A helicopter arrived at his medical aid station near Baghdad International Airport. It carried a military police officer with a gunshot wound to the head.

The solider had stopped breathing, but his heart was beating.

“We had a pulse,” said Morley, an operating room technician. “We had a chance. We had something to hold onto. We did everything we could for this soldier.”

About 45 minutes later, he died. The surgeons, nurses, medics and technicians – the 912th Forward Surgical Team – all grieved.

“The team took it really bad,” Morley said. He escaped to the station’s back stoop and sat in the desert heat.

“I was smoking about a pack of cigarettes and crying my eyes out,” he said. The respite didn’t last.

“Two Humvees came screaming up,” he said. They brought four more MPs, all injured by a homemade bomb. “Their battle buddies were frantic.”

Morley stopped grieving. He had no choice.

“It’s medicine,” he said. “You’ve got to maintain focus. People’s lives are at stake.”

That’s what he told himself as he treated the four MPs. Shrapnel had torn through their bodies.

“One of them was screaming, Don’t cut off my hand! Don’t cut off my hand!” he said.

In the morning, all four were still alive, and surgeons had saved every finger of the soldier afraid of losing his hand, Morley said.

But the previous night – which Morley calls “The Night of the MPs” – taught him about the wounds of war.

“I never imagined that I’d see the extent of blood,” said Morley, a 35-year-old husband and father, back home in Sanford.

Nor did he expect to feel so much. Since returning home in July, his days have been anxious. His nights have been worse.

As with many returning veterans, the war remains with him.

Counting the injured

Since the start of the war in Iraq 18 months ago, more than 7,000 soldiers have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon.

In a single week last spring, from April 4 through April 10, the Department of Defense counted 539 Americans wounded in action, 300 of them so severely that they could not return to duty after three days.

The Pentagon has released few details about wounded veterans and the nature of their injuries. Privacy issues and the mammoth military bureaucracy have kept data either secret or uncollected.

Walter Reed Army Medical Center – the most common destination for severely wounded soldiers – doesn’t track soldiers’ home states, spokeswoman Tawana Parker said.

The Washington, D.C., hospital has treated more than 3,400 soldiers from Iraq. Of those, 767 were wounded in battle. The rest were people with noncombat-related injuries and illnesses, Parker said.

More soldiers are ending up at Walter Reed. For most of the war’s first year, an average of 50 or so soldiers were wounded each week. Since March 2004, that number has doubled and sometimes tripled.

“It seemed that the longer we stayed, the more injuries we saw,” said Morley, who worked for 15 months in Iraq.

Located in a former missile school, the aid station was one of several that acted as first echelons of care for soldiers who were wounded in the Baghdad area.

Typically, medics administer first aid to soldiers at the scene. As soon as possible, people are transported to stations like Morley’s.

The aim is to get injured people to a doctor within one hour, what’s often described as “the golden hour.”

“We saw thousands of soldiers and performed 300 surgeries,” Morley said of his station. His team consisted of three general surgeons, one orthopedic surgeon, two nurse anesthetists, three registered nurses and several medics and technicians. A staff sergeant, Morley ran the operating room and commanded the enlisted soldiers.

Weeks might go by without any patients. Then, the radio would crackle with alerts of incoming wounded.

“You scramble,” he said.

When a United Nations building in Baghdad was bombed, eight of the wounded went to his station.

Shrapnel wounds, typically from an improvised explosive device or IED, were common.

“We filled a lot of body bags,” Morley said. “It’s a roll of the dice. Some make it. Some don’t.”

Some were women. That rattled Morley. “IEDs do not distinguish between gender,” he said.

He remembers so many soldiers.

“I know their names,” he said. “I know where they were from. I know if they had children.”

And he remembers their faces. Some nights, he can’t sleep. He wakes easily. And he has nightmares.

What are they like?

“A bloodbath,” Morley said.

At home

Among Mainers, the number of serious physical injuries has been relatively small. No one knows for sure, though.

