Curtain falls on the ‘M.A.S.H’ of the Iraq war

updated 4:32 p.m. ET July 2, 2007

BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq - At half-past midnight, the helicopters dropped off the wounded — fleeting silhouettes wheeled away on gurneys in the glow of blue landing lights, four soldiers among the last of thousands to pass through the “M.A.S.H.” of the Iraq war.

The makeshift sprawl of tents that received them, the Air Force Theater Hospital, Iraq’s premier trauma center and a war-zone fixture, will soon give way to a modern, “hard-sided” complex across the road.

The opening of that 107,000-square-foot hospital, in stages throughout July, not only brings a more standard, state-of-the-art facility to Iraq. It also announces that the U.S. military, after more than 3,500 dead and 25,000 wounded in four years of war, will be well prepared to deal with severe casualties for years more to come.

At a time when no target date has been set for a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, the new Balad hospital looks ready for an extended U.S. stay.

“It’ll be good for 10 years, depending on how well you take care of it,” said Col. Brian Masterson, the hospital commander.

Heat, tents, sandstorms
The staff in the existing “soft-sided” maze of tent flaps and wooden floors, covering 62,000 square feet at this base 50 miles north of Baghdad, say the care already ranks with the best.

“Don’t let our surroundings fool you,” said Tech. Sgt. Ellwood Tegtmeier, 35, of Pittsburgh. “We are state of the art. Except we do it in the heat, in tents, in sandstorms.”

The surroundings may evoke the Korean War’s Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, the M.A.S.H. of Hollywood and television fame.

But Balad’s 50 or so dun-colored tent sections house the most up-to-date equipment — the “16-slice” CAT scanner overseen by Tegtmeier, for example — and a broad range of expertise, from thoracic and vascular surgeons to the U.S. military’s only neurosurgeons in Iraq.

As the hospital grew and the tents spread year by year, the mayhem and tragedy of Iraq was funneled into Balad’s emergency room in sometimes daunting numbers. It once handled 35 casualties in a single 40-minute period.

The No. 1 mission of the hospital’s 379-member staff, largely Air Force regular and reserve personnel but also including Army doctors and nurses, is to perform emergency surgery and other procedures for troops badly wounded by blasts, shrapnel, bullets and burns, and prepare them for evacuation on nightly flights to the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

From there, most of these seriously wounded men and women go on to military hospitals in the United States for longer-term care.

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