Realities of the E.R.: Treating Iraqis, Airlifting American Bodies

Text Box: BAGHDAD, July 4 — It starts out traditional and easy, with Liberty cakes and holiday decorations, but today will end with hard surprises. Around midmorning, an awful, heavy stench thickens the morning air just outside the E.R.’s doors. A few medical techs and Lt. Col. Clayton Simon, the only American military pathologist in Iraq and Afghanistan, are working on three corpses in the baking heat underneath a canopy. The victims, all Iraqis, died of gunshot wounds or blunt head trauma, and the British and U.S. militaries want forensic data, identification included. “We’re doing the FBI’s work,” Simon says. In the E.R., there’s a continuing influx of U.S. military, contractor and Iraqi patients. What surprises me is how many badly injured Iraqi Army soldiers come through the doors, almost always evacuated by U.S. ground or air ambulances. Children are the most difficult to see, little boys with shy smiles and IED wounds. Today another soldier comes in, but rather than the usual blend of fierce urgency and anxiety, it’s intense grief and anger that accompany members of this unit. Their turret gunner is KIA (killed in action) by an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) to the head—always a hard pill to swallow, but this casualty is especially difficult. Later in the day, the chaplain’s assistant walks hurriedly with a woman whose face barely contains her sorrow. It is the gunner’s mother—a contractor here. Simon tells me that the fallen are taken on Blackhawk helicopters—Angel Flights—to be airlifted out of country. —Leslie Sabbagh