A Warrior's View
Back from Iraq, “Doc” Kraft offers a firsthand report from the war zone.

BY JILL KRAMER

Frederick “Doc” Kraft got his first taste of combat in the jungles of Vietnam. He liked it. He liked it so much he served again in El Salvador, the first Gulf War, Haiti and Iraq.

Adrenaline is Kraft’s drug of choice. Beyond that, he has believed wholeheartedly in every one of the missions he’s joined. Yet this is a guy who grew up in the counterculture community of Bolinas and spent much of the ’70s as a wood sculptor living in Fairfax.

Kraft joined the Army at age 18, right after graduating from Sir Francis Drake High School. Before shipping out to Nam in 1965 he was trained as a paratrooper and a medic. When he got back, he took Special Forces training, then went to medical school in Guadalajara. After that, he dropped out for a while and did the artist thing in Fairfax, supporting himself with odd jobs in construction and auto body work. In 1980 he married a woman with a daughter from a previous marriage.

But the lure of war drew him back in. He joined a mercenary unit that went to El Salvador in support of the Contras in 1983. He spent three weeks there, training helicopter medics and providing clinical care in remote villages. When he came home, he joined the Reserves and went back to medicine. He did his residency at Louisiana State University in psychiatry, a specialty he never pursued professionally.

He’s never had a private practice—he doesn’t like to get tied down to a routine. Since 1985, he’s worked on a contract basis—sort of a freelance doc. For many years, he filled in at emergency rooms all over the country, flying in for a day or two at a time. These days, he’s doing urgent care instead, working mostly in Northern California at clinics in federal buildings, treating government employees. The arrangement allows him to take off periodically, join a war and get his adrenaline fix. He may be the only full colonel who asks to be sent into action. The Army is happy to oblige him. He recently served five months in Iraq traveling in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad.

It’s hard to tell how much of what Kraft says is inflated by macho braggadocio. While he describes himself as a warrior—“chase[ing] bad guys through the brush”—the military press desk says he was in the Medical Civil Affairs Program (MEDCAP), a humanitarian mission. MEDCAPs go into remote villages and operate makeshift clinics for Iraqi civilians, also visiting people in their homes to offer care. These units often do search for insurgents and clear the area of weapons before setting up clinics, and the press desk in Baghdad tells me that Kraft probably did go along on the searches. But Kraft says house-to-house clearing operations were his primary work, and he was only involved with MEDCAP for the last three weeks of his tour. Asked about the discrepancy, Kraft says, “That’s what they have to tell you. That’s the official military policy. Because they can’t have it known that a colonel is out there running around with the troops.”

Kraft’s family moved when he was an infant from Chicago to Bolinas, where his father and uncle worked for the old RCA communications installation. The site has been occupied for many years by Commonweal, the world-famous health and environmental organization. Kraft and his family used to live in the mammoth cement block of a building that now houses Commonweal’s offices. Perched on the edge of a windy bluff overlooking the ocean, the property back then was dotted with hundreds of antennas. The RCA operation was in its last years at the time, and the Krafts had the whole eerie place to themselves. When Kraft was 10, they moved to San Anselmo.

Kraft played guitar in high school, but set it aside for most of his adult life. Then, two years ago, he put together an oldies band. The Doc Kraft band plays dance music at parties, restaurants and bars around Marin, and the group has developed a faithful following among the over-40 crowd.
I don’t know how many personas Kraft has, but I’ve observed three of them. I saw him first as leader of the band, in Western gear and black hat. As Army Reserve colonel, I’ve seen him only in photographs, in uniform, goggles and helmet, toting an M-16 in the dusty outskirts of Baghdad. When he met me at the Pacific Sun office, on his way back from a meeting in San Francisco, he was in natty business attire—well-tailored navy suit, crisp white shirt, gold cufflinks and loafers polished to a high shine. He’s rail-thin at 60. His hair is thinning but still blond. His face is sculpted and square-jawed. His manner is loose and amiable, but below the breezy, good-ol’ boy surface he’s wound tight as a tick.

