The bloody reality behind the statistics

Improvements in US battlefield medicine have greatly increased survival rates. In the Second World War, 30 per cent of the Americans injured in combat died. In Vietnam, this dropped to 24 per cent. In the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10 per cent of those injured die

The medics had 20 minutes’ warning. A soldier badly wounded by a roadside bomb was coming in. As they cut away his blood-sodden bandages in the trauma ward they found that all four limbs had either been severed or were attached by little more than skin. He had 70 per cent burns to what was left of his body.

They worked frantically to keep him alive. All his remaining limbs were amputated except for the top of one arm. Within hours he was air-borne again – this time bound for Germany and an onward flight to the Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. There, some time soon, he will wake to realise that life as he knew it is over.

He is 19. “They were devastating injuries,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Costello, the officer in charge of the Emergency Treatment Section. “I’ve seen so many of them.”

For Western publics this is a sanitized war. Iraq is too dangerous for news teams to record properly the daily shootings, bombings and executions.

The long-awaited congressional debate on President Bush’s war strategy will be driven by abstract figures. But to glimpse the human agony behind those figures, it helps to spend two days with the 28th CSH, a model of American medical excellence.

A seven-year-old Iraqi boy caught in a gunfight and hit in the abdomen; a two-year-old girl from Kalsu, with a bullet in her brain; a 62-year-old Sunni elder with at least five bullet holes in his back – the target of a drive-by shooting.

“Who can prepare you for this?” asked Major William White, 43, the nurse manager of the emergency room. “I’ve been doing this 24 years and I’ve never seen this kind of stuff.”

“Sometimes it takes your breath away. They call this a holy war, and for this to be done in the name of God appalls me,” said Major Aiken, the nursing supervisor of the 500-member unit.

[Excerpt of an article by Martin Fletcher, The Times]