RAMSTEIN, 25 March 2003 — The first airplane carrying US troops wounded in action in Iraq arrived yesterday at Ramstein air base in western Germany where they were to be treated, US officials said.
The plane was understood to be carrying seven soldiers with combat-related injuries as well as a number of military personnel with other injuries.
They were carried off the aircraft on stretchers, some with bandages around their head or connected to drips.
Marie Shaw, a spokeswoman for the nearby Landstuhl regional medical center, said 12 patients in all had arrived, but could not confirm how many had been wounded in action as they were still being screened.
She said another plane was expected later in the day, but that it was also unclear how many combat-injured soldiers would be on board.
Ramstein is home to the US 86th Airlift Wing.
The Landstuhl medical center is the biggest US military hospital outside the United States and has treated soldiers who have been injured in a series of high-profile incidents.
They included US Marines wounded during the aborted 1980 rescue attempt of American hostages in Iran and those injured in a 1983 bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut.
In 1988, the hospital treated some 500 casualties of the Ramstein air show disaster, when 70 people died after an Italian plane crashed into the watching crowd.
Landstuhl was also a repatriation point for more than 4,000 US casualties from the first Gulf War in 1991.
In 1994 it also handled hundreds of Bosnian refugees injured in a Sarajevo marketplace bombing.
The hospital has about 100 doctors and 250 nurses, as well as hundreds of other staff, and in peacetime has 162 intensive care beds available. But during an emergency, the total number of beds can be raised to more than 1,000. One of its specialties is the treatment of burn victims.
Meanwhile, a first batch of casualties were evacuated to a military hospital in a British air base in Cyprus yesterday. “In the last 12 hours, two soldiers arrived at Akrotiri for medical treatment. They were both British,” the spokesman for the British bases on the east Mediterranean island, Major Tony Brumwell, said.
“They are being treated prior to their transfer to the UK,” he said without elaborating on their condition or the circumstances in which they were wounded.
The pair were the first combat casualties to be evacuated to Cyprus since the war began on Thursday, although some 10 British troops were already being treated at Akrotiri for injuries sustained during training.
