BOSTON, Dec 23: A US medic wounded in Tuesday's suicide bomb attack in Iraq had only months earlier helped draft an eerily prescient plan on how to cope with a major attack on the exact same dining facility, a Maine newspaper reported on Thursday.

Maj John Nelson, a 51-year-old medical officer for the Maine Army National Guard's, was sitting just five metres from the explosion that tore through a mess tent at a US military base in Mosul on Tuesday.

Thirteen US soldiers and five American civilians were among those killed. Sixty-nine people were wounded, including Nelson, who was struck in the back by shrapnel.

Bill Nemitz, a columnist for the Portland Press Herald who is embedded with US troops in Iraq, interviewed Maj Nelson after the blast and learned that the medic had only months earlier helped draft a plan on how to treat casualties of an attack on the mess tent at the Marez base.

Major Nelson's mass casualty plan assumed 24 dead - two more than the actual death toll to date. Mr Nemitz reported that for months, the major had been drilling his staff to prepare them for an attack just like the one at Marez.

"At times, some of the younger medics would roll their eyes at the often irascible senior officer and wonder, sometimes aloud, if all of this wasn't a tad melodramatic," Mr Nemitz wrote in a column that ran on Thursday. "No longer." -Reuters