Casualties grapple with scars, emotions
LANDSTUHL, Germany -- Marine Staff Sergeant Samuel J. Mortimer wore two bent dog tags on a chain around his neck, stared at a photograph of a gaping gunshot wound to his left elbow, and expressed a burning desire to return to Iraq.
Shot last week by an insurgent in Fallujah, the 29-year-old Marine was evacuated out of the country for special treatment at the sprawling US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.
"I'll need a skin graft, maybe some nerve repair," Mortimer said from his hospital bed, dismissing the looming treatment with a shrug of his good, right arm. "But soon as I'm 100 percent, I want to go back and be with my men because the worst part of all this is sitting on this bed while they're sitting in the mud," he said last week as he held the digital picture of his wound.
Every day, gray-green buses pull up outside the emergency clinic of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and unload the latest casualties from Iraq. This week, there was a rush of wounded from Mosul, where an apparent suicide bomber struck Tuesday at a US base near Mosul just as soldiers were sitting down to lunch. Twenty-one people, including 18 Americans, were killed and 69 people wounded.
Thirty-five of the injured -- US soldiers and civilians -- were flown to Landstuhl, where doctors and nurses worked through Wednesday night to stabilize the latest patients, the Associated Press reported.
Landstuhl, in the hills of southwestern Germany, is the military's largest hospital in Europe and the intake center for soldiers wounded in Afghanistan, as well as Iraq.
The lucky ones are able to walk into the hospital on their own. Others, burned by roadside bombs, mangled by other explosives, or shot by insurgents, have to be carried off on special litters. Some, unconscious since being wounded, still have no idea what they have suffered.
"Working here, there's an emotional pull, you realize this is someone's cousin, someone's younger brother," said Army Major Kendra Whyatt, 37, head nurse in the orthopedic unit. "But the attitude [of the wounded] is high. They are looking out for each other. You see them in a wheelchair, on crutches, going around the hospital checking on each other."
As of yesterday, the Pentagon said, 1,024 US service members had died and at least 9,981 had been wounded as a result of hostile action in Iraq since March 2003.
Close to half of the wounded were able to return to duty within 72 hours, according to the military. Advanced protective equipment and better medical facilities in the field help more soldiers survive battle than in previous wars.
But in Tuesday's attack, the injuries were particularly serious because the soldiers were not wearing body armor as they would have been in combat, the medical center's commander, Army Colonel Dr. Rhonda Cornum, said yesterday in a news conference.
"Usually the trunk of the body is protected," she said, in comments reported by the AP. "In this case, we have neck, chest, and abdominal injuries."
Even with body armor, injuries can be extremely disabling.
"You see major tissue destruction, a lot of leg and arm amputations, multiple fractures . . . people intubated and on breathing machines," Navy Commander Dr. Peter Marco, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at Landstuhl, said last week.
Some of the seriously wounded service members ultimately will have no choice but to take a medical discharge, leaving what may be the only job they have ever held.
"One of my first questions after I was shot was whether this was something they could medically discharge me, because I love what I do," said Sergeant Charles L. Sheely, 28, whose right hand was shattered by two rounds thought to have been fired by the same Fallujah insurgent who wounded Mortimer.
Mortimer and Sheely consider themselves lucky, and they cannot forget the buddy who did not make it. He was a 25-year-old, chess-playing Marine, shot that same Sunday afternoon by the same insurgent who got them.
Mortimer remembered that day well. He heard that one of his men was down in a courtyard where some Marines were trying to track down a fleeing insurgent. When Mortimer got to the courtyard, he saw a Marine down in front of a shack.
Mortimer ran straight to grab the wounded man, while other Marines fired at the two low-slung buildings in the courtyard.
But just as Mortimer reached his man, the insurgent -- hiding in the shack -- shot again, this time at Mortimer. One shot pierced Mortimer's arm, the other hit his dog tags that were shoved in his pants pocket.
Mortimer, losing blood rapidly, had no choice but to pull himself out of the alley. His buddy died that day. "He was one of the best Marines I ever trained," said Mortimer, who asked that the dead Marine's name not be published because he did not want the family to hear the details secondhand. "I'm going to go to his family and tell them what kind of guy he was, what he was doing when he was killed.
"I'm going to tell them why their son got killed, that he died trying to protect us, and it's something they should feel proud of," he said. 