The 332nd Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad where Dr. Coppola performed operations on hundreds of U.S. soldiers and sick and injured Iraqi children, including those with rare birth defects untreatable elsewhere in the country.
Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq is the fierce, true-life account of Dr. Chris Coppola’s two deployments in Operation Iraqi Freedom as an Air Force pediatric surgeon. Twice stationed at Balad Air Base, fifty miles north of Baghdad, in what was first a rude M*A*S*H*-style tent hospital and later became one of the largest U.S. military installations on foreign soil, Dr. Coppola works feverishly to save the lives of soldiers and civilians as word spreads among Iraqi families that, no matter what the infirmity, he can save their children.
From his first night on call, Dr. Coppola is confronted with injuries more severe than any he has ever encountered—I.E.D. and suicide bomb casualties, which shake his religious conviction and trigger persistent bouts of insomnia. In his first weeks, he witnesses Iraq’s health care system tumble into crisis as thousands of Iraqi doctors flee the country, Al Qaeda ramps up efforts to target civilian sites such as schools, funeral processions, women and children; and families are left without basic essentials like electricity and drinking water. Dr. Coppola, exhausted after marathon nights in the OR, homesick for his wife and three boys in San Antonio, Texas, finally asks himself, “How can I go on?”
Dr. Chris Coppola and Guy Raz, NPR Correspondent.
One night a young four-year-old girl whose family’s home was firebombed arrives at the hospital entrance with burns covering more than forty percent of her body. Her only hope for survival is a difficult skin transplantation Dr. Coppola must finish against the orders of the commanding trauma czar. Weeks later, a family of Bedouins, seeking treatment for a young boy’s hernia, arrive at the gate of Balad Air Base with a crumpled piece of copier paper bearing only his name, Dr. Coppola, and the phrase, “doctor for children,” written in Arabic. There are many others: a boy with leishmaniasis, a pseudohermaphrodite, a child injured in the skull on election day—children whom Dr. Coppola must treat in the spare minutes he finds between operations to wounded U.S. soldiers arriving in mass in medevac helicopters.
Dr. Coppola planted sunflowers in the sandbags surrounding his hooch to remind him of home in San Antonio, Texas.
Deployed first in 2005, weeks prior to the first democratically held Iraqi elections in half a century, and later in 2007, at the height of the Surge, Dr. Coppola is to Iraq what Tim O’Brien was for Vietnam, revealing the scope of the larger story in the clarity and intimacy of the details. With powerfully shocking closeness, Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq pulls readers inside a military combat support hospital to experience not only an essential historical portrait of the war’s effect on U.S. soldiers and children, but also a redemptive, life-affirming story of one doctor’s struggle to make a difference.
