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Children of War: An Afghan Boy and His Little Sister

2 years ago

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BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan -- This war's wounded are collected from outposts around Afghanistan by C-130 aeromedical flights. The planes land here with the broken and lacerated bodies of young Americans, lying comatose in casts and bandages among their intravenous tubes and their blood monitors and respirator masks, stacked in racks of litters quietly attended by nurses wearing careworn faces and blue surgical gloves.

The wounded are rushed on gurneys into the big American military hospital to have their wounds washed and dressed, and often to undergo more surgery to stabilize them before being flown to Germany and home. This incoming flight was different, for one of the litters held the huddled figure of a little girl with one leg fractured, the other leg and her buttocks needled painfully with metal shards of shrapnel. She may have been 7 years old. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her name is Roqua.

She had been brought to the British hospital at Camp Bastion in Kandahar Province, the scene of heavy fighting. The details were unclear, but the word passed along by the medical staff was that her family had been killed – all but one, her older brother. That would be Abdul Khaliq, the solemn young boy standing beside the litter, gripping her small hand.

The U.S. military's medical policy is that combatants wounded in battle – Americans, Afghans and insurgents – are given first-priority medical attention (and they receive the same emergency medical care.) Next come Afghan civilians wounded in the fighting. Much is made about innocent Afghans killed amid the callousness of battle. Little is heard of the wounded civilians who are rushed away for world-class U.S. medical treatment.

Roqua fit that category, although no one knew whether she had been wounded and her family killed by insurgents or whether she was an innocent casualty of errant American fire. "It doesn't really matter, does it?'' a nurse said to me.

At Camp Bastion, Roqua's litter had been loaded gently aboard the C-130 along with the other battlefield wounded. Her brother was there, too, allowed on board as a family escort. A seat was found for him in the noisy, windowless cargo bay of the plane, and there he sat, clutching an air-sick bag, while the plane took off for Bagram.

When the C-130 flight crew learned of the young Afghan boy on board for his first airplane ride, they sent word back to bring him to the flight deck. Up he came, and soon was standing behind the pilot and co-pilot, grinning broadly, earphones on head and bubble gum in mouth.

Lt. Col. David Kolterman, a pilot and commander of the 77th Expeditionary Airlift Wing, snapped a photo of him there. When I saw them several days later in the hospital, Roqua had had her surgeries and was dozing while an Air Force nurse softly stroked her forehead. And Abdul Khaliq? He sat in a chair nearby, glued to a TV screen filled with bikinis and sports cars, the movie "Charlies' Angels: Full Throttle."

He was polite and respectful when I got him aside during a break, and he shook my hand with a small but firm grip. But I didn't learn much. His airplane ride was "very good,'' according to the interpreter. He thought he might be 12 years old. He did not attend school. He did not know who was responsible for casualties in his family. "There was just a lot of fighting,'' the interpreter relayed.

But whatever had happened, Abdul Khaliq and his sister were now safe.

He had bathed and put on clean (donated) clothes. Roqua was on the mend and well cared for. It is difficult to say what the future holds for them. Roqua will be moved to the Korean or Egyptian hospital here for long-term care. Eventually sister and brother will be taken home and absorbed back into rural village life and their extended family.

Perhaps their astonishing experience with America's humanitarian values may eventually lead them toward a larger horizon. That is not the point, of course: their rescue and care come without a price tag. For the medics and flight nurses, pilots and surgeons and orderlies, the opportunity to help ensure that the two young Afghans are healthy and safe is its own reward.

A final note: The Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital here, where the wounded are collected and prepared for medevac flights to Germany, is always looking for donations from home. Especially valued: get-well cards; homemade quilts and soft blankets to tuck in around the patients as they leave; toiletries; and T-shirts and sweatpants, because their uniforms are usually cut away by surgeons. If you're so inclined, send to: The Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital, Task Force MED-EAST – Afghanistan, APO AE, 09354

Filed Under: Afghanistan Journal

Tagged: afghanistan war, AfghanistanWar, doctors, nurses, wounded civilians, wounded soldiers, WoundedCivilians, WoundedSoldiers

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