WITNESS: Amid Iraq war's victims, a story of survival

Damir Sagolj is a Reuters photographer based in Sarajevo, Bosnia who has just returned from an assignment in Iraq. The following story accompanies a series of photographs Damir took during a reporting stint in the main U.S. combat hospital in Baghdad.

By Damir Sagolj

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Amid the devastation of war in Iraq a journalist can feel helpless, little more than a bystander amid the suffering.

So when an Iraqi friend spotted me in the Green Zone and asked me to get treatment for his eight-year-old son, Mustafa, I did not hesitate to get involved.

"So, go get him," I told Firas Al Jouwaily. I turned to the doctors of the 28th Combat Support Hospital (CSH) and asked them to treat the boy. His father said he had been shot in the head by U.S. troops at a checkpoint in Falluja, central Iraq.

As a photo-journalist I want my pictures to convey the reality of war. Inside the CSH, the frontline military hospital for the Baghdad area, the awfulness of combat is all too vivid.

Mustafa is carried in, his head bandaged from initial treatment by Iraqi doctors, and the combat medics go to work, watched by Firas and his American employer, a bankrupt former telecommunications executive working off his debts in Iraq.

Major William White, who runs the emergency room, supervises treatment. I take pictures. The boy has a bullet in his brain.

The medics struggle. The boy "flat-lines," the electronic beep on the heart monitor turning into a single note.

He is revived. The CSH staff manage to stabilize him and he is whisked onto a helicopter that will take him for brain surgery at a better-equipped hospital beyond Baghdad's dangers.

The CSH would likely have treated Mustafa anyway but I feel my presence speeded up the treatment. That might have saved him.

SERIOUS WOUNDS

As Mustafa flies out other helicopters land. The feet of the casualties are visible through the windows of the Black Hawks.

This is the normal work of the CSH, treating the U.S. military casualties of the war in Iraq. Over 3,700 U.S. forces have died since they invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003. Thousands more have been injured.

On a bad day the corridors are filled with screaming soldiers burned and maimed by improvised explosive devices. The quiet ones usually have the more serious wounds and are first to receive treatment.

There are strict rules on what I can photograph. No close images of faces allowed. Loud moans mix with the metallic sounds of medical equipment as burned skin falls off tattooed bodies.