Mercy’s Mission Polishes U.S. Image, Ship’s Crew Says

Dr. Steve Ferrara points at the lung that is glowing on the monitors of his radiology lab and traces his finger along a white ring that looks like a curled worm.

“That’s a very unique bacteria and a very aggressive infection,” says Ferrara, an officer on the U.S. Navy medical ship Mercy, which has been treating Indonesian victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami. “It originated in the lungs, in someone who forcefully inhaled a lot of water that was really muddy and filled with debris and all sorts of bad junk -- essentially a near-drowning -- and then progressed to the brain.

“We call it tsunami lung.”

Tsunami lung does not show up in medical textbooks, but Ferrara has seen plenty of it since the Mercy anchored off Indonesia’s coast Feb. 4. During that time, the combined crew of Navy and civilian medical workers has applied Mercy’s American-level healthcare to treat everything from badly set broken bones to tumors to teeth.

In the process, they say, they have provided a much-needed buffing of the U.S. military’s image abroad.

The Mercy is about to return to its home port of San Diego, leaving Indonesia several days ahead of Jakarta’s March 26 deadline for all foreign troops to go.

The crew leaves behind some healthier people, as well as a minority of critics who argue that the Mercy’s presence was more about political profit than responding to a disaster that demanded swift, on-the-ground first aid. Some front-line agencies scoff that the ship’s technology was underused because the Mercy was late to arrive and the Navy leery of coming ashore.

“The emergency was over by the time they got here,” says Dr. Sabine Roquefort of Doctors Without Borders, an organization that rejects working alongside any armed force.

But for the vast majority of humanitarian workers here, the Mercy’s presence has been a blessing, says Claudia Hudspeth, UNICEF’s senior global emergency coordinator.

“UNICEF has absolutely no issues working with the U.S. military as long as it separates its humanitarian and military capabilities,” says Hudspeth, who is working in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital at the center of the Indonesian relief effort. “They didn’t come in here telling us what they were going to do. They said, ‘What do you need?’ and they listened. The collaboration has been excellent.”

From its conception, the Mercy’s mission was a mix of sophisticated healthcare and public relations. Sending the ship on the long journey from California was not only part of Washington’s contribution to the relief effort, it was a way of showing that the U.S. could send the military to far-off regions for humanitarian reasons as well as warfare.

It was always going to be a challenge for an American military ship to win friends in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province, where Osama bin Laden is a hero to many.

Essentially a floating hospital with a crew of 340, the Mercy was fitted for the mission with 250 beds to go with its 12 operating rooms and top-of-the-line equipment. Many of the doctors and nurses were not Navy corpsmen but volunteers from Project Hope, a civilian organization. They replaced some of the regular Navy personnel to give the mission less of a military face, easing the Indonesian government’s jitters about having the U.S. Navy on its doorstep.

The Mercy kept a careful distance. It remained out of sight off Banda Aceh, which had absorbed some of the tsunami’s strongest blows. Except for a public health team that stayed ashore to spray at dawn and dusk against mosquito-borne malaria, medical personnel were shuttled into Banda Aceh for only brief visits, with most patients ferried to the ship by helicopter for treatment.

That led to some frustration aboard: The doctors and nurses had come thousands of miles expecting to wade into the heart of a disaster zone and instead found themselves able only to gaze at the site.

Yet many said they were proud to be part of a floating experiment that may signal better cooperation between the military and humanitarian organizations, whose different cultures have historically made them the cats and dogs of relief work.

“It’s an experiment I’ll recommend we do again,” says retired Rear Adm. Bill McDaniel, a former command surgeon of the Pacific Fleet who was hired as a consultant to make the arrangements for the Mercy. He arrived 2 1/2 weeks ahead of the ship and found himself facing resistance from many of the international aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations, which were highly suspicious of the U.S. military’s motives.

“It took awhile. There’s a natural suspicion and antipathy between these groups and any military,” McDaniel says.

“They said, ‘We’ve got enough.’ But what they had was a lot of emergency capacity. There was a crying need for CT scans and orthopedic surgery and other crucial stuff that they can’t do onshore,” he says.

Still, much of the Mercy team’s skill and technology was applied to non-tsunami-related illness. The ship didn’t reach the scene until a month after the disaster. Doctors say two-thirds of the patients they treated were new accident victims or those suffering from chronic illnesses such as cancer. Mercy’s surgeons had extracted 879 teeth as of last weekend. Many patients told the Mercy’s doctors that they had not previously sought treatment because they couldn’t afford it. Some Project Hope nurses and doctors say they arrived with misgivings about working so closely with the military, especially when they heard grumbling from some of the ship’s crew that they would rather be treating troops in Iraq.

“It was made clear to us: ‘The Navy is your boss,’ ” says Connie Wilson, 51, a registered nurse from Boston who says she still has “a bit of a ‘60s antiwar activist mentality.”

“But it’s nice to see our military projecting a humanitarian image instead of a military one,” she says. “It’s the other side of America, the good side, that no one seems to see anymore.”