From Depot in Germany, a Shot in Arm for GIs : Medical: Supplies are being shipped to Saudi Arabia at the rate of 3,000 tons each month.

Barreling up and down the snowy mountain road that winds from the autobahn to this little town near the French border come the tractor-trailers laden with bandages, burn cream, stomach tubes, surgical sponges, IV fluid and antidote against nerve gas attack.

Medical supplies are departing for Saudi Arabia from the U.S. military’s vast medical depot here at the rate of 3,000 tons a month, offering a surreal glimpse into what it takes to keep 520,000 troops healthy and into the injuries that could be caused if the Persian Gulf War shifts to the ground.

Since August, 7 million pounds of medical supplies have gone from here to the desert. In January alone, 24,000 eyeglass orders were filled. Half a million vials of gamma globulin, to be injected to help prevent infectious diseases, have gone out. Stock levels of sunscreen have soared from 2,000 to 358,000 bottles.

“We talk a lot about the numbers here,” mused Lt. Col. Stuart A. Mervis, one of the depot’s deputy commanders, who takes a logician’s pleasure in the prospect of pallets of X-ray fixer traversing the globe. “But the human side is we don’t want a single soldier to not get the care they need.”

The biggest hitch has been periodic gridlock: The depot depends upon military transportation. If ammunition or equipment, say, receives priority on flights to Saudi Arabia, bandages and bedpans get backlogged in Germany. And there is no room for incoming supplies.

“You have all the supplies backing up here,” said Maj. William A. Motley Jr., chief of inventory control for the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Center Europe, known in Army argot as USAMMCE. “We’ve got the supplies. But you can’t get them down there.”

All in all, the officers insist that the medical system is now well supplied to tackle the effects of a ground war, if it does occur. Some improvising may be necessary from time to time. But on the whole, they say soldiers in the Gulf will receive “state of the art” combat-casualty care.

“It’s the unknown that bothers me,” said Col. Joseph J. Costanzo, the center’s commander, voicing an opinion heard often in recent weeks in the military hospitals throughout Germany. “It’s tough to do something about something you’re unfamiliar with--something that’s unknown.”

The 93-acre depot here is a giant mail-order drugstore for the U.S. military and State Department in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It is the largest center of its kind outside the United States, servicing 500 customers, from the military hospitals in Germany to the embassy in Beijing.

Since the deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia began in August, the center has picked up 150 new clients, including Army combat hospitals, Navy fleet hospitals and hospital ships. Requisitions that one year ago would have seemed outlandish, or a few digits off, are suddenly commonplace.

Here’s how it works:

A battalion aid station somewhere in Saudi Arabia runs low on field bandages. It puts in a request to a medical-supply unit in the Gulf. If that unit can’t fill the request, it forwards it electronically to the depot in Germany via the Defense Data Network.

Over 80,000 individual requests have come in from Saudi Arabia so far, including a record 7,000 last week. About 945,384 pounds of supplies rolled out the week of Feb. 1, mainly on trucks to Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt to be flown to the Persian Gulf.

Demand has skyrocketed on a few items in particular.

* The depot used to stock 8,000 of the 12-bag boxes of Ringer’s lactate, the primary intravenous solution for people wounded in combat. Now it stocks 136,000 boxes. Close to 35,000 have been shipped out.

* The center stocks 1.5 million packages of the field bandages that all soldiers carry, up from 88,000 last July. Surgical sponges have jumped from 6,000 to 36,000. Gauze has gone from 490 to 54,000 packages of 12.

* Stock levels of immune globulin, given to soldiers to prevent hepatitis, have gone from 500 10-milliliter vials to 25,000. There was an emergency request not long ago for rabies serum after someone was bitten by a rat.

On a recent morning, Costanzo and Mervis toured their burgeoning fiefdom, moving briskly among towering crates of Betadine swabs, Tampax and stretchers, past locked cages full of controlled drugs, refrigerators packed with frozen products and loading docks lined with 40-foot trailers.

“We don’t want to have an unnecessary casualty because of a lack of a piece of equipment or a lack of ability to take care of a person,” Costanzo said. “Being pro-active requires a lot of materiel to move. And there is a lot of materiel moving.”

Or, as Motley, the inventory-control chief, put it succinctly, “There’s a hell of a lot of stuff pumpin’ down there.”