Hospital in Germany treats 21,000 GIs

Nov 29, 2004 | About 21,000 American soldiers, most of them from units sent to Iraq, have been treated at the biggest U.S. military hospital outside the United States since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, the hospital said Monday.

The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany handles many U.S. combat casualties, but it did not break down the figure into battlefield and noncombat patients.

Landstuhl doctors treated 17,878 U.S. soldiers from Iraq and 3,085 from Afghanistan through Sunday, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw told The Associated Press.

The patients were treated for anything from gunshot wounds to noncombat ailments such as kidney stones, she said.

Since the end of the Cold War, Landstuhl has treated victims of war and terrorism, including those wounded in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen, and, more recently, men and women serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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