4

They Counseled Insurgents Next To The Men They Wounded

David Furst/AFP/Getty Images

War zones are notably lacking in functional, well-staffed hospitals. So when, say, a U.S. Marine and an insurgent are horrifically wounded in the same firefight, there's a good chance they'll both wind up in the same place. So sometimes Jim would get called in to counsel some depressed insurgent next to a man the insurgent had blown up. "We were supposed to go out and try to be compassionate to these people, make a 'positive difference in their lives.' That's admirable and all, but it was a little beyond me. But I figured ... I'm here, so I might as well do what I'm here to do. I tried. I really did," he says. "On one occasion I wound up counseling a wounded American infantryman with no lower extremities -- he'd lost them in an attack. And while I was gently introducing him to this new fact about his life, one of the insurgents responsible for the attack was across the room in another bed. They were only separated by a sheet. That guy wanted to talk, too. I won't claim he got my best."

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images
A little hard to work up the effort to give a hand when he took your guy's legs.

3

They Get A Close-Up View Of How Ugly -- And Weird -- Extremism Can Be

Department of Defense

On one occasion, Bill says, he "had to observe a man who had tied a plastic bag around his scrotum and penis and tied it off with string. ... Honestly, I have no idea why 'numb nutz' (as I called him from that point forward) tied his junk up with string and a plastic bag. From what I gathered from the translator, the guy was tired of having to clean himself after taking a piss, which is a custom in the Muslim faith, so he tied his junk up to prevent any dripping."

DTP/DigitalVision/Getty Images
"OK, for you I'll give my best counseling."

Huh, that's ... not where we thought that story was going. Many of Sara's patients were, well, less amusing. She sometimes wound up "shooting the shit" with violent radicals, asking one man, "What would you do if your sister went to the market by herself to buy fruit?" He responded, "I'd probably cut her legs off." Sarah says, "Just matter-of-fact. His family strongly believed a female had to have an escort, and that's how he'd treat his sister."

2

It's An Incredibly Busy Hospital That Sometimes Explodes

Frank Rossoto Stocktrek/DigitalVision/Getty

As we mentioned, Sara worked as a medic in Camp Bucca's trauma ward. As you might have guessed, there is stress involved in that job. "It was one of the most fast-paced work environments I've ever been in. You get a call that a trauma is coming in, and they have to coordinate pick-up by helicopter. If they're close enough to the hospital they just haul ass to the facility, 1.5 miles each way was the green zone. So everything outside was a combat zone. So these guys would get into a firefight or blown up. ... Once you get that call, it's just coordination between a surgeon, the medics downstairs. ... My first case I thought it was insane. After 1.5 weeks there, you get used to it and you kinda live off of that adrenaline," she says.

Most of what Sara dealt with were bomb victims. "Ninety percent of cases were IED blasts. Lot of shrapnel wounds. They were the worst wounds, because ... when it blows up it sends pieces of metal into the person, so a small hole on the outside wreaks havoc on the body. You put in a lot of time X-raying, trying to stop the bleeding. It was just devastating."

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images
And when you're done you get to clean it up.

She continues: "By the end of the year into the spring, we started seeing EFP, explosively formed penetrators -- they put them in barrels, copper on top, explosive charge through a ball of molten copper. They hit the trucks a lot. But the armor wouldn't stop the copper. So even the Bradleys, pretty tough vehicles, or the MRAPS, it'd go through them like butter. And when it hit a soldier ... it would take everything off, rip an entire arm or a leg off. That was a lot easier than spending eight hours digging around in someone's stomach. But it was a lot more stressful for the soldier."

Oli Scarff/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Medics still have nightmares every time they see a penny.

1

They Also Treat Wounded Civilians, And It's Horrifying

Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Obviously, American soldiers and insurgents opposing them aren't the only people who get/got killed/horribly wounded in Iraq/Afghanistan. Some estimates say more than a million people have died in Iraq since the invasion (5 percent of the population) and more than 220,000 people in Afghanistan, most of them civilians. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the wars, on the ground, it is a shitstorm of human misery. Our sources saw it up close. "The hospital wasn't supposed to serve the local Iraqis," Jim says, "but the physician in charge basically said, 'Fuck that, of course we're going to treat these people.'"

David Furst/AFP/Getty Images
"Let's just hope they're not scared about getting dragged into a prison camp."

Sara had one nightmarish example: "We had a kid that came in early in deployment. The story ... kept changing, but the one that stuck around was that her family didn't want her anymore, 10-year-old girl, so they doused her with kerosene and set her on fire. And we got her 10 days after she was set on fire. And she was still alive. But her family decided to take her to an outlying American hospital. Dunno where she was from in Iraq. Probably 85 percent third-degree burns.

"They brought her straight to the OR, and we had this great burn doctor. He and I debrided everything, shaved her hair because of the lice. We tried to scrub her as much as we could. Did surgery to relieve pressure from swelling muscle tissue. We sent her up to the ICU, and I came up after and talked to nurses a bit ... but she came back the next day and her tissue and her legs were dead. Just totally dead. So we ended up amputating her legs from the knee down. Over the course of her time in the hospital, she got better. Everyone loved her. She was really witty, and if she didn't like something ... we spoiled her. She had so many stuffed animals, Disney movies, they set up a TV for her, and she wound up being our little mascot."

Omar Havana/Getty Images News/Getty Images
That's our last amputation story, we promise.

Holy shit. So how in the hell do you live through that kind of thing, day after day? Well ...

"Suicide was a worry with a lot of the soldiers there," Jim says. "I had to talk people out of porta-shitters with a rifle in their mouth ready to pull the trigger. People got alcohol in; one civilian huffed air dusters so much he barricaded himself in his trailer and we had to cut a hole in the wall to get him out. He got sent home."

For Sara, well, it was the little things: "There were a lot of palm trees and date trees. Not a lot of grass. I remember specifically the contractors on the outpost next to us planted a patch of really soft green grass. There was no grass anywhere around us, but we just had this little patch, and I miss walking by it," she says. "That little patch of grass was my favorite thing to walk by."

Robert Evans has a book, A Brief History of Vice, which you can order now!

Deep inside us all -- behind our political leanings, moral codes, and private biases -- there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful that we can't help but proselytize about it to the world. In the next live episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Harsh Truths You Learn As A Doctor In The Third World and 5 Things You Learn Hanging With The Taliban.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out The Insane World Of Video Game Health Care, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook, and let's go out and hug everyone we see.

Have a story to share with Cracked? Email us here.