Army Doctors Saving Lives in Afghanistan

U.S. Capt. Richard M. Slusher of 541st Forward Surgical Team, operates on a wounded Afghan soldier at a U.S. military field hospital in Lagman, southeastern Afghanistan, Wednesday, April 11, 2007. It was a dream job for a sports medicine specialist: repairing the battered knees and shoulders of the Cincinnati Bengals and other athletes. Major trauma was defined as missing a season to injury. Two years later in Afghanistan, Capt. Richard M. Slusher doesn't get to practice his much-loved specialty. The trauma he confronts now carries the gravity of life or death. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool) (Rafiq Maqbool - AP)

QALAT, Afghanistan -- It was a dream job for a sports medicine specialist: repairing the battered knees and shoulders of the Cincinnati Bengals and other athletes. Major trauma was defined as missing a season to injury. Two years later in Afghanistan, Capt. Richard M. Slusher doesn't get to practice his much-loved specialty. The trauma he confronts now carries the gravity of life or death. One recent morning, Slusher could do nothing to save an 8-year-old boy, carried in after his brain was shattered by a bomb _ unexploded ordnance litters the landscape here.

Hours earlier, Slusher and a fellow surgeon, Col. Kenneth Azarow, amputated the legs of an Afghan policeman scythed down by a roadside bomb. Four others lay nearby, riddled with shrapnel. A sixth was dead.

It's a long way from small incision, computer-guided arthroscopic surgery on a linebacker's knee to "blood, tissue, bones, everything blowing up in your face."

"I'm not used to people dying on me," the 37-year-old orthopedic surgeon said. "I'm seeing things I've never seen in my career. I've done more amputations in six months here than in my whole five years of residency," Slusher said.

And things aren't likely to ease up during the second half of his yearlong tour with the U.S. Army's 541st Forward Surgical Team.

"I expect this will be a very busy spring and summer. We're getting ready," said Azarow, echoing warnings that Taliban insurgents soon will intensify ambushes, raids and bombings in Zabul province and other areas.

The 10-man unit is half the size of a standard Army surgical team. It treats U.S., coalition and Afghan military personnel as well as civilians. "Anyone who needs our help," Azarow said.

A U.S. soldier seriously wounded at one of Zabul's remote bases can be flown by helicopter to the team at Qalat, the provincial capital, and within an hour undergo surgery and be airlifted out, first to the coalition air base at Kandahar and then to a major military hospital in Germany. All within 24 hours.

"We don't have the capability to support a critically injured patient for more than a couple of hours," Azarow said. "Here, we do life and limb-sparing surgery _ stop bleeding, control contamination, stabilize the patient."

As a comment on the medical situation in the dirt-poor province, Azarow said his understaffed unit, housed in two small rooms, is the most sophisticated facility in Zabul.

The 47-year-old from Tacoma, Wash., says the biggest fear after losing a patient is that the unit will be overwhelmed by casualties. That's nearly happened several times.

In February, nine seriously injured soldiers were rushed in from the crash in Zabul of a U.S. Chinook helicopter in which eight troops died. Within eight hours, all nine, including ones with severed spinal cords and severe trauma, were evacuated and survived.