Brian Castner, Mother Board: The Changing Face of Battlefield Medicine
At the end of the runway, an idle firetruck sat near a massive petrol-fed inferno. Flashes of light and rainbowing tracers played among the hangers, followed half-a-second later by thumps and clatters. Overhead, attack helicopters launched rockets that landed far too close.
“The bad guys are on the wrong side of the fence,” Matt Komatsu thought. “Inside the fence.”
Komatsu and Dan Warren looked at each other and then at the rest of their team, tightened the lashes on their body armor and rifles, and then one-by-one took off running for a line of armored vehicles closer to the fight. Burning aviation gas lit their way.
It was September 14, 2012. Taliban had successfully breached the wire at Camp Bastion in southern Afghanistan. But Komatsu and his team weren’t primarily in search of insurgents. There were looking for wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Komatsu is an Air Force combat rescue officer. Technical Sergeant Warren is a PJ, a pararescue airman. Their job is trauma medicine on the battlefield. Shooting guns is just part of the commute to work.
“And to think,” Komatsu would reflect when it was all over, “only a few years before, this wouldn’t have been our fight. We wouldn’t have even been forward deployed to that base at all.”
WNU Editor: Wow ....
In World War II, when the infantry wore helmets and little else and men landed on beaches in swarms, the ratio of American wounded to killed was only 2.1. The ratio increased to 2.7 in Korea, as helicopters became available to medically evacuate, or medevac the injured to Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH units. In Vietnam the ratio improved again, to 3.3, and in Iraq, where soldiers wore body armor and drove V-hulled armored vehicles and rarely strayed far from the world-class trauma hospitals at their main bases, the ratio was an astounding 9.1. Only one soldier in ten died of their wounds.
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