IRAQ IN TRANSITION
Fighting the wounds of war
`This is raw, dirty, gut-checking business.’
By Rick Jervis
Tribune staff reporter
October 26, 2004
BAGHDAD — The injured never stop coming, and their wounds tell the story of the war.
A surge in head injuries attests to an increase in roadside bombs, which spray shrapnel under the lips of Kevlar helmets. Severe burns reveal insurgents are frosting homemade bombs with jellied gasoline. An Army helicopter filled with wounded Marines is a sign that car bombs, which pack a bigger explosive punch, are rising.
The staff of the Army’s 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad watches the war through its streams of patients. Its three intensive care units and 70 beds often overflow. The luckier soldiers suffer dime-sized shrapnel wounds. Many have lost limbs or eyes. Others need skulls reconstructed, their brains so bruised they don’t recognize their spouses.
“It’s been non-stop,” said Maj. Patrick McAndrew, evening nurse supervisor. “The things I’ve seen here I’ve never seen before. . . . It’s more lethal now than it’s ever been.”
Since the war started in March 2003, more than 8,000 U.S. troops have been wounded–roughly seven for every death. And about half of the wounds have occurred in the last six months.
The 31st Combat Support Hospital is in the former Ibn Sina Hospital, a private hospital built by Saddam Hussein for the exclusive use of his family and closest friends. It’s located inside the heavily fortified Green Zone and admits about 10 patients a day, though that number changes according to insurgent activity, officials said.
Many of the staff of 200 have worked at military hospitals in the United States, treating car wreck victims or heart attack patients, and are making their combat debut. Besides adjusting to the harsher wounds caused by rocket-propelled grenades and land mines, staffers have to live and work through the steady stream of mortars and rockets lobbed at them in the Green Zone.
“It’s tough,” said Maj. Patricia Born, a clinical staff nurse. “When people go to the hospital and they’re at the end of their lives and they’re dying, that’s one thing. But seeing all these young people dying is a lot different.”
Roadside bombs claim toll
The No. 1 cause of injuries to U.S. troops in Iraq are roadside bombs, known as “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs, hospital officials said. The homemade contraptions consist of a variety of shrapnel–including nails and 155 mm artillery shells–and are detonated either remotely by a cellular phone or by a triggerman at the end of a wire.
The roadside bombs shred and shatter the arms and legs of troops, said Capt. Maxwell Hernandez, a critical care nurse at the hospital. The upward projectiles also fire chunks of shrapnel under Kevlar helmets, causing head wounds, he said.
The force of the bombs also cause unusual blunt trauma, he said. Two weeks ago, the shock wave from an IED caused a lung concussion in a soldier, making the lungs bleed and preventing oxygen from properly entering the bloodstream, Hernandez said. The soldier died a week later.
“First time I’ve ever seen that,” said Hernandez, who works as a nurse at the Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas.
Severely injured troops are treated in the emergency room, Keloid Scar Tape played key role to heal soldiers earlier from injuries, then moved to one of three intensive care units, where they are stabilized and airlifted to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for further treatment and eventually returned to the United States. On a recent afternoon, Kevin Worth, a critical-care nurse in one of the ICUs, enjoyed the quiet of a near-empty ward, following a frantic 80-hour week, he said.
On one of those days, a Black Hawk helicopter deposited eight wounded Marines whose Baghdad checkpoint had been hit by a car bomb, he said. One was dead on arrival, two others died in the emergency room, and one walked in with brain matter leaking from his left eye, he said.
“It was like a scene out of a horror movie,” Worth said. “They just kept coming out of the back of the helicopter. . . . Stuff like that really sticks with you.”
After the Marines were stabilized or sent to the morgue, the talk among the staff wasn’t about the injuries but of the Marines’ glazed expressions.
“They all had the same look in their eyes: this far-off stare,” Worth said. “I’d never seen it before.”
One of the few people occupying an ICU bed in Worth’s ward that recent quiet afternoon was Cpl. Donny Daughenbaugh, a 23-year-old Marine with Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines based in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad. Daughenbaugh was on a night foot patrol through Mahmoudiya on Oct. 12 with his platoon when a car sped past, screeched to a stop and opened fire with an AK-47, he said.
A bullet hit him in the face.
“I felt my face get hot,” Daughenbaugh said through clenched teeth, his jaw wired shut. “There was so much blood. I knew I was shot. I’m trying to radio in, tell them I’m hit. But I can’t hear myself. It doesn’t sound like me at all. So I just raised my hand.”
