Oaths and Orders: Navigating Wartime Medical Neutrality in Deanna Germain’s Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib

Abstract

This paper examines the ethical tension confronting the healthcare workers stationed at Abu Ghraib Prison, where the principles of humanitarian care dissolved under the pressure of state-sanctioned violence, preexisting structural violence and the intense scrutiny of the international public gaze. Focusing on Major Deanna Germain’s memoir, Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib, the study offers a critical account of the challenges of maintaining medical neutrality in the context of a morally degraded prison where complicity and care coexist. Most of the scholarly literature that concerns itself with questions of medical neutrality during wartime has largely documented the ethical transgressions of healthcare providers, with far less scholarship attending to the experience of those who attempted to maintain a commitment to medical ethics under intense pressure. I draw on Virginia Held’s “ethics of care” to argue that Germain’s memoir testifies to a nurse’s effort to fashion an ethical self in a prison context that works to deconstruct such a caring self. The memoir complicates the image of Abu Ghraib as merely a site of institutionalized abuse by offering a counternarrative in which care, agency, and medical ethics persist, however tenuously. Read in this way, the study contributes to a nuanced understanding of medical accountability and the potential for compassionate practice within the frame of institutionalized violence.