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EMERGENCY ROOM - On his first day in an Afghanistan combat hospital, former LGH surgeon Jamie Dunwoody (centre) treated victims of a roadside bomb. IEDs accounted for 80 per cent of all patient visits. Submitted photo
Healing with the enemy North Vancouver surgeon Jamie Dunwoody returns after a month in an Afghanistan combat hospital TODD COYNE S TA F F R E P O RT E R
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amie Dunwoody never expected when he signed up to serve the war effort in Afghanistan that he’d be working for both sides. But such is the reality of fulfilling the doctor’s Hippocratic oath in the middle of a warzone. The North Vancouver surgeon is recently back from a month-long stint in the operating room at Kandahar Airfield, one of the coalition army’s busiest combat hospitals in Afghanistan. When the former Lions Gate Hospital surgeon decided earlier this year that he wanted to experience the war first hand, he enlisted in the army and within just weeks he found himself in the roaring belly of a C-17 cargo plane bound for Afghanistan. With a reservist’s wage in his pocket and a Browning 9mm on his hip, it wasn’t the same workaday lifestyle Dunwoody was used to. That much was clear from his first morning commute. Landing at Kandahar Airfield is like landing in Las Vegas, Dunwoody recalled. It’s hot,
dusty and bright, incredibly so, even at 2 a.m. “Right away they took our passports and told us what to do in case of a rocket attack.” What to do, it seems, is hit the nearest dirt and lay there for two minutes, then report to the nearest bunker for roll call. Those were instructions Dunwoody wouldn’t have a chance to forget. By the time he found his cot, weary after 36 hours of travel, swarms of rockets began whizzing overhead like 107-mm hornets. “We were attacked every single day. Rockets flew around the base non-stop,” Dunwoody said. But for all their noise and bluster, the rockets had little of their desired impact and their menace soon turned to mundane nuisance. And so the work began. They say Afghanistan has two seasons: Winter and fighting season. And after a 12-hour snooze, Dunwoody soon found himself in the July heat of that unfairest of seasons. “This is a real trauma facility,” he said, pulling down hard on the syllables. “There is no congestive heart failure here.” Day one brought him victims of a roadside bomb — an improvised weapon which would account for 80 per cent of all patient visits, Dunwoody estimated. “I saw an American soldier with both of his legs blown off and one of his arms blown off, his genitalia blown off and his pelvis open. And we saved him. That was not uncommon.”
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