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Gidddeee-up.  It is October!  Another month down.  One more month closer to getting the heck out of here.

This morning around 0800 we heard the dreaded words, "EMT, TOC."   "MEDEVAC bird inbound with one EXPECTANT patient."  That struck me as very odd for several reasons.  The military uses a triage system to classify the severity of the injuries of casualties in order to prioritize their care.  The categories are: immediate - has life-threatening injuries that require immediate attention, delayed - serious injuries that could potentially wait a few hours if necessary, minimal - minor injuries (aka "the walking wounded"), and expectant - the patient either has fatal injuries or the injuries are so severe that the repair of the injuries is beyond the current capabilities.  Triage by definition means doing the most good for the most people.  Therefore in a situation where there are many casualties and attempting to save one seriously injured casualty would use up a significant portion of resources, one might have to make the difficult decision of making this seriously injured patient expectant.  Fortunately, we have not had to deal with that scenario during this deployment.  This triage system pertains to patients arriving to the hospital.  Oddly, the aeromedical evacuation system has their own triage category.  They use: urgent - must be evacuated within 4 to 6 hours, priority - evac within 24 hours, and routine - 48 to 72 hrs.  So this medevac was strange because someone called in a non-aeromedical triage category.  But, stranger than that, they were evacuating an expectant patient.  Typically this means that this casualty is going to die and most likely nothing can be done to save them.  Why would they bring someone to the CSH who is going to die?  Certainly there are several reasons I could think of, but it was still strange.

Well, the helicopter arrived and out comes a way dead Iraqi bad guy.  Around here we enjoy seeing this type of thing.  This guy had been shot in the middle of the left side of his chest, through and through.  A VERY non-survivable wound.  When the excitement died down, it turned out the guy was still alive after he had been shot.  The guys on the ground were afraid how it would look if they just let this guy die, so they decided to evac him to the CSH.  So they put a MEDEVAC crew and Blackhawk helicopter at risk to pick-up and Iraqi dirt-ball who surely was going to die from his wounds.  All to avoid headlines saying, "US Forces Refuse Medical Care to Dying Iraqi Civilians..." or something like that.  At my last assignment I worked with some GREAT leadership; I had a Commander who used to say, "Intel drives Ops" (translated: intelligence about the enemy and the situation helps guide the operations or missions that the soldiers perform).  Well, I guess in this case, "Media drives Ops."

Let me digress a bit to talk about the situation in Northern Iraq.  The situation here is growing more violent.  Overall our base has been relatively safe, but the stories we are hearing about what is happening in the town of Mosul are scary.  Our interpreters and their families have been threatened with kidnapping and murder.  Several interpreters and other Iraqi employees of this base have been murdered.  There are many stories of innocent Iraqis being threatened with kidnapping or death if they do not pay-off these bad guys.  Several Iraqi civilians who work in our hospital quit after the workday yesterday because of threats to them and their families.  Churches have been bombed here.  A local University has been bombed.  And, the insurgents are threatening to bomb children on school buses.  What is that???  I am not sure who these mad guys are, but some people say they are a mix between outsiders (terrorists from Iran, Syria, and Jordan) and former bad guys involved with Saddam (Baath Party, Saddam's Army, etc.). 

Well, it seems as the coalition forces up here are sitting around and letting this happen.  From our point of view, we don't see enough being done up here to help secure Mosul.  One reason for this is that a lot of the Northern Iraq assets are currently engaged (well, finishing up) in Tall'afar.  For some reason, Northern Iraq does not get a lot of coverage in the media.  Which is fine with me because then my family doesn't have to get upset and worried about the things the see and hear in the news.  But, the town of Tall'afar (a medium sized town in Northern Iraq) had been getting more and more violent over the last few months.  Well, about two weeks ago the forces up here moved into Tall'afar and essentially leveled the place.  They went after the insurgent positions the way the US Army should go after an enemy.  They killed and captured many insurgents.  Click here to read more about it.  As a result, violent activity in Tall'afar has ceased.  More recently coalition forces have begun to take control of Samarra as well.  Click here for a story on that.  The time of the "surgical attacks" is over.  It is time to get serious with these cowards.  They are protecting themselves by hiding in mosques, schools, and hospitals.  There have been plenty of weapons caches found hidden in schools.  .Remember back in July when al-Sadr was hiding out in the mosque in Fallujah?  Well, he somehow escaped before US forces took the place, but what did they find when the US forces entered the place?  There were MANY dead women and children in there.  Presumably these people were killed and placed in there to make it seem as if the US "killed" innocent women and children in the event that the mosque was bombed.  This is the way these people operate.  I don't understand why this did not receive wider media coverage? 

These insurgents are getting more confident and more violent.  They are attacking innocent Iraqis more so than they are going after coalition forces.  Click here to read an article about a recent car bomb that killed 35 children and injured over 100.  Yeah, these broad attacks are going to cause some collateral damage and result in the deaths of innocent people.  But they will not kill nearly as many people as these insurgents are killing and ultimately they will result in less people killed by terrorists.

To summarize:  It's time to start kicking some ass.