At Afghanistan hospital, Texas troops treat the wounds of war

Bagram hospital helps keep survival rates at record highs even as it sees horrible injuries from roadside bombs. 
By Jeremy Schwartz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, April 29, 2012

BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — Just after 9 a.m., the helicopter descends past jagged, snowcapped mountains, and the crew rushes a soldier with a gunshot wound to his leg into the trauma center. Nurses, doctors and medical technicians, clad in camouflage scrubs, flood into the room, unwrapping his bloody bandage, checking vital signs and inserting lines for intravenous fluids.

The injury is minor compared with what these military medical workers see on a regular basis. In addition to a growing number of gunshot victims, the trauma center sees many NATO troops whose legs and arms have been blown off by land mines hidden in the Afghan countryside, victims of what the military has termed dismounted complex blast injury. On busy days, staffers treat dozens of patients, as they did on a recent Saturday when insurgent forces staged a series of attacks around Kabul.

By nighttime, the soldier will have been carefully bundled onto a stretcher, or "packaged," and along with a dozen other wounded service members, put on a C-17 cargo plane and flown to the Army's military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.
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