When did you join the Army?
Right after high school, when I was 18. I knew I wasn’t going to go to college because I didn’t do that well in high school. I was too interested in motorcycles and girls. And I wanted to be a paratrooper, jump out of planes. I wanted to do something exciting. So that’s what I did. Became a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. Very old, famous division. Lot of action games based on it.

Where in Vietnam were you?
All over. We moved all the time. We were attacking the enemy from the ocean to the Cambodian border.

So you were jumping into the jungle?
Most of our attacks were on foot. We’d take a whole battalion and move to a new area where the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese had a stronghold. We’d go and attack them and then go to another area. Every three-five weeks we moved to a new area.

Other vets from that war have told me that often you couldn’t tell who was a friend and who was an enemy, among the locals.
That’s only when you were in the smaller villages and towns, where you were around people. If you were out in the country you treated everybody as suspect. But surprisingly, the Vietnamese didn’t have that terrorist mentality, where they’d come up to you and blow themselves up or stab you in the back. They’d engage you, like any combatant, rather than doing something sneaky. I’m sure I was in the same bar with Viet Cong.

How does that compare with your experience in Iraq?
Those folks are much more terrorist-oriented. They just want to blow you up. They don’t want to make contact with you. It’s much easier for them to just plant a bomb on the side of a road or fill their car with explosives and chase you down. They’ll sacrifice their own lives to get you. They’re very good at that.

Did you witness any of that?
Oh, yeah. I had all that stuff coming at me. I was out with the troops. I wasn’t in the rear area, I was outside the wire all the time.

Are you part cat? How many lives have you got?
I’ve got a lot, I’ll tell you. I’ve been very, very fortunate. I slipped through many harrowing situations. I was in a very highly motivated unit, just like I was in Vietnam. It was a light infantry air assault unit, the 2nd Battalion in the 130th Infantry. That was Abraham Lincoln’s unit—it’s that old. Many of the boys in my unit were athletes and their first sergeants and officers were their coaches in high school. We operated in small anti-terrorist groups, from five to 20 men. And I was a team member. We moved around the countryside in a helicopter and up-armored Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, but most of the time we were dismounted. We’d go into the Sunni and Baathist areas, get out of our vehicles and chase the bad guys through the brush. Many of these areas had never been penetrated before. Because in the thrust of the war, they went straight to Baghdad and bypassed many of these neighborhoods that were loaded with Saddam sympathizers. So when we went in, it was cleanup time. And they were waiting for us. They had bombs planted there for a long time.

So you must have lost some men.
Oh, yeah. Whole vehicles were lost, with five guys. Gone. Wouldn’t find anything. The bombs were so powerful, and of course they’re making them more and more powerful all the time. Smaller roadside bombs you can live from because those up-armored Humvees they’re building now can take a tremendous amount of explosive force. We were fortunate that we had really good Humvees. But when you have a 500-pound bomb, you won’t even find the axle from that vehicle. They’re gone. Usually there’s a trigger-man within 300 meters of you that’s got a remote device—a radio, a cell phone.

Why did you want to go out with the troops?
Because I’d been trained for it. I’d been in Special Forces my entire career. I wasn’t just trained as a doctor, I was trained as a warrior, too. So I only want to be with the warriors, I don’t like being back in the rear area. It’s no fun and there’s problems back there. We have an old saying in Special Forces—”stay away from the flagpole.”

Where all the officers are.
The junior officers go out. But I didn’t see one colonel outside the wire. I saw very few lieutenant colonels. I retired from the military last year and came back a month later because they made me a real good offer—they promoted me from lieutenant colonel to colonel. When you volunteer, you have a little bit more of a bargaining chip. They’re always looking for docs. So I called them up and said, I want to go to a special unit that’s just dealing with the infantry down at the front lines—I don’t want to be back around the flagpole.

Isn’t that the opposite of what most doctors request?
Absolutely, the complete opposite.

