Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. He lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war.Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The author tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. While many good firsthand accounts of war by frontline soldiers exist, this is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.
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Extrait
DoctorsatWar
A volume in the series The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work edited by Suzanne Gordon and Sioban Nelson
A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
DoctorsatWarLifeandDeathinaFieldHospital
MarkdeRond
ForewordbyChrisHedges
ILRPressanimprintofCornell University Press Ithaca, New York
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2017 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rond, Mark de, author. Title: Doctors at war : life and death in a eld hospital / Mark de Rond ; foreword by Chris Hedges. Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2017. | Series: The culture and politics of health care work | Includes bibliographical references. Identiers: LCCN 2016036687 (print) | LCCN 2016037076 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501705489 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501707933 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501707940 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Surgery, MilitaryAfghanistan. | Afghan War, 2001 Medical care. | Military hospitalsAfghanistan. | Medicine, MilitaryAfghanistan. Classication: LCC RD476.A3 R66 2017 (print) | LCC RD476.A3 (ebook) | DDC 617.9/9dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036687
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ToMagda
Wereallalittleweird.Andlifeisalittleweird.Andwhenwe nd someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual satisfying weirdnessand call it love. Robert Fulghum,True Love
ForewordbyChrisHedgesix ByWayofIntroductionxiii 1 Hawkeye1 2 Reporting for Duty8 3 Camp Bastion21Reason to Live4 A 30 5Legs45 Now and Again6 Apocalypse 54 7 Boredom69 8 Christmas in Summer79Record-Breaking Month9 A 88 10 Kandahar98 11 War Is Nasty104 12 Way to Start Your Day115 13 Back Home128 Epilogue132 By Way of Acknowledgment141 Notes143
Contents
Foreword
nly those who have been to war see war. The images that O reach the public, however horri c, are carefully sanitized, edited, and censored. If we truly saw war, what war does to human bodies, the long, agonizing struggle to ward off death by the se-verely woundedlike the soldier I watched die over six hours after having his legs blown off by a mine in the Kuwait desertwar would be so unpalatable it would be hard to wage. Filmicandphotographicimagesofwar,eventheonesthatattempt to look at war uninchingly, fail to capture what is fun-damental to wars realitya crippling fear, the awful stench, the deafening noise from explosions and the re of automatic weapons, the zombielike exhaustion, the hallucinogenic land-scape of overturned vehicles, rubble, severed and decapitated human bodies, the lifeless forms of small children, and the ter-rifying confusion. Combat is chaotic and confusing. So is its aftermath. OverthetwodecadesofwarIcoveredasareporter,whetherinEl Salvador, Iraq, or Bosnia, the ritual was always the same. The wounded, the crippled, and the dead were swiftly carted off stage. They were wars refuse. We did not see them. We did not hear them. They were doomed, like wandering spirits, to skirt the edges