Cheating grim death
Lightning-fast treatment is the key to success
LANDSTUHL, GERMANY--"Mom, is that you? I'm alive."
When Pat Coleman heard those words in a midnight phone call, she knew her son had been wounded in Iraq.
David Coleman, a 20-year-old Marine lance corporal, was calling home on a satellite phone to Butte, Mont., from a hospital in Baghdad. He didn't know how badly he was injured. Only later would he learn that he'd nearly bled to death, that the improvised explosive device that ripped open his armored humvee on September 23 had shattered both his legs, and that he had only a fifty-fifty shot at not having his right leg amputated. At that point, the young marine knew only that he was about to be evacuated to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and that everyone said if you made it to Landstuhl, you were going to be OK.
"I remember everything, like a movie," Coleman said from his bed at Landstuhl four days later, his eyes wide and black from anesthesia three hours after surgery to clean his wounds. "Boom! There was dust. There was smoke. People were screaming, 'I'm hit! I'm hit!' " Blood was pouring out of his boot. Coleman remembers hearing someone say, "He's got 10 minutes before the shock kills him" and realizing that the guy was talking about him . "There was blood everywhere." Less wounded buddies carried Coleman to another humvee for the drive to a medevac helicopter and a short flight to a forward surgical team. Surgeons stopped the bleeding; then Coleman was ferried to a combat support hospital at Asad Airfield, where doctors performed emergency surgery to stabilize his legs. After spending the night in Baghdad, Coleman was strapped to a litter and loaded onto a C-141 transport plane to Germany. He arrived barely 36 hours after the IED shredded his humvee and had been in Iraq just 10 days. "I'm the first soldier from Montana to be injured," he said, with a dazed smile. "I wanted to be a part of Marine Corps history. And now I am."
Better stats. Landstuhl is the first step in the long journey home for David Coleman and the nearly 9,500 other soldiers who have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unbeknown to them, they are part of a great experiment in military medicine. Soldiers today are far more likely to survive battle than in any other war in American history. In World War II, 1 in 3 casualties died. Even in the relatively bloodless 1991 Gulf War, 147 were killed in battle, 467 wounded in action. In Iraq and Afghanistan, however, 98 percent of those wounded have survived. "Mortality is down about 22 percent" compared with the first Gulf War, says Dale Smith, chairman of medical history at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He credits better protection for soldiers, as well as improved medical care. "It's phenomenal progress, at phenomenal expense."
As more soldiers come home with physical injuries and mental health problems, it becomes increasingly clear that survival has other, greater costs. The nation's healthcare system for veterans is already overburdened, and federal officials and veterans groups fear the country won't fulfill its promise to care for its wounded soldiers for the rest of their lives.
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