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Fort Lewis medics risk lives to save ones

Oct-15-2006 » Filed Under: Iraq News

SEAN COCKERHAM; The News Tribune

MOSUL, IRAQ – Sometimes the base can seem almost like a normal place. There’s a 7-Eleven, a Java Hut and a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store.

But walk down the street to the combat support hospital and the pain and horror of this war are all around. Here, Fort Lewis nurses care for an Iraqi man with horribly disfiguring burns from a bomb at the market.

Close by are young Iraqis torn apart when a suicide bomber joined them in line at an army recruiting station. All U.S. soldiers wounded in northern Iraq also pass through this hospital.

“Soldiers are not politicians, they don’t know whether we should or should not be here,” said Col. James Polo, the hospital commander. “Soldiers follow the orders they are given, and I believe we owe them the best.”

Polo is from the 47th Combat Support Hospital at Fort Lewis. The majority of the 500 men and women he commands at hospitals in Mosul and Tikrit are from Fort Lewis or Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma.

They have been in Iraq for almost a year and are returning to Tacoma in a few weeks. An advance party already went home.

There’s a lot of pride. The staff has state-of-the-art equipment. Every U.S. soldier who made it to one of the hospitals with a fighting chance ended up surviving, Polo said.

Lt. Col. David Misner, the emergency room chief in Mosul who lives in DuPont, said he finds himself caring a lot more than back home.


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