Triage by Scott Anderson (Pan Books)

Kurdistan. Wikipedia describes it as “a roughly defined geo-cultural territory in Western Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, languages, and national identity have historically been based”. It is an area that covers northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria. The Kurds, like the Palistinians, hope one day to establish their own independent country. 

Scott Anderson, a veteran war correspondant who grew up in Asia, mainly in Taiway and South Korea has set his novel Triage in Kurdistan in 1988 during the Anfal campaign, also known as the Kurdish genocide, was carried out by Ba’athist party of Iraq shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. 

Mark Walsh is a photojournalist. He was on assignment in Kurdistan with fellow war photographer and friend Colin. The story opens with Mark lying on his back looking up into the sky. “He didn’t hear the artillery shell, but he believed he saw it”. He shouts for his friend Colin who doesn’t answer. Mark knows he will die if he doesn’t move. 

He does manage to move but slips and falls in a nearby river. The next time he awakens, he finds himself in a makeshift hospital in a cave. As he regains consciousness and looks around, he realizes where he is - the Harir cave, “A forty-bed ward and an operating theater carved out of solid rock, with no ventilation, no running water, no medicine”. 

Mark has been to this cave on many separate occasions and was thinking of creating a photo-essay titled “The Worst Hospital in the World”. And now here is, not as a photojournalist, but as a patient. He has previously met Dr. Talzini, a Peshmurga, who runs the place. 

Mark knows that the Peshmurga are the military force of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He was told by Dr. Talzani that the meaning of Peshmerga is “those who face death”. Mark also knows that Dr. Talzani holds a number of colored tags which makes Dr. Talzani a triage doctor. Triage meaning “deciding the order of treatments or casualties”. 

Fortunately for Mark, he survives and makes the long journey home to his Spanish girlfriend, Elena. Elena is happy that Mark is back but she becomes worried as Mark seems to have come home a changed man. She talks to her mother, who then calls her grandfather who was a renowned psychiatrist in Franco’s Spain. 

Once Elena’s grandfather is in the picture, the story becomes a bit more complicated. Although Elena was close to her grandfather in her childhood, when she learned that he was a supporter of Franciso Franco and his government. He ran a psychiatric institute and many of his patients were war criminals. He was called the “Fascist Father Confessor”. She said, “if you had wiped out a village, if you had tortured people to death, all you had to do was go see Dr. Joaquin Morales at the Morales Institute for Psychological Purification, and he absolved you of all guilt”. 

Or course Elena doesn’t want her grandfather to help Mark and cannot understand why Mark thinks it may be beneficial to him. The book was also adapted into a movie in 2009 starring Colin Farrell. It is about the psychological effects that war has on people, on both participants and victims. It is also about forgiveness and letting go. A very powerful story about the underreported aspects of war. ~Ernie Hoyt