Mission to rebuild Iraq leaves vet in ruins

Mission to rebuild Iraq leaves vet in ruins


The story of Army Lt. Col. Kathryn Champion, 43, who owns a home in Yelm, Thurston County, and still has family there and in the Yakima area, parallels the story of the war.

By JOHN BARRY

St. Petersburg Times
Army veteran Kathy Champion, of Florida, is being treated for multiple sclerosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.



GULFPORT, Fla. — She looks young and petite, waiflike in T-shirt and shorts. The only clue to who she really is — or was — is a slight toughness in her voice, a commanding directness, a clear vibe that this is someone who could, under certain circumstances, pull the trigger.

The girl in the T-shirt was the lieutenant colonel who trucked duffel bags of cash around Baghdad, who fed donkeys to Saddam's lions, who brought home a Bronze Star, who also brought home a strange illness and a parcel of emotional ambiguity.

The story of Army Lt. Col. Kathryn Champion, 43, who owns a home in Yelm, Thurston County, and still has family there and in the Yakima area, parallels the story of the war. She won plenty, lost plenty. She accomplished a lot, accomplished little. She looks good, feels bad. She can't say what her story means. The ending hasn't been written. It's as though she has circled back to the beginning. She's Kathy again, just Kathy, starting over with nothing.

Surreal weirdness of war

Kathy is an honorably discharged veteran under Veterans Affairs (VA) care for multiple sclerosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kathryn was an Army reservist and former science teacher in Thurston and Yakima counties who rose from the ROTC to the command of an all-male "civil affairs" unit in Iraq. Her job was laughably uncivil. It was basically to dodge bombs while dispersing wads of money to pacify and theoretically rehabilitate war-ravaged neighborhoods west of the Tigris River.

That was two years ago. It's hard to see today's Kathy in such a role. She lives in limbo in a friend's Florida home. She has been driven out of teaching by rowdy middle-schoolers. She feels chronically tired. She injects herself with an interferon drug to slow her MS. She's dependent on disability pay. She's navigating, in a haze of sickness, three of the most complex bureaucracies in existence: VA health care, Social Security and VA disability benefits. But about Saddam's lions:

There were 65 of them. They fell under the job she had in Alpha Company 448, Civil Affairs Battalion, a Special Forces group that operated out of Camp Liberty, northeast of the Baghdad airport. She directed 32 men. Their mixed-bag mission was to recruit Iraqis to rebuild medical clinics, repair water plants, reopen schools. Their task also was to pay cash from duffel bags to local contractors, and to baby-sit those lions.

Lt. Col. Champion's unit had inherited the Army's mission to restore the Baghdad Zoo. The zoo, like so much else there, had a cruel and crazy history. It had long been denounced as inhumane and finally was decimated during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad.

Lions escaped into the city and had to be shot or rounded up with armored vehicles. The zoo was looted; hundreds of animals were either turned loose or eaten.

That was the zoo Champion inherited.

Much of it was downright fun. She played with lion cubs. She bargained for two white tigers from Turkey. She strengthened security and helped get rid of the barbed wire. But she also had those 65 lions on her hands.



It involved a feeding ritual that she could not have imagined as her Iraq assignment. It's documented on her home computer: Donkeys led past cages of hungry cats, slaughtered, then served up for lion-sized orgies of leg of donkey.

Everything about her mission, even the rare successes, seemed to have that same touch of surreal weirdness.

During her 15-month tour, she saw four soldiers die. Her convoy fell under fire seven times. After one roadside explosion, the rooftop gunner on her Humvee fell into her arms, his face peppered with shrapnel. She was his impromptu medic.

On another trip, her convoy was rammed by trucks front and back, forcing the Humvees to stop dead. The Humvees rammed back, forcing an opening. She shouted out her mantra: "Shoot and haul ass!" She dealt with Shiites, Sunnis and Wahhabi tribes. She paid them to rebuild infrastructure and buildings. When the work was done, she gathered the contractors in a room, signed receipts and counted out dollars from a duffel bag. She carried as much as $1.2 million.

In particular, she was proud of helping build a rehab clinic for wounded Iraqi soldiers, if only because she had completed something. "It was finished and not blown up."

Young boys greeted her convoy. They took candy treats from her soldiers. But one village meeting was interrupted by explosions just outside. She found two of her parked Humvees blasted into smoking hulks. The young boys she'd just treated had disappeared.

Next visit, the same boys were back, welcoming her Humvees, begging for candy. Friends or foes? Interrogate them? Treat them?

She had no answers.

Enduring the aftermath

Champion did accomplish this: She commanded. For 15 months, she made life-or-death decisions, tended to bleeding comrades, made men listen to her, even Muslim men. She stood her ground under fire. She was awarded a Bronze Star.

She could take that much home. She hoped.

She returned in May 2006. She mustered out of the Army and became schoolteacher Kathy again. By October, she was subbing at a middle school in Florida.

On her first day, she says, a kid cursed at her. She kicked him out of class. The boy walked home. Kathy was told she shouldn't have let him leave campus.

Public school was not foreign territory. She had taught middle-school children from 1989 to 2004 in Washington's Sunnyside School District in Yakima County and the Griffin and Yelm school districts in Thurston County for 20 years in her home state of Washington. While there, she had experienced every conceivable middle-school drama — her car was even torched once.

But Kathy couldn't pull herself together now. She ruminated over those Iraqi boys. Friends or foes? Treat them, or interrogate them?

In December, a child in class pushed her in the chest. She felt that old surge in her gut: Shoot and haul ass.

"I wanted to snap his head off."

Kathy hasn't been in a middle-school classroom since.

She tried taking a biology class at the University of South Florida. She couldn't retain anything she read. She suffered headaches, fatigue, cramps in her limbs, blurred vision. All that led to examinations and diagnoses last November of multiple sclerosis and post-traumatic stress disorder. Those led to a heavy regimen of medications, including the interferon drug Avonex and antidepressants.

Dr. Kimberly Monnell, Kathy's neurologist, says the MS may have been there all along, undiscovered during her years of service. Kathy's initial complaint was chronic pain in her arms and back from dragging a wounded soldier out of a Humvee.

A fellow civil-affairs officer, one who served in Iraq at the same time and now also lives a block away in Gulfport, hardly recognizes her.

"Kathy got that Bronze Star for a lot of reasons," Lt. Col. Ana Christian said. "She was constantly exposed. But she was the one people looked to to get things done. We're all carrying something different degrees of post-traumatic stress, so I'm not surprised she's sick. I'm just surprised at the severity. To see her this way now makes me cry."

Champion revisits Iraq through the photos and videos she stored on her laptop — black truck skeletons, group hugs, guns everywhere, fireballs and those amazing lions, which made it against all odds.

Looking back suggests a way forward. Somehow, those lions survived.

Seattle Times reporter Elizabeth Rhodes contributed to this report.

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