War Is a Real-Time Laboratory: Dispatch From Bagram and Biloxi

Abstract

When I first started writing this editorial around the middle of January 2012, I was at Manas Air Base, near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. I had arrived there a couple of days earlier from a multiple-leg flight that took me from Baltimore to Germany to Turkey and then to Manas, one of the staging areas for service members transitioning into and out of Afghanistan. I was sitting in the local coffee shop awaiting my connecting flight into Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where I would soon serve as the Human Protections Administrator (HPA) on the Joint Combat Casualty Care Research Team (JC2RT). The irony is that when Dr Craik originally approached Dr Aiken and me in the fall of 2011 to gauge our interest in putting together a special issue focused on military rehabilitation, I had absolutely no idea I would even be deployed. I now sit back in the comforts of my home in the United States putting the finishing touches on this editorial, the writing of which spanned my entire 6-month deployment. Needless to say, this special issue now has more personal relevance for me than perhaps it otherwise would have had! Regardless of your political leanings, war is the closest thing to hell on Earth, especially as it relates to combat casualties. Fortunately, service members at war now have immediate access to new lifesaving drugs, blood products, and techniques for applying tourniquets. Due to these rapid advancements, survival rates among …