The history of military medicine tells a strange tale of innovation through bloodshed, as healers in crisis conjure new remedies to save comrades ravaged by war. In recent U.S. conflicts, the wickedly destructive improvised explosive devices that littered the streets and battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan spurred advances in emergency medicine and evacuation procedures that, combined with enhanced helmets and armor, helped produce the highest U.S. combat survival rates in history. But body armor and helmets don’t protect the face. And the advances that saved so many lives in battle left surgeons back home struggling to fix harrowing facial wounds in numbers unrivaled since World War I. The Great War’s trenches exposed men’s faces to a fusillade of shrapnel, spurring unprecedented surgeries to reconstruct what remained. But when thousands of soldiers returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with the devastating facial injuries of a brutal new kind of warfare, the tools of reconstructive medicine had barely moved beyond the techniques invented nearly a century ago. My story follows the struggle of two men, Staff Sgt. Todd Nelson, a soldier who lost most of his face to an IED in Afghanistan, and Col. Robert Hale, a top Army surgeon who, moved by modern medicine’s failure to restore Nelson’s face and former life, launched a massive effort to bring the science of facial repair into the 21st century.