They must be saying, “This guy’s out of his mind!”
Yeah! Here’s a crazy guy, send him down to the company level. So I was very happy. I was hanging out with the troops and the corporals and the sergeants and didn’t have to deal with all the drama you find at headquarters. All the political problems. All the people that like making policy, dealing with generals and distinguished visitors and congressmen. A lot of people enjoy that—giving briefings. Power Point Rangers, we call them. I’m not one of them.

Does your wife say you have a death wish?
Probably. [laughs] We have a saying, though, in the Spec Ops community: “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.” But it’s true, you definitely get an adrenaline rush. And it’s addicting, there’s no doubt about it.

Tell me more about that first tour of duty in Vietnam. How did the troops view the war at that time?
Those were the days when the fighters who went to Vietnam were very motivated. There were no drugs. They were good ol’ drinking boys. Those were some tough guys. In those days, there were many people in the military who had a choice between going to jail and going into the military. It was very, very common.

You wouldn’t think the Army would want that element.
Today, they don’t, at all. In fact they’re very strict about who they let in. You can’t get in the Air Force with a bad driving record.

And back then it was the opposite?
Yeah. Many of my comrades were felons. But they were tough guys. There were no wimps in the military in those days.

And there are now?
Well, there are a lot of computer dweebs and people that came in to get college funding. There still are some tough warriors, though. They’re higher tech types. They’ll kill you with a computer. Back then they were bare-handed killers.

I guess the attitude toward the war in ’63 was quite different from what it was in, say, ’69. Among the troops.
Yes. 180 degrees. The draft started kicking in and they started getting these kids on the street that were smoking marijuana. The last thing they wanted to do was be in the military, let alone go to war. And as the war went on, these troops were basically useless. They were in the way. They were a total liability. All they wanted to do was smoke marijuana and go home. Whereas with my group all we wanted to do was go to war. We were running around during training stabbing dummies with bayonets, dying to get over there and stab the Viet Cong. That was the mentality.

What did you do in the time between your first tour in Vietnam and serving in the first Gulf War?
I was out of the military for 20 years and went back in as an officer. I came back as a captain. While I was in the Army I decided I wanted to be a doctor, so when I got out I went back to college and started thinking about medical school. I graduated from Cal State University with a degree in psychology in 1971, then went to medical school at University of Guadalajara.

Nineteen seventy-one was the height of the peace and love era. How did that affect you?
Well, you deal with it. Coming back from Vietnam, that was a difficult adjustment. Of all the wars I’ve been in, that was the most difficult. Because everybody was against the war and everybody was against the troops. People called me a baby-killer and a murderer. A lot of hostility.

Compare that with today.
These days, folks are very supportive of the troops. They may not be supportive of the policies and what the president is doing, but they’re very supportive of the troops.

Do the troops get that distinction when they’re over there? Supporters of the war always say that the war protests harm morale.
If it was as bad as Vietnam, then yeah, it would. But the troops over there now don’t pay much attention to what the antiwar activists are doing. There’s no impact on their morale. And they know that even the people that don’t like the war still worry about the troops and want them to come home.

What did you do after graduating from medical school?
I jumped on a freight train and came back to Marin. I lived in Fairfax and worked as an artist doing wood sculpture. And I was doing well. I sold my work as fast as I could make it. I was also doing construction work, remodeling. I worked on cars. I totally got out of medicine for seven years. I was tired of it. But I didn’t want to be pounding nails when I was 50 or 60 years old. And I got married in 1980. So I figured I’d better go back to medicine.

You were also in El Salvador in 1983. You went from being a sculptor in Fairfax to joining the war?
That’s another whole story. It was a private army run by the editor and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, Bob Brown.

So you were a mercenary! With the Contras!
Yes. We supported the Contras against the Sandanistas, yes. I was upset that the Sandanistas were in Central America.

Why?
Because I’m a nationalist and I didn’t want any Communist influence in Central America. Or anywhere in the world, for that matter, but especially not so close to America. So Bob Brown had a lot of money in those days and he basically built his own army. And he had many, many volunteers—veterans from the U.S. and many other countries. And the government here just kind of looked the other way. We could take our weapons down there with us and come back with weapons and we’d go through Customs. They knew what we were doing. There was a tacit agreement to leave us alone. And we ran into CIA guys down there and active duty U.S. Army guys. But we mainly hung out with the Salvadoran army. They loved us down there. I was only there for a few weeks, training helicopter medics. And we went off into remote villages and treated a lot of local civilians. We brought a lot of medical supplies there. We brought millions of dollars worth of aid to the Salvadoran Republic.

