Treating the innocents

13-year old Rakan Hussein's story, as told by the Globe's Kevin Cullen in the first of a four part series, is terrible. And moving.

A soldier in the bunk above Rakan awoke and slid his legs down to the floor, mumbling in a morphine haze that he had to go the bathroom. A nurse tried to take the soldier's helmet, but he held it tightly to his chest, pointed to a jagged hole in its side and said it was the only reason he was still alive and that he'd be damned before he gave it up.

The soldier, a big country boy with wide shoulders and a deep shrapnel wound in his back, looked at the small, emaciated Iraqi child beneath him, and turned to Ronan, who had met Rakan at the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and was bringing him back to Boston for treatment.

''What happened to him?" the soldier asked, as Ronan recalls it.

Ronan repeated the story: a speeding car, a jumpy patrol, a family devastated.

The soldier bent down, wincing in pain, and stroked Rakan's head. ''I'm sorry, kid," the soldier told him. ''I'm really sorry."

Rakan looked at him, intrigued.

Still clutching his helmet, the soldier dug into his duffel bag with his free hand and pulled out his US Army cap and handed it to Rakan. Rakan smiled up at him.

Ronan turned away, his eyes welling up.

Later, he tried to explain.

''Every military person I've dealt with in this says the same thing: what can I do to help? All these guys know they could have been the one who pulled the trigger."

But Rakan, who lost his parents and possibly use of his legs, because of a U.S. patrol mistakenly fired on their speeding car, needed an extraordinary amount of effort to get him the care he needed. Not only that, that extraordinary effort would not have even begun had the patrol not been accompanied by Chris Hondos, a photographer for Getty Images, whose photos of the family's plight appeared in Newsweek.

I am somewhat astonished that U.S. forces do not routinely provide medical care to any innocent civilian victims they injure by accident. Instead, they call an ambulance and send them to Iraq's hospitals? Those were in bad shape before the U.S. invasion.

I guess I'm naive. I would have assumed they'd be taken to the army's medical facilities, at least for initial care, such as removing a U.S. bullet.

Something else struck me as I read the installment. I wonder who will be the more permanently traumatized: Young Rakan, or the soldiers who killed his parents by mistake and left him unable to walk?