The Unknown Soldiers

Gene Bolles has seen more than his fair share of human suffering. Two years in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center – the U.S. military hospital in Germany that receives all injured soldiers evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan – is no doctor's dream job, especially not if you are a neurosurgeon who specializes in brain and spinal injuries – the kind that can destroy a 19-year-old kid's life. Yet as he speaks of the shattered soldiers who were once his charge, Bolles is neither overwrought nor angry.

The soft-spoken 62-year-old civilian speaks not of politics but of humanity – the terrible toll imposed by all wars, unjust or otherwise, on all involved, soldier or civilian. He speaks not of blame but of compassion and duty – our duty as a nation to pay attention and tend to the young men and women we ask to sacrifice life or limb in battle. At a time when the reality of the suffering in Iraq has been rendered invisible by media hype and partisan battle, Gene Bolles remains a steadfast advocate for the scarred, the maimed, and the tormented – whose numbers are far, far greater than what the Bush administration would like to admit.

So how did you end up working at Landstuhl hospital?

I am a neurosurgeon and have been in the practice for 32 years. I was approached to consider working for the Department of Defense and going to Landstuhl right after 9/11. So I took a leave of absence from my hospital and became the chief of neurosurgery in Germany.

That was right at the time the war in Afghanistan began and carried through Feb. 1, 2004.

Were the 9/11 attacks part of the reason why you agreed to go to Landstuhl?

Sure, in part. I had been in the military years ago, during the Vietnam era. I'd had that experience. So when this came up, I felt honored to have an opportunity to go help out and do what I could.

What kind of cases did you treat in Landstuhl? And these were mostly kids, right?

Well, I call them that since I'm 62 years old. And they were 18, 19, maybe 21. They all seemed very young. Certainly younger than my children.

As a neurosurgeon I mostly dealt with injuries to the brain, the spinal cord, or the spine itself. The injuries were all fairly horrific, anywhere from loss of extremities, multiple extremities, to severe burns. It just goes on, and on, and on. There were just a lot of serious injuries.

As a doctor myself who has seen trauma throughout his career, I've never seen it to this degree. The numbers, the degree of injuries. It really kinda caught me off-guard.

What about the soldiers themselves?

The soldiers, initially because of how they're trained, don't think of themselves. They're thinking of the buddies they've left behind. Almost all of them don't accept the reality of what's happened to them. They're still back in the war zone. And they care about their buddies so much.

And this is what makes the soldiers do what they do so gallantly – this feeling for each other. So when they get injured, they first feel guilty that they're not still back with their buddies. But then as time goes on, they realize that the price they paid for the war and then there is anger. And then there is frustration, then sadness, then depression. They realize they may never walk again or are so disfigured that the rest of their life is going to be very difficult.

But when they're going through this depression, we don't write about them so much. We don't display them. We want to only look at those soldiers who have either recovered from it or those who are acting as though nothing has happened. It's because we want to look at them as heroes. And they are heroes. But it's a reality that is not talked about much.

One of the soldiers interviewed in a recent documentary, titled "The Ground Truth," said that post-traumatic stress disorder is going to be to the Iraq War what Agent Orange was to the Vietnam War. Do you agree?