The USNS Comfort in Haiti

A must-read from the USNS Comfort, the US Navy's hospital ship based in Baltimore and now in Haiti:

We don’t have our Marine combat cargo Gunnery Sergeant yet so a Navy chief filled in today. We had 147 helicopters land on the Comfort. Only 81 patients so you can see there were a lot of politicians trying to show the world how important they are. Plus media was all over CASREC today.

Captain Sharpe, one of my roommates, just came in all pumped up about the day. He said, “This is what it’s all about. Helping people.” We talked about how much busier things are going to get. Last night he and I talked about amputations. You chop the limb off clean _ they call it a guillotine amputation _ cover it with gauze, and put the patient in the ward for a couple days. Then you have to bring him back and operate again to take out what’s died, rap it up, and put them away again for a couple day. This may go on 3 or 4 or 5 times until you open it up and nothings dead. Then you can close the skin flap and be done. The point is that a person with an amputation doesn’t get operated on once and done. So he’s concerned with the number of amputations we’ll see the number of surgeries will go thru the roof. We’ll just have to see.

Read the whole thing.

-Wes

h/t: Instapundit