Friday morning: 57 dead; 16 missing; 7
captured.
The daily White House press briefings and fuzzy real-time TV reports
fall far short of conveying the brutality of war, says Boulder
neurosurgeon Gene Bolles.
Bolles spent Thursday hunched over an operating table at Germany's
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, repairing the broken back of Army
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital this week.
The 19-year-old soldier will require aggressive rehabilitation, Bolles
said, but is expected to recover well — one success story in a war
full of tragedy.
"It really is disgustingly sanitized on television," said
Bolles, who has spent the last 16 months as chief of neurosurgery at
Landstuhl, the destination for the war's most wounded soldiers.
As of Friday, 281 patients had been brought to Landstuhl since
Operation Iraqi Freedom started, and plane-loads are arriving regularly.
"We have had a number of really horrific injuries now from the
war. They have lost arms, legs, hands, they have been burned, they have
had significant brain injuries and peripheral nerve damage. These are
young kids that are going to be, in some regards, changed for life. I
don't feel that people realize that."
Bolles, 66, had a private practice in Boulder for 32 years before
taking the job at Landstuhl. The U.S. military was short on
neurosurgeons after Sept. 11, 2001 — having scaled down its medical
staff in response to a shrinking troop population in the '90s — and
was looking for an experienced civilian doctor willing to work as a
contractor for a few years, said Lt. Colonel Bill Monacci, consultant to
the Army Surgeon General for neurosurgery.
Bolles, a self-described "pacifist," found his patriotic
juices flowing in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, so he
postponed his retirement and took the job to help out with Operation
Enduring Freedom, the war on terrorism in Afghanistan.
"I was looking for any way to help out," said Bolles.
"Not to fight a war necessarily, but to help out."
He is one of only a handful of civilian doctors among the mostly
military staff at Landstuhl, the largest military hospital outside the
United States. Until this week, he was the only neurosurgeon, taking
anyone with back, neck, spine or head injuries.
While Monacci said he thinks the number of wounded has been
relatively low given the scope of the war, Bolles has handled an
increasingly heavy workload exceptionally well, he said.
"It is a tough situation. He probably thought it was going to be
a bit of a slow-down from his practice, but I imagine it is a little
busier than he planned for," Monacci said
Bolles said despite media images that may lead the public to believe
otherwise, he and the other doctors at Landstuhl have been busy for
months.
Before the war began, the hospital already had treated 300 U.S.
soldiers from Kuwait and surrounding areas, wounded in car accidents,
windstorms and during training exercises. A brutal sandstorm landed five
soldiers on Bolles' operating table. The wind blew a tent pole through
the skull of one soldier and toppled heavy equipment onto another,
fracturing his spine, he said.
Still affected by the carnage he saw as a division flight surgeon
during the Vietnam War, Bolles said he is particularly troubled by the
injuries he has seen coming from Operation Iraqi Freedom, a war he
doesn't necessarily support.
"I am opposed to any war," he said. "I am doing what I
am doing because I am a doctor, not because I have a political
agenda."
He spent three hours in the operating room one morning last week
removing bullet fragments, blood and brain matter from two young
soldiers who each had been shot in the head. One will recover nicely,
Bolles said; the other will have permanent neurological damage.
Another of his patients, wounded in a grenade battle, died on the
operating table.
"These are young children; 18, 19, 20 with arms and legs blown
off. That is the reality," said Bolles.
Lt. Col. John Ogle, a Longmont emergency room doctor and flight
surgeon for the National Guard, agrees that the public is not always
given an accurate count of military injuries. But he says that is
because an accurate number is often hard to come by: What exactly
constitutes wounded?
"I would not call the war coverage sanitized," he said.
"Everybody knows that there are casualties over there, mostly
Iraqi. What has not been stressed enough is what it was like in the
previous 12 years of Saddam's regime."
As things heat up on the battlefield, Bolles' workload is getting
heavier.
Soldiers arrive daily in C-141 transport planes after the eight-hour
flight from Iraq: 46 on Friday, 39 today, 38 on Sunday, 25 on Monday.
To brace for the flood of patients, the hospital has doubled its
capacity to 322 beds and called up 600 medical reservists, including two
more neurosurgeons. Bolles admitted four new patients Friday and was
preparing to go back into the emergency room that night.
"The feeling here originally was, this is going to be over in a
couple days," Bolles said.
His work is rewarding: He recently received a letter from a soldier
who suffered a severe brain injury in a bomb blast in Afghanistan a few
months ago. He'd recovered well and is getting married.
Working on the recently rescued Pfc. Lynch, who is not much older
than Bolles' own daughter, was particularly rewarding, yet troubling.
"Nineteen years old and she's out there carrying a big
gun," he said.
His assignment with Landstuhl should expire within a year or two, but
Bolles has no plans to retire. Instead, he's looking into signing up
with the relief agency Doctors without Borders.
"I could feel just as needed if I were in Iraq taking care of
the people there who needed my services," he said.
