Back in September, Anthony Pasqualone was first assistant to surgeons performing traumatic amputations on soldiers at a military hospital in Al Asad, a town in the bloody Al Anbar Province of Iraq.
"We saw the outcome of war. We treated mutilated bodies," Pasqualone says. "We cut off arms, legs, elbows, hands. A lot of this came from IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. Al Asad is the starting and end point of a convoy route that's about 120 miles long. It's a four- or five-day event, because they're shot at a lot and hit with IEDs."
Today, Pasqualone is the grand marshal of the Veterans Day parade in his hometown of Arlington.
Pasqualone, an orthopedic nurse practitioner at MIT Medical in civilian life, has been nursing for 32 years and in and out of harm's way with some frequency. He volunteered for Vietnam and served in the Mekong Delta from 1971 to 1972, working on humanitarian projects with the Navy Seabees.
He joined the Army reserves when he returned and later found himself in Germany during the first Gulf War, backstopping a medical unit that went to the Mideast. He was in Kuwait running a military emergency department before the start of the current war. "We knew the war was coming before you did," he says.
And on Oct. 1, Lieutenant Colonel Pasqualone returned home after a year in Iraq with his unit, the 399th Combat Support Hospital. The unit flew into Hanscom Field and found a large crowd of families and supporters convened in a big hanger. A general was there. So was Senator John F. Kerry, who Pasqualone says gave the best speech of all - "short and sweet and no politics."
Yellow ribbons festooned Pasqualone's neighborhood in Arlington, and there were endless hugs. A far cry, he says, from his return from Vietnam: "There was no homecoming."
The man has had no time to decompress. The rubber hose hooked up to his washing machine broke, flooding the first floor of his house. Then his wife, who spent 21 years in the Army in both active and reserve duty, underwent major surgery for a hip replacement. (They have been parents to a foster daughter for 29 years.)
"You do what's put in front of you," Pasqualone says.
Pasqualone and his unit were first sent to Mosul, a big city in northern Iraq. He was in charge of daily sick call, which he defines as his most enjoyable assignment in the country because of the range of people he saw for treatment: coalition troops and personnel, Iraqi troops, Iraqi civilians.
Mosul was also the hairiest. Located in the city, the hospital came under mortar attack two or three times a week. The enemy forces were mere blocks away and could lob mortars into the compound with ease. One projectile went through the roof of the building and out a side window without exploding.
From there he went to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, where another part of his unit was stationed. Pasqualone worked in the orthopedic clinic of a larger medical facility. "Bones, muscle, joints - we treated them all," he says. "We also took care of bad guys."
Then he went to Al Asad, where he worked in an operating room for the first time. Pasqualone endured because he never let his emotions trespass. "I'm very technology-oriented," he says. "When I'm in work mode, I zero in on the mission. Also, the learning curve there was very steep - almost a vertical line."
Working in the OR, Pasqualone says, was the greatest learning experience of his life.
Pasqualone's emotions surfaced when he thought about youngsters injured by IEDs: "It's complex surgery, cutting the chest of a child from sternum to upper pubic to remove shrapnel."
We hear of soldiers doing their best to care for Iraqi children. "I've seen it," he says. "In Mosul, they needed clothes for the kids in schools. The 399th represents 36 states, and the word went out. We received 1,200 boxes of clothes."
Soldiers often focus on the medical plight of children, too. I got an e-mail from Pasqualone in early September about a 7-year-old Iraqi girl named Sarah Hussein Mansour who was suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She needed the kind of treatment available at Children's Hospital Boston. He called there but was told the hospital couldn't take her because it was already doing other pro bono work. He tried other hospitals without success. I ask him what happened to Sarah. She died.
I ask Pasqualone who his heroes are and he says: "The kids who go outside the wire. Those are my heroes. Nineteen- and 20-year-olds who go out looking for bad guys, night after night. The greatest honor of my life was taking care of our boys."
The Army, Pasqualone says, has been the high point of his life.
Civilians have no sense of living with a unit in a war zone," he adds. "Unless you do it, you can't understand. It's a family thing."
Pasqualone and his unit probably won't get called again before he retires at the mandatory age of 60. But he's up for a promotion to full bird colonel in January. If he gets it - and I'm betting he does - he must extend for another three years.
Would he go back to Iraq?
"In a heartbeat," he says. "If I got a call to go back, I'd say: 'You don't have to say any more. I'm yours.' There's a need. What am I going to do, say no?"
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
