GIs extend tours to aid the injured

LANDSTUHL, Germany - His face is pink and puffy, except around his eyes, where his protective goggles took the brunt of the explosion. His ears are swollen and caked with blood, his arm pocked with deep red burns.
   But these are not the wounds that hurt the worst. After dragging several soldiers - some whose hands and faces were in flames - from the wreckage of a burning Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Army medic J.T. Stewart could do little more. His aid bag had caught fire in the roadside bomb blast.
   Sitting on the side of a hospital bed - one week, thousands of miles and several realities away from Iraq - he recalls the anguish.
   "They were screaming, and I'm trying to hit them with morphine, but I really didn't have much to work with," Stewart says through cracked, brown lips. "It is the most helpless feeling in the world. I'm the medic, and I couldn't make them feel better."
   Shannon Green leans against the doorway of Stewart's hospital room and listens. Just listens. As a nurse, she knows this can be the best medicine.
   She could have left Landstuhl Regional Medical Center a few months back, to leave behind stories like this and injuries like this and days like this. She missed her Sandy home, her family and her job at Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City.
   But she couldn't turn away.
   Instead of going home as expected after a year of service at Landstuhl, about 100 of the 300 soldiers in the Salt Lake City-based 328th Combat Support Hospital chose to keep working at one of the most professionally demanding and emotionally exhausting medical facilities in the world. They have now been here 16 months, with six more months to go.
   Hospital officials say the number of those who stayed was unprecedented and perplexing.
   Each soldier has a different set of reasons, but there is one constant.
   "This is where our fight is," Green says.
   
    'I kept thinking about my mom': Since the wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 6,000 combat-wounded patients have been treated at Landstuhl, the U.S. military's largest medical center in Europe with a staff of 2,000. Each day, hospital officials say, buses arrive with new patients from the battlefields, and the nurses, medics, technicians and administrators of the 328th await them.
   Just months after arriving at Landstuhl, Green took a phone call from the panicked mother of a young soldier who was in the intensive care unit. It would be a defining moment for the nurse.
   The mother was pleading for information about her son. And Green very badly wanted to give the woman something - anything that might help her understand. An explanation. An outlook. Some kind of comfort.
   Green still sobs when she remembers. The woman's son died later that day. He was 19 years old.
   "I knew before that woman did that her son had passed away," she says. "And I kept thinking about my mom."
   A few months later, Green's brother, Joe, also a soldier in the Army, received orders into Iraq.
   And she decided that there was something she could give to her mom - and to the mothers of all of the troops that would pass through this hospital. She could stay.
   
   'Here we take care of heroes':
   Keith Anderson admits it wasn't a purely altruistic decision.
   The money he makes taking X-rays for the Army is better than what he was making before, to say nothing of the benefits. Those things made the decision easier, he says, but not easy.
   His wife is waiting back in Magna. And although he has seven grandchildren, he's only met two. The rest were born after he deployed.
   When this year comes to an end, Anderson says, he'll be more than ready to go home. Still, he's glad he signed on for a second year at Landstuhl.
   "Here we take care of heroes," he says "When you think of it in those terms, what could be more important?"
   Sometimes, Anderson says, the troops he sees are struggling with more than just physical injuries. The hospital has an entire ward dedicated to psychiatric patients. And medics here say almost everyone who has been injured in combat seems to harbor some level of combat stress.
   "Sometimes," Anderson says, "you come in, and they have that far-off look in their eyes. And if you can get their attention - if you can bring them away from whatever it is for just a few moments, maybe with a joke or just a conversation - then that blank look goes away.
   "I get to help take care of soldiers who went down range to fight - to do what I wouldn't want to do. That is why I'm still here."
   
   'We're never at a loss': Once or twice, and sometimes three times a day, a group of service members in assorted uniforms, hospital scrubs and white lab coats meets outside the hospital entrance, just across from the small fountain that marks the center of a roundabout driveway.
   They park long black gurneys in perfect rows and even ranks, several across and several deep, and wait for the buses to arrive.
   The first off are the worst off - their bodies often hidden under thick layers of bandages and tangled webs of tubes and wires.
   It's such a usual sight here that no one cringes.
   "But you don't ever get numb to it, either," says Sgt. Maj. Melanie Karmazsin, the highest ranking enlisted soldier from Utah at the hospital.
   "Each one of those kids - we're supposed to call them 'soldiers' but we still call them 'kids' - each one is an individual. You know that, and you never forget that, and so it doesn't get any easier with the next busload."
   But these things, Karmazsin says, give her focus. "We are never at a loss for a sign of why we are here."
   
    'I cried and cried': Melinda Merkley, a native of Heber, works in the hospital's neurosurgery clinic. Occasionally, however, she finds herself in the intensive care unit.
   "The first time I helped out, there was one soldier - he was on a ventilator, and he was burned all over his body," she says. "He was burned so badly that you could barely tell what his face looked like before.
   "I went back to my office, and I cried and cried."
   Every time the bus comes in, Merkley says, she is struck by one patient "who, you can just see, has been through a lot."
   Merkley acknowledges that a year of such experiences might be enough to make someone want to go home. She feels fortunate, though, to have the immediate support of her husband, Rod, who serves in the same unit.
   When it came time to decide whether to stay or go, the couple agreed they could weather the emotional hardships to help those patients they call "brother and sister soldiers."
   "It didn't discourage us," Melinda Merkley said. "If anything, it encouraged us more.
   "The thing we strive for most in life is to help people," she says. "And here we are doing that."
   mlaplante@sltrib.com
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   Matthew D. LaPlante traveled to Germany on a World Affairs Journalism Fellowship administered by the International Center for Journalists. The Fellowship is funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.