I can't tell you what it was like in other combat teams, but when I went to Afghanistan, it was my third war. I took part in two others with Doctors Without Borders. I was 48 the first time. I was always very careful.
The benefit of the medical system in periods of war is that there isn't always an operation going on. There are times when you have a lot of wounded. Then things calm down for a good while. Whether we had 10 people wounded or only 1, I would always have a meeting with my medical team to debrief so they could vent and talk about what had happened. It certainly had an educational dimension. I was very helpful as an educator in emergency medicine. I had a lot to teach them and I made sure that we talked about situations they had had a hard time with, even in the educational context.
Let's use the example of facial injuries. Those are incredibly difficult to deal with because our face defines us to other human beings. It is staggering just how emotionally difficult facial injuries are. When we were dealing with those injuries, I made sure to talk to the personnel and acknowledge how hard those situations were. It was an opportunity for them to process and for their emotions to stabilize, to use a medical term.
That's what you do in those situations. I would even say you have much more time for that kind of thing in the field than you do in an emergency room, where you move from one patient right to the next.