GI Medics Launch Assault on Hunger, Disease in Iraq

By KIM MURPHY

April 20, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAFWAN, Iraq — They are, in a world where misery keeps banging on the front gate with clenched brown fists, two U.S. Army medics armed with stethoscopes, antibiotics and the will to comfort a nation past solace.

The clinic in Safwan consists of a few examining tables, tall stacks of medication boxes, buckets of water mixed with antiseptic--and, everywhere, the hot, dry wind of an uneasy early summer, pushing through shattered windowpanes and rustling the robes of the waiting patients.

Here is the new front in the just-ended war: a stream of the injured, dying, ill and starving from hundreds of miles in all directions, converging on a side street of this dusty border village where a pair of physician’s assistants from New York and Texas have opened what appears to be the best-supplied medical facility in southern Iraq.

In the weeks since the two warrant officers arrived, they have lured the Iraqi staff back to the clinic, seen an estimated 200 patients a day, helped scrounge up electrical generators to power a mosque and 100 houses in the surrounding village, launched a school lunch program, delivered babies, chastised neglectful parents, defied angry combatants, treated shrapnel injuries, bullet wounds, malnutrition, leprosy and congestive heart failure, handed out meal rations and comforted the grieving.

“Our main goal has been to show the people that although the war had gone on and they certainly were in dire straits, it wasn’t a hopeless situation, they could pick themselves up, do something for themselves,” said Chief Warrant Officer Joseph Hatch of Hamburg, N.Y.

“I like to think that the Marshall Plan begins with a bottle of water and a Hershey bar,” he said in an interview.

“As a professional soldier, I fought the enemy. Now, the war’s over, the shooting’s done. I’m not going to turn my back on an invalid man with diabetes who’s 60 years old and hasn’t had insulin in a month. I look at it as a gift from the people of America to the people of Iraq: We don’t hate you. How can you hate the 16-year-old mother of a dying baby?”

The clinic opened on March 19 with Hatch and the other member of this odd couple, Tunisian-born Chief Warrant Officer Mahfoudh Beaoui of San Antonio, when the 3rd Armored Division moved into Safwan, a small community on Iraq’s border with Kuwait, behind the departing 1st Infantry Division.

The two medics found a gutted shell of a clinic, its medical supplies looted, its equipment smashed, window glass strewn across the floor, no running water and plugged latrines.

Retreating Iraqi soldiers had taken what they could as they left, and then, according to townspeople, incoming Kuwaiti, Egyptian and Senegalese soldiers further pillaged the facility.

Hatch and Beaoui persuaded some nervous Iraqi townspeople--fearful of cooperating with the American occupiers--to help sweep up the floors and set up what was left of the equipment, then opened the door for business.

On the first day, 400 people showed up, many dying of malnutrition, dehydration, severe diarrhea, pneumonia, parasitic infections, old infected war wounds or new injuries from fresh munitions explosions. They amputated a man’s badly injured foot on the first day, sewed up the stumps of cut-off fingers, dispensed medication and dispatched some gravely ill patients for acute-care treatment at field hospitals in Saudi Arabia and, later, Kuwait.

On another day, they treated five children wounded when a cluster bomb left from the war exploded. Four of them survived.

Throughout it all, in the early days, the Iraqis and the Americans eyed each other with a kind of perplexity, the Iraqis seemingly not sure whether to trust the soldiers who had battled their army and occupied their cities, the Americans unable to comprehend the level of despair that had settled over the war weary populace.

The worst day, said Hatch, was an afternoon when a young mother brought in her infant son, suffering from a severe infection of the soft tissues of the head, which by then had invaded much of the rest of the baby’s body. The medics said the only way of saving the baby was immediately transporting him to a hospital in Saudi Arabia.

The mother refused. “I will throw him in the ditch,” she told the astounded medics.

The same day, a 16-year-old girl brought in her month-old baby, suffering from severe malnutrition because it apparently had not been fed. “They had an older child who was perfectly well-fed, but the 65-year-old father apparently didn’t feed the baby because he figured . . . well, it’s the second son; what the hell,” Hatch said.

In both cases, the two medics grabbed the babies from their mothers and sent them out of the country for treatment. They have since been returned to their parents.

“I don’t know if they were frightened of their husbands in the army, or if they thought once we took them they’d never see the baby again, or if they just didn’t care,” said Hatch. “I think that was the hardest day for me. We had a kid blow his hand off that day, another kid got powder burns on his face. . . . Every day has been a different day, and there are no better days.”

A few days later, one of the men who’d helped clean up the clinic brought in his baby daughter, Wisan, suffering from diarrhea, vomiting, pneumonia and malnutrition.

“The baby was a mess,” Hatch recalled. “I made her my project: If there was one thing in Safwan that was not going to fail, it was this kid. She had a tube in her arm, a tube in her leg, a tube in her stomach.” Hatch fed her through an eyedropper in the mouth for weeks before she pulled out of it and was able to go home.

In the meantime, Hatch and Beaoui turned their attention on the schools in Safwan, which with the help of the two medics and other 3rd Armored Division personnel had opened within a few weeks but which were not attracting children from the streets of the village, where they loitered day after day.

The two medics set up a school lunch program, offering Army rations to whoever attended school all day, and attendance immediately climbed from 40 to 150--and finally 600--a day.

They helped free up several electrical generators that had been seized from the Iraqis and made sure they were set up to deliver power to the local mosque and about 100 nearby houses.

As word of the spare, three-room clinic spread, Iraqis from as far as 300 miles away began showing up for treatment. The Iraqi-controlled hospital at Basra, itself unable to obtain medical supplies, began sending patients to Safwan, and eventually Iraqi authorities signed documents allowing former employees of the clinic to go back to work.

Last Saturday, with the return of Safwan’s only physician, the Army officially handed control of the clinic over to the Iraqi staff, which by now includes the doctor, five nurses, a pharmacist, two ambulance drivers and two custodians. Hatch and Beaoui are staying on as advisers.

“The Americans came, they treated us with fairness and brought us back many of the things the war cost us,” said the Iraqi doctor, Taha Hussein. “We feel they’re the people who got the town started again.”

The two medics said the clinic, and everything that came after it, was a natural outgrowth of the American Army’s occupation of southern Iraq.

“We moved into Safwan. We occupied their city. We were the enemy. We carried guns, told people what to do. But then we looked around and said, ‘There’s some things we could do here,’ ” Hatch said.

“There was initially a suspicion: ‘Why are you doing this? What do you want?’ The answer was, ‘We want you to be healthy. We want you to be free.’ ”