Word: soldiers
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...rifle into the dark. The return fire raked his chest; his life was saved by his bulletproof vest. "For 48 hours after that, I was a train wreck, dumbfounded," he says, weeping softly in his four-bed hospital room. In many rooms along these long hospital corridors, soldiers tell similar tales of grief and pain. Across the hall, Sergeant Chris Chilles, 28, a California National Guardsman, says he was standing in the gun turret of his Humvee near Mosul a few mornings before, thinking about the Philadelphia cheesesteak he would have for lunch, when a roadside bomb exploded in front...
...Baghdad and Landstuhl. The aircraft are fitted with the same kind of sophisticated medical equipment that would be found in any high-tech ICU, and a doctor, nurse and technician are aboard each flight. Holcomb says the greatest medical achievement in the Iraq war has been how fast injured soldiers are moved to safety. "The rapid evacuation of casualties is stunning," he says. At first glance, Landstuhl doesn't seem like it could play a key role in any war. The complex of low-slung buildings and neatly manicured pathways, set on a forested hillside above a small town, looks...
...been thoroughly modernized. Today's combat doctors are likely wired to e-mail and cell phones. Holcomb, who now heads the Army's Institute of Surgical Research in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, says he routinely gets an e-mail "from some doctor in a tent outside Fallujah," saying a soldier has been burned in an explosion minutes before, and is being flown by helicopter to the combat hospital in Balad. An hour later, a physician in Balad calls Holcomb, saying he's putting the patient on a plane to Germany. At that point, Holcomb can dispatch a burn team...
...blinding flash of the explosion and the dead body of his gunner sprawled across the back seat. Days later, doctors in Iraq e-mailed surgeons at Walter Reed to say that Jurgersen had flatlined twice in the field hospital in Balad, before being flown to Landstuhl. Like many other soldiers who've landed here during past two years, it was not Jurgersen's first evacuation. Last June, he survived a bullet that pierced his tongue and lodged in the back of throat. He spent more than three weeks recovering at Landstuhl. Jurgersen, tall and powerfully built, insisted on returning...
...been promised a job at the Air Force base in Aviano, Italy, once she heals, possibly as early as this summer. She wonders whether her scars might actually serve her in a new assignment. In the military, she says, the guys always ask first how a woman soldier looks, not how well she does her job. "I will have the scars to show what I've been through, and no one will be able to doubt me. I have a lot of credibility now. This happened to me, and it stinks real...