Afghans keep U.S. hospital busy

Lynn Doan

Wednesday, June 23, 2004 | 9:05 a.m.

Four seriously injured Afghan civilians were treated at the U.S.-run Combat Support Hospital in Bagram, Afghanistan, for every one seriously injured U.S. or coalition soldier, according to the only American pharmacist in Afghanistan during the first six months of last year.

Army Capt. Charles Boenig, who received a Bronze Star for his six months of medical support in Afghanistan, discussed that ratio after speaking Monday to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists at The Venetian.

Boenig said he treated an equal number of Afghan civilians and U.S. soldiers. But while civilians were only treated for serious injuries, soldiers could "come and be treated for even an ingrown toenail."

Boenig said that most of the civilians who came to the American hospital in Bagram suffered from gunshot wounds and land mine injuries. During his time at the hospital, Boenig said, he rarely treated a civilian suffering from U.S. or coalition-caused injuries, with most gunshot wounds resulting from "local gunfire" and mines.

"Afghanistan was so heavily land mined that (civilians) were always walking on them," he told the pharmacists gathering during a presentation that included photographs from his stint in the war zone.

"They would plow their field and hit a land mine. They would go the bathroom and hit a land mine," he said. "It was terrible."

One Afghan boy, who allowed Boenig to take his picture, survived a gunshot wound in his head. Doctors at the U.S.-run hospital used a zipper suture on the boy's head so that a portion of his skull that was saved might be reinserted in the future, Boenig said.

Boenig said the hospital, which is located on the coalition's Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, was only able to treat civilians who were at risk of "loss of life, limbs or eyesight."

And while wounded soldiers were delivered to the hospital in helicopters and ambulances, Boenig said civilians came to the base by whatever means they could find, including wheelbarrows and donkeys.

Boenig's job was to reform the hospital's pharmacy, which had been without a pharmacist for five months before his arrival in December 2002. Boenig also maintained medical records for all soldiers who were treated.

Boenig said there had already been one accidental drug overdose before he got there -- a soldier who was taking between nine to 12 pain pills each day.

One of the biggest challenges at the pharmacy was dirt, he said.

"You could clean off a counter and, within eight hours, you'd come back and it would need to be cleaned again," Boenig said. "You're breathing it in all the time."

Boenig was able to get enough clear tarp to wrap around the storage room-turned-pharmacy and came up with other ways to prevent dirt from contaminating the drugs, including making his own plastic boxes.

Boenig was also responsible for organizing missions "outside the wire," or off the perimeter of the airbase, to aid civilians who were unable to travel to the hospital. Though the visits were always unannounced, for security reasons, Boenig said a crowd as large as 1,000 civilians would appear for medical attention in no time.

So as not to infringe on Afghan tradition, doctors tended to patients in a hierarchal order: first men, then women, then children. Because "female children are worth less than dogs" in Afghanistan, Boenig said, parents did not even bother bringing their baby daughters to doctors for medical attention.

"But I wasn't there to show these people how to live," said Boenig, who would have liked to have treated the patients according to the severity of their injuries. "Our function is just to re-establish the type of government and system they had prior to the Taliban. To say they'll have a wonderful democratic society like ours is foolish."

Boenig said he was shocked to hear allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq. As one of his duties in Afghanistan, Boenig visited the Bagram base's prisoners every month.

"I never saw anything but good treatment of those people," he said.