Nations united

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia
OFFICIALS IN this tsunami-stricken city have settled on a memorial to the catastrophe of Dec. 26, when tidal waves killed more than a third of the city's 400,000 residents and washed away buildings over several square miles. The memorial: an electricity-generating barge that the waves pushed more than 2 miles inland from its original site on the ocean. The diesel-fueled, 10.5-megawatt barge is longer than a football field, almost as wide, and more than three stories high. It crushed everything in its path from the shore, including at least one car still visible under its seaside edge.

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The visitors who come to see the barge and, closer to the water, a mosque that emerged relatively unscathed are among the few people visible amid the destruction. Here and there a lone man can be seen using a sledgehammer to salvage the steel reinforcement bars from broken concrete. The reason for the eerie emptiness is evident -- most of the occupants of the city's houses and shops were killed. The surviving owner of an only-partially destroyed building has painted on the walls: ''This is my house, I am still alive" in a plea to ward off looters.

The quiet makes all the more apocalyptic the surprising vastness of the destruction. No television images could have prepared the beachfront visitors for the sight of devastation reaching to the horizon in every direction but the sea.

When they come ashore, the American civilian and military doctors and nurses working on the Navy hospital ship Mercy (41 of whom are from Massachusetts General Hospital) go mainly to the city's university hospital, not to the scene of devastation. The hospital's patients and many of its staff members were drowned or buried alive in mud when the sea engulfed the hospital's wards, each in its own single-story building in the compound.

International rivalry
Military medical units from Australia, Germany, Singapore, and other nations all got to the scene weeks before the Mercy. The American ship's signal technical contribution was a CAT scanning machine, which, unfortunately, was out of commission at first but eventually did work. The Germans did not hide their belief that the Americans were Johnny-come-latelys on the medical scene.

Still, a 12-year-old boy with pneumonia caused by the tsunami water and mud he inhaled would have died of respiratory arrest if it were not for the care provided on the Mercy. Many of the patients treated by the American and other foreign doctors had conditions unrelated to the tsunami: malaria, cataracts, tumors, moped crash injuries, untreated burn scars from a pressure-cooker explosion two years ago that left a 4-year-old unable to walk.

Australians call their soldiers ''diggers" after the trenches they dug at Gallipoli in World War I. They -- and the doctors and nurses -- earned that fond name once again, shoveling out mud and calling in Indonesian soldiers whenever a body was found. Out of the mud came washing machines, refrigerators, air-conditioning units, and other hospital gear that mechanics, including some from the Mercy, were able to restore to working condition.   Continued...