About 200 Maine veterans from Iraq have enrolled at the Department of Veterans Affairs center in Togus. Most have minor injuries ranging from insect bites and stomach pains to bad backs and broken knees.

Since the war began, fewer than 10 Mainers have been treated at Walter Reed or the other national hospitals, estimated Kenneth Burt, an intake worker at Togus.

It’s an uncertain number, since it represents only cases of which the Maine center has been informed. There could be others.

Most of the vets in the Togus system seem more like Chris Henry of Auburn. The 32-year-old guardsman was part of the 94th Military Police Company, which returned home in early August after 15 months in Iraq.

While in the desert, he contracted a fungus that infected his foot, turning it green. It has since improved a bit.

More traumatic, however, are the memories.

Like Morley, he has trouble sleeping. His nights are a series of naps.

“I haven’t been dreaming at all,” Henry said.

He just can’t relax.

Relieving the stress

The stress of combat – fearing for one’s life and watching people die – is catching up with many of Maine’s soldiers.

“All have expressed anxiety,” said Deborah Maillett, one of the Togus workers who meets with the new vets. “If you didn’t show anxiety, you’d have problems.”

In the base camps where Henry lived in Iraq, mortar attacks were common. If he had to walk outside, even from his bed to breakfast, he had to wear body armor.

“You really couldn’t relax,” he said. “At the base camp, an attack might come at any time.”

Outside the camp, he was often protecting convoys. The stress never ended.

A study published in the July issue of the New England Journal of Medicine questioned more than 1,600 Army soldiers and Marines who served in Iraq. More than 90 percent reported being shot at. Nearly as many had known someone who was seriously wounded or killed. At least half said they had handled or uncovered dead bodies.

The memories can affect someone for decades.

At Togus, psychologists Kevin Polk and Jerald Hambright began seeing new vets earlier this year.

After years of treating veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War, they are preparing for a new wave of problems.

Besides sleeplessness, some vets are jumpy, on edge or easily startled. Some are avoiding places or people that might recall bad memories.

Others, in a way, have never returned. They still feel in jeopardy. An argument may escalate out of hand or a place as innocuous as Wal-Mart can feel unsafe, Hambright said.

A soldier who learned to fear crowds and confusion on the streets of Baghdad might fear a store full of people. In the worst cases, people begin separating themselves from friends and family. It can get in the way of work and relationships.

However, few of the vets have been diagnosed with the syndrome known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The good news is that many of the people who have these symptoms get better,” Polk said.

There are ways to treat the problems. It can get better with something as simple as relaxation training, which involves specialized breathing and muscle relaxation.

“If they do it, it’s like a miracle for some people,” Polk said.

A lot depends on time and support. For those vets who reach out for help, it’s usually easier.

Learning from the past

Morley knows. This was his second war.

In 1991, he was a 22-year-old Marine infantryman, part of the force that invaded Kuwait in the first Gulf War. The relatively short war rattled the young man.

He began to drink heavily and caused problems within his unit, in which he still had one year to serve.

“I crawled inside the bottle,” he said. “But not this time.”

Just days after coming home, he asked for help. Doctors diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He met with leaders at Togus, and he is seeing a counselor in his hometown, at Sanford’s VA center.

There’s no shame, he said. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

“I tried to prepare myself for the death,” said Morley said. “I found that I couldn’t. There’s no way.”

His wife, Theresa, supports the counseling. She heard some of his stories: of mortar shells striking the roof of the aid station, of the night of the MPs and the pleas of men to save their limbs from amputation.

“I feel guilty because I can do nothing for him,” she said. “There’s nothing you can say to make it better.”

But she understands better than most. Her father was a Vietnam veteran.

Morley plans to return to work this month at Southern Maine Medical Center in Biddeford, where he works as a surgical technician.

Morley doesn’t know whether he’ll re-enlist. With 17 years of service in the military, he could earn a pension if he signs up again when he’s due in March 2005.

He fears he may be torn again from his wife and two children, Michael, 9, and Danielle, 7. And he fears going back.

“They say they won’t send me back there,” he said. “But things can change.”