CONTINGENCY OPERATING BASE ADDER, Iraq – Maj. Kevin Scott joined 2nd Battalion, 104th Aviation Regiment this month as the battalion flight surgeon, replacing Lt. Col. David Doud, who returned to the U.S. recently after completing his tour.
Lt. Col. David Doud, 42, returned home to Gettysburg, Pa. Doud joined the battalion in 2006 after serving as the medical company commander for the 728th Maintenance Support Battalion.
Doud has nearly 18 years of service in the Army National Guard as a doctor. He deployed to Kosovo with the 56th Brigade in 2003 as the brigade surgeon. Doud had the opportunity to fly with the Nebraska MEDEVAC Company attached to the 56th Bde. After deployment he took the training course at Fort Rucker to be qualified as a flight surgeon. He then moved to the 2nd Bn., 104th AR.
The day Doud remembered most clearly on this deployment was June 10, when an explosion in Al Batha, Iraq, killed and wounded many civilians. The Tallil medical facility asked Doud to help their staff with the emergency surgery patients that were being flown in. “I treat car accident victims and gunshot wounds in the States,” Doud said, “but the damage to the human body by high explosives is beyond anything I had seen.”
Two patients had non-survivable injuries and were made as comfortable as possible. The other three were critical, but Doud was able to perform surgery that kept them alive for evacuation to a larger medical facility.
“The three critical patients lived,” said Doud. “We made a difference.”
Scott, the incoming surgeon, is a neurologist with a civilian practice at Penn State Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa., but Scott did not start his military career in medicine. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1986 and served in a military police unit at Fort Bragg, N.C., where he completed airborne, air-assault and ranger training. He parachuted into Panama in 1989 when the U.S. captured Manuel Noriega. He served with the 82nd Airborne Div. in Operation Desert Storm. In 1992, he returned to civilian life to pursue a medical career. He went to graduate school for physiology in New York, then to Wake Forest for Medical School, graduating in 1999. From 2000 to 2004 he trained as a neurosurgeon, then returned to the military in 2006 with an age waiver. Scott, 44, previously served as the 628th Aviation Support Battalion flight surgeon since 2006 and deployed to Taji, Iraq, in 2007.
“I wanted to serve after 9/11,” Scott said. “But I decided to complete all of my medical training first, then come back.”
