Lee Warren: Why You’re Not Stuck With the Brain You Have

**Lee C. Camp** (0:02)
This is No Small Endeavor exploring what it means to live a good life.

**W. Lee Warren** (0:09)
I was deployed to the Iraq War in a combat hospital and did 200 brain surgeries in a tent hospital in the middle of the Sunni Triangle during the busy part of the war, so I would get mortared a hundred times while I was there.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:21)
This is Dr. Lee Warren speaking, he's a neurosurgeon talking about his four-month deployment at 332nd Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad Air Base back in 2005

**W. Lee Warren** (0:33)
I saw a lot of things that you don't see in civilian trauma settings and survived a lot of personal attacks and bombs blowing up and things like that. So I came home and as a neurosurgeon, not surprising, probably a little bit of a control freak and in that environment, I didn't have any control over anything.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:51)
When Lee first arrived home, everything seemed relatively fine. There's a subsequent divorce, but he's also productive, working hard, opens his own neurosurgery practice, remarries. But all during this time, he never talks about his experiences in Iraq.

**W. Lee Warren** (1:07)
In fact, literally came home and all my uniforms and mementos and things that I brought home from the war, I put in a trunk in the garage of our house and just stuck it out there, which metaphorically, I think, was what I did with my memories and my stories too.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:21)
Then a few years later, he begins to realize something might be wrong.

**W. Lee Warren** (1:27)
So the first moment, my wife Lisa and I were driving and we stopped at a red light and all of a sudden she was shaking me.
And she said, what are you doing? And I said, what do you mean? She said, a helicopter flew by and you checked out. You've sat here through two cycles of the red light. And I didn't know that. I didn't experience it. And it turned out the day before that happened, we'd been watching television and there was a show on HBO called Generation Kill, which was about Iraq combat. And there was a scene that we watched where a soldier was injured and they put him on a helicopter. And they said, we're taking this guy to Belize, which is where I had been.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:03)
Over the next few months, the PTSD that Lee was experiencing begins to escalate more episodes of dissociation than nightmares and flashbacks. Eventually reaches out to a psychiatrist friend who suggests Lee explore his memories of deployment.

**W. Lee Warren** (2:19)
So that's what we did and took this out in the garage when we unpacked the trunk full of my stuff from the war.
And it turns out that almost everybody that we took care of, I never knew their names because they were there such a short time. If they survived, we put them on a plane and got them back to the states really quickly and didn't know anything about what happened to them or any of that. But I had a thumb drive that was in that trunk that had about 5,000 digital images that I had taken of cases and scans. And of all those images, one folder had a name attached to it. I still don't know why I saved that soldier's name. And we put it in the computer and I was showing Lisa that case was the worst thing I'd ever seen. And she said, well, what happened to that guy? And then I said, well, I assume he probably died. He had such bad injuries. We stabilized him enough to get him on the plane. But she just Googled his name and there he was being interviewed on CBS Evening News five years after I got home from the war and he was well. And I ended up reaching out to him and connecting with him. And we went to Pittsburgh to meet him and his family. And that was a real closure moment for me that showed me that some of the work that we did over there mattered and people made it home because of what we did. And that was really a kind of instrumental part of my healing process.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:28)
Slowly, Lee found a way to live with the trauma of the war and things began to improve.
But then three years later, tragedy struck the family. Lee's 19-year-old son Mitchell was killed.

**W. Lee Warren** (3:42)
The war was all about danger I was in for one thing, but also things that I had my hands on, I could interact with. And there was an understanding of why it was happening. With Mitch, he was okay one day and he was gone the next. He was stabbed to death. And there was no context for that. There was nothing that made us understand it or be able to put my hands on it and operate on it like I could a patient interact. Whatever kind of trauma people go through is their trauma and their experience. But the loss of a child, at least in my experience, in my 56 years, is unparalleled.