Wounded from Fallujah fight put doctors at Balad base hospital to test

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=25702

There was a drumbeat. A battle was looming.

Negotiations with the insurgents in Fallujah were failing. Coalition troops were massing. Would the offensive kick off? If so, when? What would it be like?

The staff at the Air Force Theater Hospital watched this. They listened to this. They waited.

“Suddenly,” said Dr. (Col.) Ted Parsons, deputy commander of the hospital, “the helicopters started dropping out of the sky.”

The helicopters would come for days, day and night, ferrying wounded from the battlefield, filling the operating rooms and the beds of the hospital with human carnage — American soldiers and Marines, Iraqi National Guard and police, enemy combatants and civilians.