BALAD (Iraq): Maj. Hans Bakken and Maj. Brett Schlifka were bone-tired as they sipped bad coffee from foam cups on a chilly morning in a US military tent. The neurosurgeons had worked on two serious head wound cases the previous evening and then, after going to sleep about midnight, were awakened at 1:30am to treat a soldier flown in with a gunshot to the head.

The night before that, on Sunday, they operated on ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt.

“They all get the same quality of medical care — a soldier, an Iraqi, a journalist,” said Schlifka, a big-armed man from Philadelphia.

They didn’t want to discuss specifics about Woodruff and Vogt. “We can’t give you any details” for privacy reasons, said Bakken, a native of Decorah, Iowa.

But they did talk plenty about who they are and what they do in this, the Air Force Theatre Hospital, recently designated as the medical receiving centre in Iraq for the handling of all head and neck wounds by the US military. The wounded ABC journalists were flown here by helicopter from Baghdad. They were eventually taken to the National Naval Medical Centre in Bethesda where a doctor said their prognosis was ‘excellent’, according to news reports.

Back home, Bakken said he saw ‘maybe half a dozen’ gunshot head wounds in six years of practice. Here, about 70 miles north of Baghdad, he handles one or two ‘penetrating brain injuries’ a day, either from gunfire or roadside bombs.

The two neurosurgeons also have become experts in particular varieties of head trauma. The majority of head injuries they saw in the United States involved external trauma, but most cases here involve penetration of the brain. What’s more, the pistol shots they generally saw in the United States were far less lethal than higher-velocity rifle shots that traverse the skull and are nearly impossible to survive, they said. Also, their patients here arrive with far more complex wounds than the typical victim back home. Bomb victims arrive with eardrums blown, cheekbones smashed, eyes ripped apart, as well as deep brain injuries.

The extraordinary becomes routine. “I would say without exception almost everyone who has a penetrating injury has a craniectomy,” said Bakken, referring to the operation in which part of the skull is removed to relieve swelling of the brain. Other military officials here have indicated that such a procedure was performed on Woodruff, who along with Vogt was injured on Sunday in a roadside bombing near Baghdad that caught them standing in the open hatch of an Iraqi army armoured vehicle. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service