Tarawa doubles as backup hospital ship

ABOARD THE USS TARAWA — The Navy’s first-response medical vessel for Marines in the Persian Gulf just might be one without a giant red cross painted on the hull.

The USS Tarawa is an 820-foot-long, 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship. It’s a delivery platform built to launch Marines by helicopter and giant hovercraft. But it also serves as a secondary floating hospital. It comes with four operating rooms and space for 300 patients when Marines are ashore. The medical team manning the facility includes surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, nurses and hospital corpsmen. They know how to treat nearly every battlefield trauma, including gunshot wounds and exposure to chemical and biological attacks.

“We are the equivalent of a small community hospital,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Steven Gable, Tarawa’s senior medical officer. “With the exception of CT scanner, we can do everything else. Our last float, we operated for six appendectomies and a couple of hernias.”

The ship isn’t as extensive as USNS Comfort or USNS Mercy, the Navy’s two hospital ships, Gable said. But the vessel carries a greater capacity to treat battlefield casualties than an aircraft carrier does.

Gable said Marines could be treated at aid stations set up close to the battlefield, but Tarawa offers a safe haven away from hostilities. Patients treated on board are stabilized and transferred either to hospital ships or military hospitals in Europe or the United States.

“Typically, this ship operates at the tip of the spear,” Gable said. “We’re in a unique position to be on the spot in a short amount of time. We’re capable of supporting the Marines ashore wherever they are. It takes the Comfort and the Mercy quite a while to get on station.”

The USS Comfort is already operating in the region, but sailing outside of the Persian Gulf, according to Navy officials. The USS Tarawa, though, is steaming close to Kuwait, while the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit moves its Marines and gear ashore. Prior to landing the Marines, Tarawa’s medical crew was busy inoculating everyone on board against smallpox and anthrax. Doctors and corpsmen also spent much of their time running drills for medical emergencies, for those originating both on the ship and on the battlefield. They’re practicing moving quickly through the ship’s medical areas, including the 14-bed intensive care unit and walk-in blood bank. Doctors and sailors practice running X-ray machines and testing blood samples in the laboratory, all tasks that would be performed in any shore-based hospital.

“The training is very real,” said Navy Lt. Jerry Bailey, head of the Tarawa’s health care administration. “We use moulage, or simulated wounds that look like the real thing. It adds some realism. I also like our simulated victims to be yelling and screaming, just to raise the stress level. I want our staff to experience the adrenaline rush.”

The crews stepped up the number of mass casualty drills, too. Drills with multiple patients piling up at receiving stations increased. Gable said 10 to 15 such drills have taken place in the past three months, and plans are to keep the rehearsals coming.

“As we got closer to the Persian Gulf, the training just got harder,” Bailey said. “I’ll have them run up eight levels to perform CPR. I’ll have them drag bodies out of the ship’s compartments. I want everything they do to be their primary reaction.”

Training while the Navy medical team is steaming in the Persian Gulf will continue, but Bailey said the training has the very real possibility of turning real.

“We’re not transiting anymore,” he said. “There’s no time to play around.”

Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class David Jones took part in nearly every drill run since USS Tarawa left San Diego in early January.

“We take it very seriously,” Jones said. “We’re dealing with people’s lives. We go through all the drills, from broken bones to chemical exposures.”

That also includes training on new hand-held “sniffers,” Gable said. The sniffers determine within minutes if Marines or sailors have been exposed to chemical agents, and identify the agents.

“We have to make the assumption that weapons of mass destruction are going to be used,” Gable said. “We’re going into this with eyes wide open. Anything is possible.”