Do you think you’ll be going back to Iraq?
Oh, I know that I’ll be back. Everybody that goes there once goes back. So there’s no doubt about it, I’ll be going back. Probably in nine months to a year. And who knows how many more times. I believe in the global war on terrorism. I believe in the war effort.

Did you get much opportunity to gauge the views of the Iraqi people?
I was talking to them every day. We had some very noble, patriotic interpreters. They ran out there with us, getting shot and killed on a regular basis. And they’re unarmed, they don’t carry any weapons. So we’re talking to the people all the time because we’re looking for informants. We want to know who’s planting a bomb down the street, who’s got bomb-making materials.

And you’re in the Sunni area where the majority of people want to kill you, right?
Yes. But they’re polite to you. And we’re giving them a lot of things—stuffed animals and candy for the kids. So they’ll shake your hand but they’ll blow you up at night. Even the ones we call the “good Iraqis”—they really don’t want this war and they don’t want us there, either. Nobody wants an occupying army. And we respect that. You don’t want to turn an ordinary Iraqi into a terrorist. So you have to be very careful about how you conduct yourself while you’re searching their house and their farmlands.

It’s a horrible position to be in, when nobody wants you there.
Yes. You just have to walk on eggshells. A lot of the younger troops have a lot of hate. They’ve just seen some friends blown up and you have to watch them closely because they’ll shoot dogs and they’ll shoot people that they don’t really know are terrorists. They get trigger-happy. So as an older officer, I have to hold them back. You have to reel them in. But when mortar rounds are coming in, there’s small arms fire going off, things can get out of control and escalate very rapidly. So you have to have your eyes and ears open all the time to avoid an international incident.

So how do you reconcile in your own mind your personal support for the war effort with the knowledge that nobody in Iraq wants you there?
Well, our main job is to go after the terrorists, because they’re killing innocent Iraqis, too.

But if we weren’t there, innocent Iraqis probably wouldn’t be getting killed.
If we weren’t there, there would be a civil war. Iraqis don’t like each other. You’ve got all these different factions fighting amongst each other with no central leadership.

And you believe they’re better off with American troops there?
Oh, no, I think it would be great if we’d pull out of there, which will eventually happen. But in the meantime, it’s the only front where we can engage the enemy because there’s not enough terrorists here for us to engage. They’re not coming to the United States. But they’re coming from all over the world into Iraq. So we can confront them there.

And the local Iraqis are taking the brunt of it.
Unfortunately, yes. There are many, many innocent Iraqis that are getting killed. It’s not a good situation for the U.S. or the Iraqis.

How would you like to see it resolved?
Well I think it’s probably a little too early for us to leave right now. It would be nice if there were some stability in the country. How much there will be in the future no one will be able to predict. I have my own opinion about how the cards are gonna fall, but I’m not at liberty to expose that. But my job when I go over there is to keep as many kids from dying as I can.

Can you describe a typical encounter in a Baath stronghold?
We go in in a variety of ways—sometimes very secretively, at night. We can be in someone’s house before they even wake up. They turn the lights on and we’re standing there, so they don’t have a chance to get away.

Yikes! So a kid wakes up and sees a soldier standing there with a gun!
Yes. It’s dramatic. But at that point we have control. And we know who the terrorists are.

So you’re saying you’re certain a terrorist is in the house before you go in.
Oh, yeah, we have really good informants.

The information you get is from other Iraqi villagers who have informed on a neighbor?
Yes.

How do you know it’s not just a personal grudge?
We have cross-checks. We hear from other people. We don’t just go in and take some innocent person. And we have interrogators.

