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Fort Lewis soldiers set up clinic in Iraq

Mar- 1-2007 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

RACHAEL VAN HORN; For The News Tribune

AL QUDAS, Iraq – After driving through some of the most treacherous roads in Iraq, soldiers from a Fort-Lewis-based unit set up the clinic Wednesday in empty classrooms of the school building in Al Qudas.

Three weeks ago, the village north of Baghdad was a growing Sunni support zone for al-Qaida in Iraq. Thanks to small detachment of soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery Regiment, the village has become a place for residents to seek medical help from the Americans.

The Fort Lewis unit is part of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – the Army’s first Stryker brigade. It arrived in Iraq in July for its second deployment of the war.

Wednesday, more than 300 people from the village and surrounding areas came to the makeshift free clinic, seeking help for injuries and illnesses left, in some cases, untreated for months.

There to help were three U.S. doctors and four American medics, working with one Iraqi doctor, a medic and a physician’s assistant.

After using a loudspeaker atop a Humvee to let residents know the clinic was open, doctors met their first patient at 11 a.m.

But it wasn’t the case of sniffles they had expected. Instead, a severely burned 2-year-old Iraqi girl was brought in by her distraught father. The child had pulled a pan of hot cooking water from the stove onto her face Tuesday and now, without treatment, her eyes were swollen shut and her condition was deteriorating.

The child needed to be hospitalized but her father was afraid to make the lengthy drive to a hospital in a Sunni neighborhood and feared he would be killed if he went to the nearby hospital in a Shiite neighborhood.

He carried his whimpering daughter back out into the dirty alleyway behind the school and walked toward home.

Because of the tenuous security situation at the town, no one could be spared to get the child to a hospital, leaving the medics to watch helplessly.

“This is the hard part,” said Spc.Brad Green, a medic. “Those are cases that we are just not prepared here to handle since we only came prepared to help with the most minor stuff.”

But the trend continued through the day, and provided intelligence to the unit on areas in which criminal activity needed to be addressed. [...]

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