Flying wounded from combat zone is a life-saving advancement

Flying wounded from combat zone is a life-saving advancement
By Seth Robbins, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, February 23, 2010

JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq — It was during World War I that an injured soldier was first evacuated by air, in a “Jenny” biplane modified to allow a single stretcher in place of the rear cockpit. And for nearly a century afterward, air evacuations of the badly injured out of the combat zone were the exception, not the norm.

Now, troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are routinely flown to hospitals in the United States within three days. Some burn patients make it back within 24 hours, said Col. James King, the Critical Care Air Transport, or CCAT, theater medical director.

“We are moving patients thousands of miles,” King said, “that some civilian trauma doctors would be reluctant to even put on an elevator.”

Troops are treated at the front lines and then shuttled by helicopter to nearby combat support hospitals for life-saving surgeries, often within a critical one-hour window. The surgeons perform the minimum amount of operations to stabilize the patients, and then they are flown to hospitals in the U.S. or Germany, where they can receive more specialized care.
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