Editor’s note: Blogger Bill Ardolino is embedded with a U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. He’s there to find out the truth about the U.S. war effort on the ground in Iraq. Unlike the vast majority of mainstream media journalists who stay within the Green Zone in Baghdad, Ardolino is on patrol in the streets wherever his embedded Marine unit goes. This is his first exclusive dispatch for The Examiner.

Within five minutes of arriving at the Fallujah-Iraqi Police Station headquarters, I was welcomed by the sound of shouts and hurried footsteps. An Iraqi policeman had been shot at the northwest perimeter of the station — a sniper had found his mark.

A crowd of Iraqis carried the groaning victim up the station’s main staircase and placed him on a litter hurriedly set down on the floor of the second-story hallway. A crowd of Iraqi Police and Marines coalesced, only to be shooed away by two Navy corpsmen rapidly assessing the gaping exit wound in the man’s stomach.

“Is he going to live?” I asked a Marine standing by on the fringes of the press.

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“Dunno, his guts are hanging out.”

The two corpsmen ripped his blouse open and pulled up a white undershirt. Then they rolled the man on his side, gauging the bullet’s path.

“It’s in his vest,” said a Marine, holding it up.

A flat, nickel-sized piece of lead was embedded in the inside of the kevlar, making the wound a “through-in-through.”

Corpsman HN Jerad “Doc J” Jurgensmier bandaged the exit wound with an abdominal pressure dressing. HM3 Joshua “Scuba Steve” Watson located the pinhole-sized entrance wound in the man’s lower back — an unlucky inch below the body armor’s ceramic protection — and put gauze over it. He then wet the abdominal bandages to keep the exposed organs moist, tied back his legs with two green cravats and threw a bag of charcoal under them for elevation.

With the wound dressed and the patient stabilized, the Iraqi Police carried their wounded comrade down to an Iraqi Police patrol truck (ambulances are juicy targets for insurgents) and transport to Camp Fallujah Surgical. It’s likely that the Iraqi policeman will live.

Navy corpsmen are a key component of a Marine Police Transition Team, an elite advisory unit responsible for equipping and training local Iraqis to take back the city from the confusing alliance of foreign terrorists and local insurgents currently sowing havoc.

In addition to the medical treatment they provide their Marines, also critical is the lifesaving care given to the Iraqi Police, who are subject to murderous intimidation outside of police headquarters, and who take traumatic injuries at an exponentially higher rate than their advisors. The professional care and personal concern shown by the corpsman go a long way towards forging trust and rapport between the Fallujan cops and their American advisors.

Jurgensmier is a thin, baby-faced 21-year-old who joined up after his brother took part in Operation al Fajr, the famed Marine assault on the city. He is well-loved by his Iraqi charges and the concern he shows for his patients earns him unending yet good-natured grief from his buddies.

The ribbing is such that he feels a need to explain: “I do a lot for them and give them a lot of medicine. Some of these guys have seen a doctor once, maybe twice in their life. I’m getting a guy medicine for his mother’s diabetes; another guy medicine for his kid who has been sick with the flu for about a week. I’m doing it not only to help them, but because if I help them they feel like they owe me something, and that’s good for the team. They come back with information, they’ll turn someone in or actually start doing their job. I’ve had it happen a couple of times — one guy brought in a list of names of possible insurgents in the area and where they live. In the beginning I just wanted to help them, but it turned out that they have an impressionable mentality. If you do something for them, they feel obligated to do something in return. And when it gets in their head that we’re here to help them, they start helping us.”

The other corpsman is Doc “Scuba Steve” Watson, a stocky, no-nonsense 25-year-old with a shaved head and blonde mustache. He’s plying the family trade, as his father was a corpsman from the Vietnam War through 2006. If Doc J is the maternal figure of the two corpsman, Doc Watson claims professional detachment.

Two hours after the belly wound was evacuated for surgery, one of Watson’s former trauma patients came in to have a bandage changed on a feeding tube in his stomach. A month ago, the man was shot clean through both cheeks while guarding a post office. Through an interpreter (terp), I asked who shot him and why.

“He said … he is saying bad words. He cursed them in Arabic. He says they are bad people who don’t want Fallujah to be at peace,” said the “terp.”

I asked him if he was going to return to work after his recovery.

“Of course,” he said. “I am Iraqi police forever.”

He complained about his neck bandage and asked for some ointment.

“What happened to the tube I gave him?” asked Doc Watson. He claimed to have lost it. “I don’t have any more … wait. Wait.” He shook his head. “Wait a minute.”

He disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with a handful of ointment packets.

“You tell him to use one per day. One per day. And he needs to come to Fallujah surgical to get the bandage removed.”

“We have sick call hours usually about now (6 p.m.),” Doc explained to me. “We take care of everything from sniffles to ‘hey, my arm is missing.’ We usually get about three to four seriously wounded per week. The most was 12 in one week. That was crazy.”

They also treat the wounded insurgents trying to kill them.

Later in the hallway, I overheard him introducing himself to an Iraqi Army liaison to the police department.

“I’m Josh, but they call me Scuba Steve.”

“Hmmm?” grunted the IA soldier.

“It’s a nickname. You know, nickname? They call me Scuba Steve.”

“Skoo … ba … steeev.”

“Yeah,” said Watson with a smile.