Is there ever a situation where you feel that you might have made a mistake?
Oh, yeah. But down the road it’s usually taken care of. It’s just like in our justice system here. Say you get caught with some detonators, you get prosecuted for having bomb-making material. You get caught with a couple of automatic weapons in your car—that doesn’t necessarily make you a terrorist. Could be, so you’ll get a certain jail sentence for that. Or they might not even get jail. We might just take excessive weapons away from people. There are so many criminals wandering around there, we always leave them with at least one AK-47 and one magazine. But if you go in and they’ve got cases of AK-47s and lots of artillery shells buried in and around the house—well, that’s a pretty good sign that that guy’s in the pipeline.

And what do you do with that guy?
He goes to Abu Ghraib prison. But surprisingly, a lot of times the Iraqis let them out after six months or a year.

You also hear a lot of scary stories about the corruption of the Iraqi Interior Ministry and their secret prisons, torture and death squads.
I think those stories are bogus. There’s so much visibility. We’re everywhere. There’s no secret places in Iraq anymore. There’s no possible place to hide.

So you don’t believe that the Shiites in power now are taking revenge on the Sunnis they have in jail?
They don’t have a chance to. There’s too much oversight. But when we leave, who knows? Anyway, I was talking about the different ways we approach a house. Sometimes we let them know we’re coming so we can catch whoever’s running out the back. And lots of times we’ll come in very quickly and land in helicopters in their backyard in the middle of the night and be in their house in a second. We can light up the whole countryside with night vision equipment so they can’t get away. They’d rather attack us in the morning when the streets are full of people. But we own the night.

Tell me about your medical practice.
I did emergency room work from 1985 to 1996. I worked all over the United States. I had licenses in seven states. I worked for big contracting firms that had contracts with various hospitals. I worked in a lot of military hospitals. I was living in Mill Valley and sometimes I’d go work a 12-hour shift in Arizona. Fly up to Denver and work there for a couple days. It was good because you didn’t get involved in the politics of staying in one hospital. And they paid very well. And when you’re off, you’re off—it’s not like having your own practice where you’re tied down by your patients. You’re responsible for those patients and when you go on vacation you have to find somebody else to take over for you. It’s better for me to go in, do my job and then leave without having the stress of being a businessman. Most doctors have to be a businessperson first and then a clinician.

What have you been doing since you stopped ER work?
Now I’m doing urgent care, and I work just in California. People come in because they burned themselves, they hurt their back, they’re in pain and they need to be seen right away. And I do a lot of diagnosis. A lot of times people go to a doctor for one thing and something else jumps out at you. Like they dropped an anvil on their toe and you find skin cancer. Or they have bipolar disorder and they’ve been self-medicating.

If you, as a patient, came to yourself as a doctor, what would your diagnosis be?
Good question. Yeah, I’d say, “You’re kind of a crazy guy—you’ve got a mental problem, son.” [laughs]

And what would you say about all your military adventures?
Well, I had it instilled in me at a very young age. Probably inherited it, being German. The Germans are pretty war-like folks. But also being in a very gung-ho unit in Vietnam. You never really get that out of you. You always want to go back and relive your youth.

Does regular life seem boring to you?
Aah—I think so. I enjoy living on the edge. Otherwise it’s just too mundane. I like the peak and nadir experiences. If you’ve had some bad, bad nadir experiences in your life, everything else seems happy most of the time. So something that would upset somebody else, to me is nothing. It’s trivial. You can live pretty comfortably when nothing bothers you. I can live like a rat and enjoy it. I can get by with very little.

You must feel like a political alien living in Marin.
Uh, yeah. At times. I don’t discuss politics very much. But I’m not really as right wing as you think I am. I think very liberally on many aspects. I’m behind the ACLU on a lot of things. Like putting photography equipment on traffic signals so they can record people’s license plates. And I’m a strong believer in a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body. I’m very liberal when it comes to civil liberties.

So do you have concerns about the Bush administration’s unauthorized wiretapping?
Oh, very much so. I’m very concerned about Big Brother. That’s why I fought in all these wars. I don’t want to come home to some Gestapo type of government. I risked my life so I could come back and enjoy living in Marin.

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