The Hole Where Sgt. Thorne's Life Used to Be

A short while later, after the shooting stopped and he'd stretchered his dead and wounded out of the L-shaped alley, Specialist Chris McCracken sat down for a moment and realized he'd seen the car, the one that played cat-and-mouse with them all morning. He'd marked it — they all had — but paid no mind; they were always being tailed by local kids for sport or tough-guy practice.

Except that there, suddenly, it was at the mouth of the alley, slowing to a crawl with its windows down, three or four barrels on the passenger side pouring a thunderhead of AK fire. There was nowhere to hide and no time to duck; the blasting went on and on. The squad leader bled out on the ground. Another soldier took a bullet that clipped his neck and was crippled from the shoulders down. Of those still breathing, the worst off was the team leader, a blond, hawk-eyed sergeant named Scott Thorne.

The bullet that bounced off his radio pack split his skull open at the ear. White matter and brain fluid foamed out the hole; a lagoon of blood gathered where he lay. Holding him still in the medivac truck that jounced through downtown Mosul, Iraq, McCracken examined his good friend's wound and thought, Christ, no way, man. He's gone.

That was how things happened in northern Iraq: You'd be out there all morning on a nothing mission, walking street patrol in the high heat of September that kept everyone indoors, when suddenly a rocket wheeled in or a van blew up and the world went to pieces around you. For weeks, this seven-man squad of the Stryker Brigade had been spinning its gears and marking time, checking off the days of a yearlong tour that was up in less than a month. A razor-sharp crew of recon scouts who'd handled themselves brilliantly in their prior mission — hunting down insurgents at the Syrian border — the unit had been detailed to Mosul to serve the drab function of traffic cop. Jotting license-plate numbers, checking car trunks for rifles — it was pretty pale stuff for elite-level soldiers who could track and kill their prey in pitch darkness.

When Sgt. Thorne arrived at the neurosurgery ward at a Green Zone hospital in Baghdad half an hour after the attack, Col. John Werschkul looked down at him and wasn't sure where to start. Werschkul, a veteran combat surgeon who'd operated in the first Gulf War, had seen his share of above-the-neck trauma, but this was another order of magnitude. The bullet that slammed to the back of Thorne's brain sat intact but inoperable in the rear lobe. There was massive swelling of the surviving tissue and a rubble of fractures and dural lining that had to be stripped out gingerly. To give his patient any sort of chance, Werschkul removed about a third of the skull above and behind the left ear. After three bloody hours, he stitched back the scalp over the yawning gap in Thorne's cranium. As nurses prepped Thorne for the move to intensive care, where he'd spend a couple of touch-and-go days before being flown to Landstuhl, Germany, Werschkul took stock of his patient. He was a powerfully built kid of twenty-three with the kind of arms you see on a carpenter, one of those high-speed soldiers who look like decathletes and burn to make Special Forces. That was all in Thorne's favor, and Werschkul had personally witnessed marvels — strong, young men who'd stunned his staff by coming back from unthinkable wounds. Still, he remembers saying to himself, I don't know; this one may not make it.

Given a war bogged down in its third year of stalemate and a continuous crawl of wretched news from the mosques and morgues of Baghdad, it is odd that the Pentagon has done little to tout a triumph for which it deserves high marks. Thanks to advances in training and armor and a series of major breakthroughs in combat medicine, the military has saved thousands of Marines and soldiers who would have died of their wounds in prior wars.

The revolution in combat medicine starts at the point of conflict, and follows a tightly choreographed series of steps from Baghdad to Germany to intensive-care units in military hospitals in the U.S., and from there to an elite chain of new rehab clinics called Polytrauma Rehab Centers. There are seven to eight survivors for every death in Iraq, a 400 percent improvement on the numbers for World War II, and the credit for that starts with technology and training.

The armored truck that Thorne's crew traveled in, a Stryker infantry-transport vehicle, was equipped with both a precision GPS receiver and a satellite-linked reporting system that instantly beamed its position to medivac units in Mosul. A couple of minutes after the assault in the alley, a Humvee convoy roared up to the scene, accompanying the injured to a battalion aid station, where they were stabilized and readied for the twenty-minute chopper flight to the combat support hospital in Baghdad. The body armor they wore, sixty-five pounds of chin-to-groin Kevlar, plus two ceramic plates over the chest and back that stop everything short of rocket grenades, saved them from fatal gut shots. And each of the scouts in Thorne's six-man team had been given advanced instruction in emergency medical treatment, learning to treat shock, start field IVs and stanch the bleeding from a ruptured vein.