Mohammad Zaman, an Afghan local policeman who was wounded in Daikundi province, walks with his prosthetic legs at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) orthopaedic rehabilitation centre in Kabul August 26, 2014. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani
Special Report: Left To Fight Alone, Afghanistan Battles To Save Wounded -- Reuters
(Reuters) - Omar Gul was on duty at a remote police checkpoint in Helmand's restive district of Sangin when the station came under fire.
It was a warm night in mid-September and the battle between Afghanistan's government forces and Taliban militants had been simmering in the southern province all summer.
Around sunrise, Gul recalled, he was shot in the leg. For the next twelve hours he bled, and waited, and bled some more, until the fighting died down long enough for a colleague to hoist Gul onto his back and take him to get help.
In the end, it was not his employer – the government of Afghanistan – who saved his life. After carrying him out of the checkpoint, Gul’s colleagues drove him to a first-aid post run by an Italian NGO called Emergency, whose own ambulance ferried him to the group's hospital in Lashkar Gah, Helmand's capital.
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My Comment: My father's biggest fear when he fought in World War II was not being killed ... it was to be severely wounded with crippling injuries. At the time Soviet medical facilities to help the wounded were inadequate to help such soldiers .... and the horror stories of what life would be like being a cripple made everyone shudder at such a prospect. I guess in today's Afghanistan .... these same fears exist.
3 comments:
WNU,
Still a big fear, that and being burned. It is a paradox that the better battlefield medicine became, the more it produced alive , but severely disabled troopies.
I forgot about my father talking about soldiers being burned alive. He had nightmares about that for his entire life.
Most people think it is only conventional fire that gets you, but it's the flash burns that are really bad.
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