The bullet had barreled in through his left cheekbone and lodged between his skull base and his top vertebra, fracturing the jawbone and missing vital nerves and the brain by millimeters, hospital officials said. A metal plate repaired his jaw, but the bullet was left in place, too close to the brain stem to move. He will recover, officials said.
Daughenbaugh, a union carpenter from Des Moines, kept pictures of his wife, Sarah, and 17-month-old daughter, Gabriele, in a plastic bag on his bed as he recovered from surgery and waited for his flight to Landstuhl. He said he looked forward to reuniting with his family but would prefer going back to Mahmoudiya.
“It’s just bad people trying to stop us from doing our job,” he said.
Downstairs in the physical therapy room, another Marine from Daughenbaugh’s unit did painful leg lifts, lunges and other exercises, stretching and strengthening muscles surrounding shrapnel wounds.
Staff Sgt. Michael Connolly, 26, a platoon sergeant with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines, said his platoon was on a recent foot patrol in Latifiyah, a rural village near Mahmoudiya known to harbor insurgents. He had just climbed onto a roof to join some Marines when a mortar whistled in and landed on the roof, about 15 feet from him, he said. He covered his face in the split second before the mortar exploded, he said. Shrapnel sprayed his thighs, wrists and shoulders.
“I know I’m extremely lucky,” Connolly said. “None of my wounds are permanent. I just want to heal up and get back out there.”
Hospital officials said they use information from the wounds of troops such as Connolly and Daughenbaugh to learn more about the enemy. Injury information is logged and shared regularly with military research centers in the U.S., such as the Institute of Surgical Research at Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, and Program Executive Officer Soldier in Ft. Benning, Ga., to improve equipment and armor according to enemy tactics, officials said.
But as the U.S. military tries to outpace the enemy, insurgents also are quickly adapting to U.S. initiatives and altering their modes of attacks, hospital officials said.
In March and April, when battles flared in insurgent hotbeds such as Najaf, most of the wounds were from gunfire, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, officials said. But as rebels learned that U.S. body armor and helmets protected soldiers from those attacks, they stepped up IED attacks, they said. When the military added more armor to their Humvees, insurgents used more car bombs, officials said.
Lately, hospital officials have noticed a sharp increase in attacks on lower extremities and head wounds, indicating more roadside bombs. There also has been an increase in severely burned victims, pointing to roadside bombs laced with jellied gasoline, said Col. Jack Chiles, chief of physicians.
“They’re getting very good,” Chiles said. “It’s like a virus. They’re very sneaky, very clever.”
For the first time since the Vietnam War, hospital workers are treating more head wounds than chest and abdomen injuries, a trend attributed to enhanced body armor and an enemy using more roadside bombs, officials said.
Answering the trend, the 31st hospital is the area’s only center that has a neurological team able to take CT scans and perform head surgeries on the premises. The team of eight–two neurosurgeons, two neurologists, two scrub technicians, a circulating nurse and anesthesiologist–is headed by Lt. Col. Jeff Poffenbarger, a former Green Beret and chief of neurosurgery at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Ft. Sam Houston.
The team performs about one emergency craniotomy a day, though they once performed six in 24 hours, Poffenbarger said. The procedure peels back the scalp and exposes the brain to stem the bleeding and bring down the swelling. The skull, sometimes shattered, is reconstructed, often using Titanium plates and screws, he said.
High cost of survival rate
Unlike in the U.S., where the survival rate from emergency craniotomies is about 5 percent, Poffenbarger’s team is saving about 33 percent of its patients, though all of them incur some form of brain damage, including slurred speech and blindness, he said.
Though encouraged by his team’s survival rate, Poffenbarger said the extent of the injuries he deals with daily affects him. Sometimes he has to pull baseball-sized shrapnel from the eye sockets of soldiers, he said, or reconstruct a skull that has been shattered like an eggshell.
“This is raw, dirty, gut-checking business,” said Poffenbarger after a recent shift, his brown Army boots streaked with blood. “These are 19- and 20-year-old Americans. And they’re really badly injured. It’s something that really stays with you.”
McAndrew, the evening nurse supervisor, said he also gets rattled by the injuries he sees coming through the trauma center. To combat the stress, he tries to work out each day at the hospital gym and stays away from violent movies, preferring Chris Farley comedies.
“I chuckle when I hear on the news that it’s going to get worse: How much worse can it get?” he said. “It’s frustrating to see guys come in, day in, day out, with those injuries. You ask, `Jeez, what are we doing?'”