Army officer got leave, but missed the big deal

Anne Marie Sterling was having breakfast Sunday morning at a Seattle hotel. She was getting a waffle when her husband, Rob, told her the news.

"He said they had captured Saddam," said Sterling, 25, a first lieutenant in the Army’s 82nd Airborne medical corps.

"I was absolutely thrilled, but it was weird not to be there," she said.

She wanted to be there, though.

Until a week ago, Sterling was there. On Christmas Eve, after visiting friends at home in Fayetteville, N.C., near Fort Bragg, her short leave will end.

The Cascade High School graduate will head back to Iraq, where she’s a personnel officer at the Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad. Before the war, it was Saddam Hussein’s hospital, used expressly by his family and the Baath Party elite.

Sterling is part of an Army combat support hospital that moved with troops during fighting last spring. The U.S. group has taken over the hospital, which now serves American and coalition forces as well as Iraqis.

All along, she has seen severely wounded patients, Americans and Iraqis.

"We still do," Sterling said. "Last April and May, it was combat related. Then it slowed down and was more accident related. In July and August, the guerrilla tactics picked up.

"They’re really good with those RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). Lately, it’s been improvised bombs. They use explosives, blasting caps and remote detonators, and disguise them. Some are even stuffed in watermelons."

Sterling was there last month when a surface-to-air missile attack on a Chinook helicopter killed 16 U.S. troops, the worst single loss of the war.

"That was a bad day," said Sterling, who isn’t involved in hands-on medical care but does help bring in the casualties. "They woke everybody up that Sunday. Everybody goes to help."

Although Sterling has become hardened to the injuries she sees, most from shrapnel, she is still rattled by the thunder of mortars.

"That’s the most dangerous thing. It’s really loud, the blasts shake the building. That usually happens at night, unless it’s a car bomb," she said, as if a car bomb is the most common thing on earth.

I met Peter Olney, Sterling’s father, in May when I wrote about the Mill Creek family’s pride in having two daughters in the armed forces. While Sterling is in Iraq, 24-year-old Amanda Olney is a second lieutenant with the Army signal corps in South Korea. Amanda can’t be home for the holidays, but is on leave in Hawaii.

Reflecting on the capture of the Iraqi dictator, Sterling said "the effect on the people there is going to be huge."

"There’s been such a threat to Iraqis who work with any of the coalition forces, or even with the Red Cross," she said. "I think that will happen less. It gives a lot more closure than we have in Afghanistan."

Despite the losses, she believes in the U.S. effort and thinks democracy will take hold in Iraq.

"I know they want it. When we leave in five to 10 years there will be advisors and ambassadors. It’s not like the Iraqis are not working for it," said Sterling, whose hospital is near the compound where the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council and Paul Bremer, U.S. administrator of Iraq, are based.

At church Sunday, Sterling said her pastor commented, "I bet you feel like you’re missing something."

That was true enough. But being home has obvious pleasures.

"To experience normal is so good," Sterling said. She was granted the holiday leave through a lottery system.

She is spending every minute she can with her husband of three years, who is not in the military. She loves seeing her father, her mother, Margy Olney, brother Alex, a senior at Cascade High School, and youngest sister Alison, a nursing student at Seattle Pacific University.

The family is going to Leavenworth for a snowy celebration. Sterling has been driving her dad’s snazzy red Chrysler PT Cruiser. When we met Monday, she’d been out for a Thai food lunch.

"And I’ve missed Starbucks," she said.

Sterling entered the military by way of ROTC, which helped finance her education at Seattle Pacific.

With at least two months to go in Iraq, Sterling said, "I got college paid for. They’re getting their money’s worth."

Columnist Julie Muhlstein:

425-339-3460 or

muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.