 years earlier. Now I had a wife and two
daughters. My new baby, Vienne, was 2 months old when I left.”
In a war relying heavily on National Guard troops, Abrahamian saw
lots of older soldiers with families.
“We were seeing injured that looked as old as my dad — these guys
had ranks of private or corporal and were out on convoys. We were
dealing with heart attacks and kidney stones and chronic pulmonary
disease. It was kind of crazy.”
Then came the battle of Fallujah and the nonstop parade of young.
“Emotions were running strongly during Fallujah. We were seeing
hundreds of 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Marines with mangled arms and
legs. We’d explain that we were going to have to operate to remove a
limb to save their life and then send them home, and they’d say, ‘No,
you can’t send me home. My buddies need me.’ ”
As a transplant surgeon, Abrahamian, deals with the sickest patients.
“Death and dying are not new to me. I see it. But to see war with so
many young and strong dying is different.”
He would see his patients only quickly before operating, and briefly
in recovery before they were on planes to Germany.
“It was such a brief period of time. I don’t know those kids’ names.
They’re faces are getting fuzzy, I can’t remember their tattoos,
their dogtags,” he says.
But he’s going to tell his dad what he remembers.
His parents are going to San Antonio next week to celebrate
granddaughter Natalia’s fifth birthday. Sometime during the visit,
Abrahamian will tell his dad what he saw and ask his dad to tell him
his war tales.
“He has a lot of stories. I’m going to have him retell them so I
don’t forget.”
Abrahamian says he feels good about what he did while he was in Iraq.
But it’s only now that he’s home that he understands how much his
father worried.
“I’m only just beginning to appreciate how hard it was on him. How
hard it is for all the families.”
The reporter can be reached at [email protected] or (559)
441-6375.