Medical research is part of the military's combat mission, too

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FOB WILSON - OCTOBER 10: Army PFC,Terry Heise, screams in pain as Task Force Shadow flight medics work on his leg wounds aboard a Medivac in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan on October 10, 2010. At , left, Army PFC Jeff Springer and (right) Sgt Rodrigo Santos are transported with Heise by helicopter from the battlefield after an IED expoloded under the MRAP they were riding in the Kandahar region of Afghanistan. The explosion killed two other soldiers riding in the vehicle. All three survived but with lower extremity injures; one lost his foot.


Medical research is part of the military's combat mission, too
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 30, 2010; 10:43 PM

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, AFGHANISTAN - On most days of his six-month deployment, surgeon David H. Zonies was lucky just to get outside and see the sun. Often, his only break from work was 30 minutes on the treadmill in the physical therapy department.

Every day, a half-dozen casualties arrived at the Joint Theater Hospital here, nearly all needing surgery in the next 24 hours, many missing limbs, a few barely clinging to life. The 36-year-old Air Force major was the "trauma czar." His job was to coordinate the patients' care and operate on about a third of them.

At the end of October, however, Zonies took two days away from the job. He exchanged blue scrubs for a brown flight suit, flew to Kandahar Airfield 350 miles to the southwest and presented two papers at a medical conference.

One described bringing dialysis to the war theater, and the other was about a new lab test for measuring the strength of blood clots. Thirty people from four hospitals in Afghanistan watched his PowerPoint presentations and asked him questions. Then he flew back to work.

Zonies' big outing - and the willingness of the Air Force to let him take it - says a lot about how important medical research is to the American military, even during one of the most intense periods of a nine-year war.