Operation Mend at UCLA helping soldiers recover better

Military, civilian medical communities team up to improve the lives of troops with severe disfigurements from war
By Charlie Reed, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, February 6, 2010

Gunnery Sgt. Blaine Scott can now eat a cheeseburger without first having to tear it to pieces.

It’s a small yet significant triumph for the 37-year-old native of Kellerton, Iowa. In 2006, a roadside bomb in Iraq scorched 40 percent of his body, including his face. Three of his fellow Marines died in the attack.

Scott endured more than a dozen surgeries during the 18 months he spent recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where 800 troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at its burn center since 2003. But it wasn’t until he returned to active duty and hooked up with Operation Mend at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center that civilian plastic surgeons restored his ability to chew, gave him a new nose and further refined scars with another dozen surgeries.

"It’s good to get back to the way I was," said the married father of three, whose youngest son knows him only by the face scarred by war.

Advances in combat medicine and body and vehicle armor have made war more survivable for troops like Scott. Today, 3 percent of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq die from their wounds, compared with 19 percent during the Vietnam War and 25 percent during World War II, according to statistics provided by the Pentagon.

But the price of survival is often paid with severed limbs, disfigured faces and burned bodies.

Operation Mend is among a growing number of partnerships the military has forged with the civilian medical community to help the tens of thousands wounded in combat, many with severe disfigurements. And recent investments in reconstructive surgery research point to the military’s growing attention to improving life for war-mangled troops.
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