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USNS Comfort Stops in Rota in Return to Homeport

Navy Newsstand

Story Number: NNS030529-05

Release Date: 5/29/2003 12:14:00 PM

By Chief Journalist (SW) Dan Smithyman, Naval Station Rota Public Affairs

ROTA, Spain (NNS) -- Hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) is returning home after nearly six months underway. The ship pulled into Rota's naval station May 26 to pick up supplies and fill their gas tank before the final leg home to Baltimore.

Comfort spent 56 consecutive days on station in the Arabian Gulf, providing critical combat medical care to both coalition forces and Iraqis during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The ship's medical staff treated more than 160 coalition inpatients and nearly 200 Iraqi prisoners of war, in addition to another 300 outpatients. The Geneva Convention dictates that all casualties, friendly or foe, civilian or military, will be treated without regard to their affiliation.

Long Island native, Lt. j.g. Colleen Mahon, a nurse aboard Comfort, says she learned a great deal while treating patients, despite the horrific battle wounds she was charged with treating.

"Most of the injuries were bullet wounds," Mahon said. "But the worst were the burn patients. It's like nothing I've ever seen."

She said all Iraqis were considered prisoners of war until cleared by proper authority. The ship had only one translator aboard initially, and the language barrier was an obstacle they learned to overcome by hand signals and other means.

Cmdr. Brian Lewis, of Austin, Texas, and division officer of Casualty Receiving, said he was in constant awe of his staff. He said even though the 1,000-bed hospital ship provides the same capability as any large city hospital, many of his team had never worked together before this deployment.

"It was a really dynamic, exciting environment," Lewis said of the first few days of caring for wounded. "It never ceases to amaze me how inspired, and inspiring, our young troops are. My corpsmen and my nurses conducted business in a manner I never would have expected. They were so fantastic."

According to Lewis, many of the staff are trained for trauma in inner cities, like Washington and Los Angeles, but the traumas seen there are civilian traumas, nothing like the kinds of bullet wounds experienced in real combat. Lewis said the nature of the wounds seen aboard Comfort were "stunning."

Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Amy Lee, from Hay Springs, Neb., agreed she had never experienced anything like this before. She and others sought each other for their own brand of comfort and stress relief.

"We would talk about what we saw each day to help relieve some stress," Lee said. "It helped to know other people were feeling the same way you were. We would PT (physical training), read books, or whatever, just to try to alleviate some of the realities of what we'd seen that day."

"One day, we saw 54 real, no-joke, combat casualties in 10 hours," he said. "With 35 percent of my staff having less than one year of medical experience, I was concerned about how they would handle the intensity of working in Casualty Receiving. Our environment here is so dynamic, that the real word for it is 'chaotic.' When you have as many as 25 or 30 major trauma cases come in at the same time, the amount of chaos and confusion is stunning."