Perhaps the most deserving and most unheralded story of the current war is the astonishing success of the military’s medical cadre.
For every American soldier killed in Iraq, nine others have been wounded and survived — the highest rate of any war in U.S. history. It isn’t that their injuries were less serious, a new report says. In fact, some young soldiers and Marines have had faces, arms and legs blown off and are now returning home badly maimed.
But they have survived thanks, in part, to armor-like vests and fast treatment from doctors on the move with surgical kits in backpacks.
“This is unprecedented. People who lose not just one but two or three extremities are people who just have not survived in the past,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who researched military medicine and wrote about it in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
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By mid-November, 10,369 American troops had been wounded in battle in Afghanistan or Iraq, and 1,004 had died — a survival rate of roughly 90 percent. In the Vietnam War, one in four wounded died, virtually all of them before they could reach MASH units some distance from the fighting.
Please go read this examination of the effects of advancements in both the protection of soldiers and the treatment of casualties. The story also highlights the courage, determination and skill of our medical personnel. I’ve never met a medic I didn’t like. Apparently, it’s a calling that summons a better, stronger person than I am.
There is the other side of the story, though.
“This war is producing unique injuries — less lethal but more traumatic,” he said.
In one traumatic case, Gawande tells of an airman who lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face. “How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question,” Gawande writes.
We now face a new generation of injured combat veterans, many of whom would not have survived their wounds in times past. We, as a nation, must welcome and care for them. We must thank them and help them hold on to their humanity and rebuild their lives.
We owe that to them. And to their caregivers.