.... The Camp Bastion trauma center is a United Kingdom facility. Severe casualties are treated by U.K. surgeons and receive U.K. blood products. American troops are kept alive by units, liters, sometimes gallons of British blood. One Marine from my unit lost both legs high on the femur in an instant, and the blast opened his pelvis. Marines and a corpsman were at his side in seconds, and knew where to find his arteries to stop the bleeding from his gaping groin. His circulatory system no longer circulated—his arteries and veins were a nest of open-ended tubes draining away from his heart. The team at Camp Bastion stabilized his injuries, and in the process gave him more than 100 units of blood. Twenty citizens' worth of blood went into him and flowed out his wounds again before he was stable.
Last summer, I found myself in a political squabble with a Briton in a bar in San Francisco. He thought American servicemen were in the grip of a narrow mythos of self-reliance. I told him about the Marine, and all the blood that had passed through him. "Your blood brings us home," I said, and I thanked him and his countrymen. We're Facebook friends now ....
