Reviews & Endorsements

‘Good Medicine, Hard Times’ Review:
Binding Up the Wounds of War

In 2004, at the age of 57, former medical officer Edward Horvath rejoined the military as a combat physician and saw three tours of duty.

By Samuel Sweeney – July 17, 2022

Early in 2004, in the wake of 9/11, Edward Horvath, a Vietnam-era Navy medical officer, felt compelled to leave his home and career in Cleveland and rejoin the military. “They need doctors,” he explained to his wife. On April 19, he writes in his memoir “Good Medicine, Hard Times,” he raised his right hand to take the oath of service for a second time, then shipped out to the U.S. Army’s 256th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq. He was 57 years old. He would stay on for two more deployments, through August 2014, leaving only when forced to do so, on his mandatory removal date—namely, his 68th birthday.

The spring of 2008 found Dr. Horvath, now an Army colonel, as chief physician in an emergency medical treatment center near Tikrit. His beds were filled with “wounded of all ages—men, women, and children, mostly Iraqi citizens intermixed with a few soldiers.” It was his duty to care for them all, including a loud-mouthed young terrorist—“AQI, Al Qaeda in Iraq”—being treated for minor wounds before being turned over, as the Iraqis required, to the local police. Dr. Horvath was unnerved by this hateful person, and by the strength of their visceral contempt for each other: “I felt relief when he was gone.”

A few days later, the terrorist returned. He had been kicked in the face by his jailers, and the Army, learning of the beating, went to Tikrit to pick him up. “It struck me as ironic,” Dr. Horvath writes, “that our soldiers had to rescue our enemies from our allies, but this was Iraq and irony was never in short supply.” While attempting to treat the insurgent, his face still under the hood supplied by his tormentors, he found him uncooperative. “He won’t talk,” the EMT interpreter told Dr. Horvath, “until you assure him that he’ll stay here with you Americans and not be sent back to the Iraqi police.”

Dr. Horvath consented, then peeled back the bloodied hood off his patient’s head. Instead of the expected face of “evil incarnate” he found that of “a battered youngster,” a mere teenager. “As I stared at the face of my enemy, he looked back at me with a boyish smile. My God, I thought, I can’t hate you. You’re just a kid, someone’s child. I felt a sudden sense of shame.”

Seeing every wounded patient as “someone’s child” is a recurring theme of Dr. Horvath’s book. His plain-spoken memoir is a testament not only to his compassion and strength of character but to the calling of medicine as a profession. He had gone to Iraq to patch up Americans, only to learn that, in the words of an anonymous epigraph, “those who need your love the most are often the ones who deserve it the least.”

For me, none of the encounters that Dr. Horvath recounts here is as moving as one back home, at the Cleveland airport, in late 2008. Seeing him in combat uniform, a Delta ticket agent mentioned that her son had suffered a ruptured spleen in Iraq. “No one knew the extent of his injuries,” she said, “until an older doctor examined him and sent him for emergency surgery.” After asking her a few questions, Dr. Horvath realized that he was the doctor she was talking about. “For a brief moment, she looked at me in astonishment—then she darted from behind the counter, embraced me like she’d never let go, and began to cry.”

Small world, it seems, but not too small for grace. “At that moment,” writes Dr. Horvath, “all the hardship, privation, separation, danger, and fear I’d experienced became worthwhile. At least on that one fateful day in Iraq, I accomplished what I’d set out to do—caring for the neighbor’s kid.” Nine years later, the man whose life he’d saved phoned him to share the cries and burbles of his newborn son.

Despite these and the many other inspiring stories scattered throughout its pages, “Good Medicine, Hard Times” paints a grimly honest picture of the difficult U.S. mission in Iraq. As a combat physician, Dr. Horvath got a front-row view of the worst of the region’s bad news. In 2011, as he was beginning his final deployment, he became reacquainted with “Dr. Tim,” an Iraqi-American doctor he had worked with years before. Back in the day Dr. Horvath had talked of returning to the country as a tourist, with Dr. Tim as his guide. The war, however, showed no signs of ending, making such a trip a far-fetched dream. “I’m afraid it’s too early for a tour of Iraq,” Dr. Tim remarked. “You’ll have to wait ten more years at least.”

Perhaps it is fitting that just last year, a decade after that conversation in Mosul, Iraq instituted a visa-on-arrival program for more than 30 Western countries, including the U.S. The Iraqi ministry of tourism, focusing on the ancient sites of Ur and Babylon, is eager to push the 2003 invasion, bloody civil war and ISIS insurgency out of the Western world’s memory. A few brave tourists, some of them veterans, are, however, coming to Mosul to see the ruins of what once was one of the great Arab cities, destroyed by American and Iraqi airstrikes when ISIS, in 2014-17, occupied the city.

As a noncombatant physician in his 60s, Dr. Horvath often felt himself to be a fascinated outsider among the throngs of young soldiers dominating his experience of Iraq. Many readers may feel similarly fascinated by the exotic, under-reported world of military medicine that Dr. Horvath so vividly delivers in his memoir. His book is valuable for its on-the-ground details about the Iraq conflict, its granular evocation of day-to-day life during wartime, but even more so for its witness to the selflessness of emergency doctoring. The world would be a better place if we all treated each another with the concern, compassion and caring that Dr. Horvath prescribes. In our present political climate, it’s become too easy to forget to pray for those we disagree with, let alone our persecutors.

Mr. Sweeney is a writer and translator based in the Middle East.

Appeared in the July 18, 2022, print edition as ‘Binding Up the Wounds of War’. https://www.wsj.com/articles/good-medicine-hard-times-review-binding-up-the-wounds-of-war-11658096562