Out of harm's way

[unhappycamper]

Out of harm's way
By Sam Allis
Globe Columnist / November 11, 2007

Back in September, Anthony Pasqualone was first assistant to surgeons performing traumatic amputations on soldiers at a military hospital in Al Asad, a town in the bloody Al Anbar Province of Iraq.

"We saw the outcome of war. We treated mutilated bodies," Pasqualone says. "We cut off arms, legs, elbows, hands. A lot of this came from IEDs . Al Asad is the starting and end point of a convoy route that's about 120 miles long. It's a four- or five-day event, because they're shot at a lot and hit with IEDs."

Today, Pasqualone is the grand marshal of the Veterans Day parade in his hometown of Arlington.

Pasqualone, an orthopedic nurse practitioner at MIT Medical in civilian life, has been nursing for 32 years and in and out of harm's way with some frequency. He volunteered for Vietnam and served in the Mekong Delta from 1971 to 1972, working on humanitarian projects with the Navy Seabees.

He joined the Army reserves when he returned and later found himself in Germany during the first Gulf War, backstopping a medical unit that went to the Mideast. He was in Kuwait running a military emergency department before the start of the current war. "We knew the war was coming before you did," he says.

And on Oct. 1, Lieutenant Colonel Pasqualone returned home after a year in Iraq with his unit, the 399th Combat Support Hospital. The unit flew into Hanscom Field and found a large crowd of families and supporters convened in a big hanger. A general was there. So was Senator John F. Kerry, who Pasqualone says gave the best speech of all - "short and sweet and no politics."


Rest of article at: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/11/out_of_harms_way/