Dr. Gene Bolles is a Colorado neurosurgeon and Vietnam vet who volunteered to go to work at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in the Iraq war. (Landstuhl is significant because it's where badly injured military are stablized once they're airlifted from Iraq, and before being returned to the States to recuperate further in key trauma hospitals in the U.S. like Bethesda and Walter Reed.) Bolles, who is not pro-war, looks at himself as old enough to be a grandfather to some of the troops he's operated on. But he is uniformly moved by their tremendous courage in the face of truly awesome suffering and tragedy. Read Bolles to get a mature doctor's view of how heroic the current vets are, with all that they endure. It's hard not to admire Bolles quite a bit in the process, and to see and feel the toll that so much carnage has taken on him as well. If we assume the vets are stoic, we perhaps assume that of their caregivers as well. And it's better that we enlarge our view, and make it fuller and more complete. (The op-ed piece was published in the New York Daily News.)
A segment on PBS' News Hour, with Jim Lehrer, entitled "War Wounds," which interviews Dr. Bolles and several others, makes it clear that Bolles himself is affected by what he's seen and experienced, to the point that he has a hard time relaxing or falling asleep.
