10th Field Hospital
Colorado
A unit based here kept ninety-eight out of every hundred wounded soldiers alive, the highest survival rate in the history of American warfare.
The Mountain Medics went to Iraq twice. On the second tour, working out of Baghdad and then scattered across Camp Sather, Tallil, Al Kut, Al Amarah and Bucca, they even took in wounded from British forces at Basrah. Their survival rate came out at ninety-eight percent. The article calls it the highest in the history of American warfare. The hospital started as a tent operation in nineteen forty-two, stood up at a camp in Texas, and followed the war through Tunisia, Italy, France and Germany. Since then it has been renamed six times. Field hospital, evacuation hospital, combat support hospital, and for a decade in the eighties, a MASH. Half its staff never shows up until it is needed. Doctors and nurses are assigned to the unit on paper only, working in real clinics to keep their skills sharp. The Army's own description compares them to a piece of equipment behind glass, broken open when a war starts. In the spring of two thousand twenty, they set up inside a football stadium in Seattle.
Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.
The unit achieved a 98-percent survivability rate, the highest survivability rate in the history of American warfare.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Cheyenne Mountain Complex 3.3 mi A single bad computer chip inside Cheyenne Mountain once issued false warnings that a missile attack had begun.
- South Cheyenne Cañon 5.5 mi A poet asked to be buried at the top of the trail above Seven Falls, and for a while she was.
- Cheyenne Creek 5.7 mi Two men dammed this creek in the 1880s to make a lake that would help sell a hotel and casino, and then had to sue the city for stealing the water.
- Fountain, Colorado 6.6 mi A murder cover-up on a freight train sent eighteen tons of explosives rolling toward Fountain in 1888.
- Peterson Space Force Base 7.7 mi The base is named for a lieutenant who died on takeoff there, four months before the field got his name.
- Old North End Historic District (Colorado Springs, Colorado) 8.4 mi A college president bought this land as an investment, named it New Massachusetts, and was fired when it lost money.