COLUMN ONE : They’re Healers on the Run : Iraq is the latest stop for teams of medical commandos--doctors, nurses and other volunteers drawn by disaster.

The French-accented chatter at the hotel buffet softened as two European women in their early 30s entered the room. Heads turned. Shouts arose. Where was it last--Africa . . . Latin America?

Swept off their feet in Gallic embraces, the women were back in the thick of it again. Somewhere, sometime, they and their colleagues at the Baghdad Novotel, now Red Cross headquarters in postwar Iraq, had been drawn together before, as now, by disaster.

Theirs is an exclusive club: doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians and logistics wizards working in dangerous places, most of them volunteers. They come to bind the wounds, to give the shots, to seek the missing in the awful aftermath of war, earthquakes and violent storms.

Some are idealists; others are hard-bitten veterans of bureaucratic inertia, official suspicion and similar hurdles facing outsiders in troubled times.

Blowing off the tension of a hard day’s work over a beer or a treasured bottle of wine, they give a glimpse of life on the run, of first-strike commando medicine.

“It’s not so much that we need doctors. We have enough Iraqi doctors, and their competence is completely sufficient,” explained Daniel Dufour, a peppery Swiss who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross’ quick-relief contingent in Iraq. He brought in a team of 130 relief workers March 3, just days after the Persian Gulf War ended. They spent their first nights working by candlelight.

“It’s logistics and supplies,” Dufour said in a breathless rundown of his problems. “You’ve got to get in and grab all the available (Toyota) Landcruisers. We’re bringing stuff in with (Soviet) Aeroflot charters. They’re very cheap.

“Diarrhea is the thing. We need 260,000 liters of Ringer lactate. We need rehydration kits. The chlorine plants were bombed. We’re not going to be able to chlorinate all the tap water.

“We are stopgapping here,” he said.

But plugging holes in the medical dikes until Iraq can put its own system back together will take cash for imported supplies, and, under U.N. sanctions, Iraq still cannot sell its oil. So, the Red Cross and other volunteer relief agencies are carrying a large share of the load.

“They are the fire brigades,” Staffan Bodemar, a Swede who heads the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugee’s relief programs in Iraq, said of the Red Cross quick-hit teams. U.N. operations are “heavy,” Bodemar explained--more formal in approach and slower to get established in a disaster.

On the range of heavy to light, the people known as “the French doctors” are often the lightest--quickest off the mark to the world’s trouble spots.

Just 20 years in business, the pioneering Medecins Sans Frontieres and its rival offsprings, Medecins du Monde and Aide Medicale Internationale, often put diplomatic niceties aside in their rush to serve. The original group’s physicians don’t call themselves “Doctors Without Borders” for nothing.

Basically, MSF is a floating pool of humanitarian-driven, damn-the-politics volunteer physicians, called up in emergencies by a small professional staff in Paris. The nucleus was leftist, a sort of net-bag-and-sandal medical corps that found itself at odds with repressive regimes. They were French and abrasively righteous. Now, veterans say, they have mellowed--marginally. And the movement has spread.

In the Iraqi port of Basra, which was damaged by allied bombing and ravaged by the Shiite Muslim insurgency that followed, two members of MSF’s Dutch branch shared the last of a case of South African beer with three visiting reporters and talked about the problems there. Both of them, a man and a woman, were casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts, just off the job after a planning session at a restaurant with their colleagues.

MSF volunteers, unhindered by the international apparatus of the Red Cross or the U.N. agencies, are refreshingly candid. They are not trammeled by bureaucratic self-censorship. They are not on a payroll. These two had been in Iraq just 10 days.

“The phone rang at home. MSF asked me if I’d like to go to Iraq, and I said sure,” the woman recalled. “That’s about it. Forty-eight hours later, I was on a plane from Amsterdam to Jordan for the drive into Iraq.”

Why take the risk?

“This is what I do. I’m a doctor. And besides, it’s rewarding. There’s a lot of help needed here.”

It was not her first taste of the Persian Gulf crisis. In January, she had worked at a Jordanian transit camp where refugees from Iraq and Kuwait, mainly Asian workers, were given medical care, food and a bath before moving on.

Her colleague was critical of Iraqi preparedness for the devastation and disease that followed President Saddam Hussein’s disastrous war with the American-led coalition forces.

“The health department,” he said, “has no idea of the real impact of the situation on the people. They had no medical stocks for emergencies. They don’t have the organization, and the distribution system doesn’t work.

“The rural areas where the situation is worst are at the bottom of the ladder. Even higher up the scale, most health centers have just a nurse and a dresser.”

The result has been double duty for the foreign relief workers. They not only have to administer necessary treatments and round up and deliver the supplies but, in many cases, help set emergency priorities for local officials.

At his storefront offices in Basra, Aldo Benini, who heads the Red Cross relief effort in the south, explained the difficulties. Basra’s water supplies were in danger. Chlorine for purification had run out April 3. The Iraqi government could not import the needed chemical because of the embargo, so the job fell to the Red Cross. By mid-May, the water was being chlorinated again.

The sewage-treatment plant, however, was still out, and raw sewage was being pumped into the Shatt al Arab, which is the source of the city’s water, completing a bacterial circle.

The Red Cross, whose primary job in Iraq had been monitoring the treatment of prisoners from Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran, was now being called upon to help repair and maintain the water and sewage systems in Basra.

“We should retrench,” complained Dufour, Benini’s colleague in Baghdad. “We should get back to accounting for prisoners and our traditional responsibilities.”

For those in the field, the preoccupation is still logistics. Take P. J. Murros, an angular, plain-spoken Finnish doctor who traveled through Kurdistan during the refugee crisis, surveying needs for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). He had come to Iraq from Vietnam, where he runs a clinic outside Ho Chi Minh City, leaving an area with lingering health problems for one where they are acute.

“Here’s my report,” he said, spinning 10 or 12 stapled, typewritten pages across the table to an Indian UNICEF official who was telling reporters that he had been working for days on a distribution plan.

“And here’s the problem with your distribution plan. You’re sending the chloride powder (for water treatment) north in big trucks. Good for you, as far as it goes. But they need that chloride up in the village areas. You’ve got to offload it onto smaller vehicles and get it up in the valleys. And you’ve got to do it now, today!”

This is “light” talking to “heavy” in emergency medical care. They have differences in perception, but neither can perform without the other in the long run. And Iraq is, by recent expert appraisals, facing a prolonged crisis.

But for the fire brigades--the Red Cross, the “French doctors” and other first-into-action volunteers--the phones will soon start ringing for help in some disaster far from the Middle East. They always ring. Physicians in Paris, Amsterdam and Geneva will pack their bags, leave their practices and catch the first flight out.

And Iraq will be left to its own resources.