THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Boston Globe has a long feature on the 399th Combat Support Hospital. Their work is now saving the lives of 90% of all US troops who reach them alive. They also work on any Iraqi brought into their facilities. And their facilities are close enough to the bad guys to come under attack from mortars and even a ground assault. And day after day they do their job, whenever the call comes.

The mass casualty call to action is the most dreaded in combat medicine. For sheer heart-cracking urgency, its only rival is the siren blare that warns of imminent incoming shellfire or rockets. Since arriving in Iraq in early October, the doctors, nurses, medics, and techs of the 399th Combat Support Hospital, a Massachusetts-based Army Reserve unit, have become intimately familiar with both signals.

They've handled scores of hideously wounded casualties so fresh from the battlefield that the stench of explosive still clings to skin and red-hot fragments of shrapnel sizzle and pop in torn flesh. And they've scrambled for cover behind sandbags or into concrete bunkers to the soul-jarring whump of mortar rounds "walking" the compound, and the rip-roar of automatic weapons at the far perimeter wire.

"You listen for sounds like you've never listened in your life," said Captain Kathy Ryland, 42, a trauma nurse from Camas, Wash. "You learn fast to recognize the difference between a shell blast that's too near and one that's too far away to matter. You live by speed because you can die by slow. That's true for saving our patients. That's true for saving ourselves."

They've treated young American soldiers punctured by bullets. They've treated the insurgents who pulled the triggers. They've treated Iraqi police cut down by roadside bombs. They've treated school kids blown up for what's become the cardinal sin in this suffering land -- being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And they and others like them still have to do this job because Our Dear Leader is still dithering about how to avoid admitting he was wrong, dead wrong in everything he did in Iraq. Perhaps he might want to consider this quote from Colonel Joseph Blansfield, the 399th's chief registered nurse.

"Heard about the glory of war? You're looking at it. This is the ground truth."