CAPT. William Todd: I know I'm not going to be able to treat everybody for everything,
I just knew I had to give everything I had to everybody who was on the ship.
CAPT. David Hartsell: We're going to go to our neighbors around the world,
and show them that we have compassion.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: We take care of people who have so little.
LT. CMDR., Thomas Olivero: You can put this ship off the coast anywhere,
and it is a symbol of, we're here to help. We're also here to learn as
much from your country as you can from us.
Flight Deck OPO David Simpkins: If you were to take John Hopkins or Walter Reed,
and put it inside the skin of a ship, that's what we have.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: We have a digital x-ray, we have dental, we have optometry.
LT. CMDR. Mili Etienne: We have a cat-scan machine.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: 12 operating rooms, as well as an interventional radiology suite.
Flight Deck OPO David Simpkins: We have our own oxygen plant that produces medical oxygen.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: Eighty ICU beds, and hundreds of ward beds.
Flight Deck OPO David Simpkins: So anything you could do at a Navy or civilian hospital,
we can do it here. The only difference is, we can come to you instead of you having to come to us.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: Operation Continuing Promise is actually a regular deployment schedule
where we take the USNS Comfort, to Central and South America...the countries vary a little bit.
LT. CMDR., Thomas Olivero: We work with the ministries of health, uh, to be able to build a
partnership of caring, a partnership of learning, and education.
CAPT. David Hartsell: We made a promise to these countries that we visited, that in any time
that they are going to have a need for us to come down to help them, that we would be back.
LT. CMDR. Mili Etienne: Um, I was driving home from work, and as I was driving
I started hearing about the earthquake...
CAPT. William Todd: ...and I told my wife, I said, well I've got to get my sea bag ready,
'cause I'm going to be getting a phone call tomorrow.
We're going to go down to Haiti probably by the end of the week.
LT. CMDR. Mili Etienne: I really felt that, this is what I've been preparing my entire life for.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: For Operation Unified Response, the ship was underway in 76 hours.
CAPT. William Todd: On the way down to Haiti, we kept receiving a lot of information via
email about hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people, primarily with orthopedic injuries.
But it's one thing to see a couple of pictures on the internet, another thing to know that
you're actually going to be a part of the human element of what we see, the devastation.
The fact that that suffering was going to be coming on board in numbers that we had
no idea of how many, or for how long.
LT. CMDR., Thomas Olivero: When we were about 100 miles out, we started getting patients.
We went, ah,..we went non-stop the first three days.
CAPT. William Todd: About every ninety seconds, these elevator doors open,
and here come more and more patients. And they just kept coming.
Then there would be about a twenty minute delay. The next round of helicopters,
and there would be more and more coming.
Flight Deck OPO David Simpkins: Anywhere from newborns that didn't have any family left,
up to, you know, senior citizens.
LT. CMDR. Mili Etienne: So it was kind of like a mayhem. 'Cause you've got two different cultures,
you've got, you know, different types of understanding of the, of the disease process.
CAPT. William Todd: So each and every patient that would come in, I would spend some time
with an interpreter, to understand their story. Because every one seemed to be,
the next one seemed to be worse than the previous one. You couldn't make this stuff up.
We had an individual who was approximately 28 years old. And he had a very bad injury
right over his elbow on his dominant arm. Basically it took out the joint itself.
Now, the interesting thing with him was, this part worked just fine.
So, he knew that he was probably going to have to have an amputation.
But in talking to him, he has a family, he has dreams for his kids,..
So I was with my colleague, a hand surgeon Dr. Rullen, and we looked and we saw, that,
he may not have an elbow, but what about if we just connect the bones up?
If we can get the bones to heal, he won't have any motion across the elbow,
or what was the elbow, but he'll still have the use of his hand.
We took him back after the surgery into the recovery room. The first thing he did when
he woke up is he kind of looked down to see if he had a hand. He saw his hand,
he grabbed it just like he did before, picked it up, 'It works, it works!'
Flight Deck OPO David Simpkins: I think in the big picture, the big scheme of things,
having the Comfort and the Mercy shows the rest of the world that we're not just out
there to go, you know, drop bombs in the desert and fight wars. We can project a
positive image and soft power on the rest of the country, rest of the world,
and maybe change some people's opinions about us.
CAPT. William Todd: We are military, but we're in a big white ship. As a matter of fact,
many places we go when they see us off the coast, they call us the great white angel from America.
Every site, hundreds and hundreds of surgeries. Lives that are changed, and impressions
that are altered for the benefit of the United States Of America,
and our partner and host nations as well.
CAPT. Kathy Becker: From a humanitarian assistance perspective, there's not anything
more rewarding that you can do, truly in the Navy.