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An 11-year-old girl whimpers softly as her father carries her into the blue insulated medical tent where Marc O'Regan has been working nonstop to treat the injured. More than six weeks have passed since the devastating earthquake in Pakistan, and the lesion the child sustained behind her left ear -- most likely caused by a falling beam -- has yet to be treated. The girl lays her head on her father's lap as O'Regan carefully cuts away some of her hair. He then cleanses the festering wound and dresses it.As he works, he keeps up a steady patter of encouragement: "I know it hurts," he says. "We're going to make it better." He administers an injection of powerful antibiotics, then hands over a packet of pills. Through a pair of soldiers who translate using rudimentary English, he tells his patient to come back to see him tomorrow. He wonders if she will.
A physician's assistant from California, O'Regan is taking a month from his practice to volunteer with a medical-relief team called Operation Heartbeat in the demolished earthquake zone that spans Pakistani Kashmir, a region that has been at the center of a dispute between India and Pakistan for decades. Al Qaeda sympathizers reside in the area, and its mountains are a possible hiding place for Osama bin Laden.
The quake struck on October 8, 2005, and to a world already fatigued by a year of disasters, its magnitude and severity were overwhelming: more than 80,000 people killed in a 12,000-square-mile region containing some of the steepest, most difficult terrain in the world.
Nearly four million of the quake survivors, many of them seriously injured, had been left homeless, with winter coming soon. From the air, the place looked like Hiroshima after the bomb: Buildings were flattened like insects, debris was everywhere, including farm equipment and carcasses of animals that were the lifeblood of the region.
Before the quake, Kashmir was spectacularly beautiful, its mountain peaks stretching dramatically toward the sky. An emerald river rushed along glacier-smoothed stones at the valley floor; steep red-dirt bluffs a hundred feet high created the first band of narrow roadway. Then it was up, up, up, past terraced hillsides, where shaggy goats munched roadside flowers. Higher still, women carried water in metal jugs on their heads. There, amid homes and little villages, pine trees and hazy sunlight made the air cooler. In the distance stood the majestic Himalayas.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, which measured 7.6 on the Richter scale, Pakistan and the United Nations issued a plea for help, and volunteers began to arrive. On the day O'Regan saw the girl with the head wound, he was performing a two-day drop-in mission for Operation Heartbeat, flying by helicopter from base camp into a remote valley called Gehl to care for the injured in three villages still inaccessible by road.
A lanky, athletic bachelor in his 50s, O'Regan is a former Navy SEAL who once served with Jesse Ventura. He joined the military as a young man "wanting to jump out of planes and blow things up without hurting anybody," and left, ultimately to pursue a career in health care. In the following years, he began to shape his life by serving others. "I know I'm not going to change the world," he says. "But this work feeds my soul."
Now here he is, sleeping and working in an eight-by-ten insulated royal blue tent donated by the Chinese government. Men wrapped in blanket- like shawls, women in colorful head scarves, and children hugging themselves against the cold squat silently outside his tent, waiting to be treated for everything from minor cuts and bruises to life-threatening infections. After all this time, the injuries are still severe.
Today, a 60-year-old man is carried in with a crushed foot wrapped in filthy gauze, swollen to almost four times its normal size. O'Regan grimaces at the odor: gangrene. The patient has no illusions about his condition. "Please don't take my leg," he begs.
O'Regan's near-constant smile fades as he turns to the interpreter. "Tell him first we save his life; then we worry about his leg," he says. He unwraps the dressing, and one glance tells him there is nothing he can do. So O'Regan accompanies the man by helicopter to the city of Muzaffarabad, carries him half a mile through rubble-strewn streets, and leaves him with better-equipped doctors at a Red Cross field hospital. It is the last time he will see him.
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