THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 29, 1994 TAG: 9409290478
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KERRY DEROCHI, Staff writer
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
Lt. James Webb saw the Bosnian war in the pale, heaving body of a six-month old girl.
She lay on a table inside a canvas tent, her eyes rolled back in her head.
The girl, a Muslim refugee, suffered from severe dehydration and was likely to die in the camp 80 miles south of Zagreb, Croatia.
Webb worked for an hour, trying to start an IV in thin veins that had already collapsed. He inserted a metal tube into a bone in her leg, hoping the fluids would be in time.
Thirty-minutes later the girl opened her eyes.
``We weren't sure what we were supposed to expect,'' said Webb, in a telephone interview Wednesday.
``It was pretty remarkable.''
For Webb and three other members of the Portsmouth-based Fleet Hospital 5, the recovery of the tiny girl has come to symbolize their recent medical mission into the hilly terrain of war-torn Croatia.
Based at a U.N. compound outside of Zagreb, the Navy medics were the first U.S. forces allowed to go into the field and treat refugees since fighting broke out three years ago in the former Republic of Yugoslavia.
The medics were dispatched to the refugee camps on Sept. 2, lessthan 10 days after they had arrived with the Portsmouth unit to run a field hospital on Camp Pleso, the U.N. compound.
They returned from the mission on Sept. 15, after treating more than 1,500 refugees outside the town of Batnoga.
What they saw shocked them.
As many as 25,000 refugees lived in abandoned chicken coops in fields outside the town. They huddled on blankets in cramped spaces, their sparse belongings stacked on the feeding troughs. Space heaters once used to keep poultry warm had been converted into stoves.
The refugees, most of them Muslim, had come from Velika Kladusa, a town across the border in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Many were followers of Fikret Abdic, a break-away Moslem military leader opposed to the Moslem-dominated Bosnian government.
Government forces had routed Abdic this summer, leaving his followers with few places to turn. They fled to a portion of Croatia that is controlled by the Krajina Serbs, where they have remained in limbo.
A driving rain fell the morning the U.S. medics arrived at the refugee camp.
Patients were lined up outside of the jagged wire that separated the medical compound. Some huddled under blankets in the mud. None would give up without seeing a doctor.
``The line of patients waiting to be seen was unbelievable,'' said Webb, 30, a family practice doctor from the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, N.C.
``People were staying outside all times of the day or night, waiting to see the next doctor.''
The U.S. team took over the tent reserved for pediatric cases. Each day they worked from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., before returning to the nearby Polish battalion where they slept in metal containers. They rotated night duty with other U.N. doctors sent to the compound.
The biggest challenge was fighting the dehydration that had already killed four children.
Their task was complicated by a lack of hygiene. They watched refugees carry jugs of muddy water from a creek where others bathed and washed their clothes. Infection was a problem.
``The first thing that struck me was it absolutely looked like the pictures of death camps,'' said Lt. Max Dawkins, 47, a physician's assistant from Pensacola, Fla. ``When we walked in there were children with pale complexions, big eyes, stick-like arms and protruding bellies.
``These kids were sick. They were dying.''
The war seemed close at hand.
At night, Chief Corpsman Joe Steward saw flashes of distant gunfire in the hills that surrounded the camp.
``At times, you just never knew what to expect,'' said Steward, 35, from Groton, Conn. ``We were told the soldiers had been disarmed. The first morning we could hear the rip of a machine gun. You couldn't tell how close.''
The team stayed 12 days before traveling back to Camp Pleso where they resumed their assignment at the tent hospital. They will return to the United States in February with the rest of Fleet Hospital 5, at the end of the six-month deployment.
Looking back on the refugee mission, the team members said what they will remember most were the patients that had traipsed through their tent.
The mother who sat quietly next to her child, who had died in the night. The woman who was picking apples when she stepped on a land mine and lost her foot. The six-month old girl the team saved on that second day.
``It was the first real trauma I have personally been involved with,'' said Lt. Nancy Marshall, 31, a nurse from Orlando, Fla. ``I never expected my first would be in this tent in a refugee camp.
``I think we did a good thing there.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Lt. Cmdr. William Lussier, of Portsmouth's Fleet Hospital 5, left,
and Lt. Max Dawkins were at a camp near Zagreb in August.
Map
STAFF
KEYWORDS: CIVIL WAR BOSNIA RELIEF AID by CNB