Aid and Comfort Among the many unsung–or insufficiently sung–heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom are the men and women of the hospital ship USNS Comfort, which was deployed to the Persian Gulf in January. The Comfort is a former supertanker turned 1,000-bed hospital with 12 operating rooms, staffed by Navy medical personnel and merchant marine crewmen. Its exploits were brought to our attention by an e-mail from one of the Naval Reserve doctors, Steve Crawford, which was forwarded to us. We received his permission to reprint the excerpts below.
“On the 10th of April, another doc, a nurse and myself were transferred from the USS Boxer by CH-46E helo to the USNS Comfort, the U.S. hospital ship. Unlike the medical teams on the amphibious assault ships, the Comfort had received many casualties. Some of these are coalition forces, however the majority are Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and a few are fighters from other Arab countries. Among the civilians are families, the elderly, and a number of children. Some of the children are alone, either orphaned by the fighting or handed to the Marines in desperation for someone to treat their injuries. A small few were ‘abandoned’ to the U.S. soldiers, not because the children were injured but rather, it appears, because they were developmentally retarded or emotionally disturbed. They are now our responsibility.
“I am working in the ICU. This is the largest collection of the sickest patients I have ever seen. We are caring for seven severe burn victims that would challenge any of the largest burn centers in the States. The gunshot and blast injuries are pretty horrific. The injuries were inflicted in a variety of ways: by our troops, their fighters, and some just by routine accidents unrelated to the war. To top it off, many of these patients are developing severe bacterial infections with organisms found in the Iraqi soil. Controlling these infections has been a major challenge. Most of the patients do not speak English, and the translators are kept busy. There are not enough of them to be available all the time. I cannot imagine being injured and alone with people who cannot talk to you, especially if you are only 4 years old.
“Most of us are working at least 12-hour days. It has been hard on our nurses who are pushed to the limits of their capabilities with the large number of severely sick patients. Many of our corpsmen have had little or no hospital experience. They are forced to learn quickly and learn on the job. In all, the attitude is one of firm resolve. Complaints and arguments are minimal. There is obvious frustration due to the intensity of the work and the constant shortage of supplies and medicines. We improvise with medication regimens when particular antibiotics or sedatives are unavailable for days at a time. Syringes, alcohol wipes, and certain dressings become used up, and people figure out ways to get around it. This takes a toll on the staff, and yet we are all ‘in the same boat’ and folks just ‘buck-up’ and deal with it. It is really quite amazing to realize how well these people cope with these stresses.
“If things keep going as they are, I hope there will be little need for us to stay here. The biggest hurdle appears to be how to provide long-term care and rehabilitation for these injured Iraqis. Until we find facilities in Iraq or another country to accept their care, we are stuck with no place to send them. I just hope our country and the rest of the world appreciate what lengths we are going to providing care for anyone who showed up at a coalition forces’ medical aid station.”
Daschle’s Conversion
Think back, if you will, to Monday, March 17, 2003–two days before American bombs first struck the Iraqi leadership compound. Tom Daschle was distraught and angry with the president.
“I’m saddened, saddened,” he said, “that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re forced to war–saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn’t create the kind of diplomatic effort so critical for our country.” This was a rather dramatic reversal for a man who had spent eight years preaching “unity” under President Clinton. In 1998, Daschle scolded Trent Lott for criticizing another in the endless string of “last chances” the U.N.’s Kofi Annan offered Saddam Hussein. “I don’t know what purpose it serves by attacking one another at this point. . . . Let’s not . . . send all kinds of erroneous messages to Iraq about what kind of unity there is within the community.”
Good advice. And now that the war has been decisively won, Daschle is taking it. Better late than never. In a May 6 interview, Daschle told PBS’s Jim Lehrer that better diplomacy “wasn’t possible” and that the United States had “exhausted the diplomatic effort.”
Lehrer asked Daschle if going to war had been “the right thing to do.” Said Daschle: “I wish we could have worked more effectively at the diplomatic side; that wasn’t possible, but having exhausted the diplomatic effort, we had no choice, in my view, but to continue to pursue our goals, and that was done, done successfully.”
Unity at last.
See No Evil
Following a series of scandals involving high-profile historians, the leading professional organization in the field, the American Historical Association, is reducing efforts to investigate claims of dishonest scholarship. The AHA said last week it would no longer evaluate claims of plagiarism reported to it, as had been its practice, despite the dishonor brought to the profession by such recent cases of plagiarism as those of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose and by Michael Bellesiles’s discredited history of gun ownership in America.
The association’s rationale, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, was that its resources would be better expended elsewhere. William J. Cronon of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, head of the AHA’s professional division, argued that because the association had no power to punish offenders, there was really no point in investigating plagiarism claims. The only action taken by the association in response to accusations of plagiarism has been a letter announcing their findings to those parties to the dispute. Otherwise its findings have been confidential.
One might argue then that the answer is not an end to investigations, but the publication of cases in which plagiarism has been discovered. It is a sad comment on the state of the profession, that the historians simply prefer not to police their own. But then, we already knew that from the case of Bellesiles, whose sins were effectively aired by journalists and non-historian academics. Indeed, AHA’s decision is something of a fait accompli because, for a while now, it’s been left to the nonprofessionals to police the profession.
Breindel Award for Michael Kelly
The fifth annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism has been awarded, posthumously, to Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. Sponsored by the Eric Breindel Memorial Foundation, and generously supported by News Corporation, Breindel’s longtime employer and this magazine’s corporate parent, the award is the richest honor in opinion journalism, carrying a prize of $10,000. It is presented each year to the columnist or editorialist whose work best reflects the spirit that animated Eric Breindel’s own writing: love of country, commitment to democratic institutions, and determination to bear witness to the evils of totalitarianism. This year, it seems to us, there could have been no other honoree.
Mike Kelly had many friends–and was universally admired–at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. We applaud the Breindel Foundation for its worthy tribute to his career. And we congratulate Mike’s family, which will accept the award in his memory and on his behalf.
