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In comes two badly burned patients.  The first thing I noticed was that they had a lot of bandages all over their bodies.  More than what usually occurs out in the field by a medic.  Then I noticed that they both had venous cut-downs (the process of cutting into the skin to find a vein to put an iv into).  Then I noticed they both had Foley catheters (a tube that goes into the bladder through the penis - Iraqis, as do most soldiers, HATE when they need to get these.  I kid you not, they could be all shot up with multiple broken bones and lying there with only some mild moaning, but when you go to put the Foley in the scream like you are killing them) which looked a bit different.  Again, I thought this was a little more than what a medic or Battalion Aid Station usually does before transporting patients.  Then I noticed that the venous cut-downs were tied in with a cloth suture.  We never use that, these guys must have come from an Iraqi hospital.  When all else fails ask the guards...

Apparently, these guys were setting off IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices), when one went off a bit too close to their car, which was full of C4 (dynamite).  Bad guys go boom.  They blew themselves up pretty good.  They were taken to a local Iraqi hospital, and some US forces found out that these guys may be high in the ranks of the insurgents, so they went and swiped them from the hospital with some hopes of getting some good intel.  I think they were a bit shocked with what they found...

The first patient probably had about 80% TBSA (total body surface area) 3rd degree burns.  Very bad.  Survivability with over 60% TBSA is very low.  This guy didn't have a chance.  In fact he was barely alive when they brought him in.  The second guy was not as badly burned, he had about 55% TBSA 3rd degree burns.  Both patients were intubated and had central lines and arterial lines placed.  They weren't going to provide much information now...  As we were working on these guys, the guards mentioned that another helicopter would be coming to take these guys to another location.  Cool, I thought.  We don't have to devote tons of resources to take care of these guys only to see them die (burn patients like this will require massive amounts of IV fluids, massive amounts of sedatives and narcotics to keep them asleep while on the ventilator, massive amounts of IV antibiotics, surgery almost everyday to cut away dead tissue and remove scar tissue, and blood products because they always have problems with their clotting mechanisms - and CNN, the Washington Post, the New England Journal of Med, etc. say we are mistreating these Iraqi EPW's (enemy prisoners of war)...).

We essentially stabilized these guys and transferred them to the ICU to await their "transportation."  Their transportation did arrive and they brought a medic and one physician, and NO EQUIPMENT.  The doc almost shit himself when he saw the condition of the patients.  "Oh shit," he said, "do you guys have a phone?"  I knew right away that we were keeping these bad guys.  During the 45 minutes that the doc was on the phone, I asked the medic what they were told about these patients.  His response was, "they told us we were coming up here to pick up a few dudes."  Oh great.

As I predicted, the outcome was they left without their insurgents.  As I predicted, about 40 hours later the more severely injured EPW died.  Today is 7 Nov.  As I write this the second patient is still alive.  If he remained in the Iraqi hospital he surely would have died.  He is intubated (breathing tube in the lungs on a ventilator machine), but this will probably be removed in a day or two.  As I mentioned above, he has sucked up a massive amount of our resources.  On top of it all, the unit that initially brought him here has not produced any paperwork to officially make him an EPW.  After a bad guy is captured, the unit that captures him needs to provide sworn statements with evidence that the person is a bad guy.  Without these statements, the captured guy cannot be detained and placed in an EPW jail.  Makes sense, we can't just randomly pluck people off the streets and put them in jail unless we can prove they did something wrong.  Well, this unit has yet to produce paperwork on this patient.  If we do not receive any paperwork we will most likely transfer this guy back to the local hospital (we do not have the resources to keep this guy here indefinitely.  He is now quite stable and can be transferred to a local hospital that can give him the wound care he needs).  A local hospital from where one day he may be discharged and allowed to go back to the IED making business...

ALL THAT WORK FOR NOTHING