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Soldiers treat Iraqi kids with severe burns

SCANIA, Iraq — YaYa sits quietly on the table. A flowered plastic band holds back her black hair, revealing a smile that only a child’s heart musters. YaYa’s sparkle grows for a moment as a soldier walks toward her, but then she notices the tweezers and the scrub brush.

Remembering, she turns grim. The next half-hour will bring excruciating pain. There will be candy and perhaps a toy later, but the pain comes first.

Sgt. 1st Class Stanley Krupsky smiles as he reaches out to welcome YaYa back. The girl’s hand finds his shoulder. She is ready.

YaYa cries as the soldier peels and scrubs away the dead skin. She muffles her screams, and Krupsky has to gather his composure more than once. He hates to hurt the girl, but he has no choice.

“I know it hurts, but it’s got to be done,” he said.

Krupsky, a convoy escort team commander for Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 151st Cavalry Regiment, 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the Arkansas Army National Guard, is helping YaYa recover from burns suffered in a fire more than a month ago. Two of her family members died from their wounds, and two others travel with their grandmother three days a week to Scania, to a free burn clinic where soldiers from Charlie Troop and other units volunteer.

Most of the patients are children who have suffered horrific burns, their arms and legs blistered and raw. YaYa’s burned skin is bright pink now, a good sign. She’s healing.

Krupsky and the troops in his team rearrange their mission schedules, sacrificing what little off time they might otherwise have between missions, to spend a few hours at the clinic. They do what they can to help the children and leave them with a smile — candy and toys the soldiers buy at the post exchanges or receive in the mail from home.

“We just do what we can to help,” said Krupsky, from Oregon.

Staff Sgt. Mark Kellogg of Sheridan, senior medic for Charlie Troop, explained that the soldiers are fighting infections in the severe burns. They remove damaged skin in and around the burned areas and dress the wounds, directing the patients’ parent or guardian to repeat the process several times a week.

“We let it heal from the inside out,” he said, noting that the process can take several months.

Troops who volunteer to help receive a crash course in procedures, Kellogg said, and the available medics oversee all the work.

Their work often involves seeing the agony on the faces of their young patients. Sgt. 1st Class Tammy Treat of North Carolina recalled one child who violently resisted help.

“She was hitting herself in the face and trying to bite her mother’s hands. Even with the child in so much pain, the mother was smiling so big because she knew we were helping,” Treat explained.

Though many of the troops who volunteer at the clinic have only limited medical training, they have ample desire to help.

“I’ve got four kids, and when you hear about something like that happening to kids and you are away from your own, it’s a way of trying to keep in touch with yourself, doing something for somebody aside from yourself. It gives you a good feeling,” said Spec. Ronald Branum, a Virginia resident who joined the unit several months ago.

That feeling of accomplishment resonates throughout the team.

“It’s nice to be able to give back to the kids, especially when you see how messed up some of them are,” said Sgt. Shea Lindsey of Bearden.

Spec. Courtland Walker of Camden agreed.

“You think about your own kids in that situation, so you just want to help them however you can,” he said.

Walker said that, after leaving the clinic to continue the team’s convoy escort missions, he reflects on what he sees and hears and feels.

“You have to take that one deep breath, but afterward you think that they are gonna be all right, and you feel good about yourself,” he commented. “You just wish you could stay longer and help more.”

Sgt. Kevin Jackson of Camden said he hoped that the benefits of the troops’ work at the clinic go beyond the children who recover.

“It shows them we are here for more than to just fight a war. It shows them we are here to help.”

Branum suggested that the relationships built through the clinic are bearing positive fruit. “The community knows we are there helping, and they are gonna tell people,” he said.