2006 News picture story - HM

David Gilkey

ER Iraq

Soldiers injured in battle are brought by medical evacuation helicopters to the Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad Air Base in Iraq. The survival rate for critically wounded patients is over 80 percent thanks to the frontline doctors that have pushed emergency room medicine to the front lines of battle. New ways of healing are as much a product of war as are new ways of killing. To save lives on the battlefield, medical innovations are born in days — sometimes in hours and minutes — rather than in years or decades, military and civilian doctors said. And as with wars past, the new ways of treating the injured and sick in Iraq and Afghanistan could have benefits beyond the battlefield.