When Army Lt. Col. George Garcia, M.D., took over as director of the Army Trauma Training Center at the Ryder Trauma Center, he immediately felt at home.
That's because Garcia, a jovial, bespectacled man who sports a bristle haircut, was a Miller School trauma fellow at Ryder from 2005 until 2007. When he took charge of the ATTC -- which trains military medical teams headed to Iraq and Afghanistan -- last August, it represented a homecoming of sorts.
"I hate to toot my own horn," Garcia says with an infectious chuckle, "but everybody seemed really happy that I was back. I kept in touch with a lot of the people here while I was gone."
Part of his time away was spent at a small Army encampment in northeastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. Garcia had been in-country a few days and was outside with another new medical officer when something streaked overhead.
"And then, BOOOOOM!" Garcia says, reenacting his first encounter with Taliban mortar attacks. "Then you realize what it is and you run and get your body armor." The only fortified position at the encampment was a cement mess hall where Garcia hunkered down on more than one occasion as mortars or rockets rained down outside.
During the six months Garcia spent in Afghanistan, he never was called upon to treat a GI. "We didn't operate on any Americans, which was good," he recalls. "It was all civilians - we only operated on Afghans."
Garcia treated people who sustained shrapnel wounds from exploding ordnance, patched up Afghan men who tumbled off mountain trails and even performed elective pediatric surgery.
A California native, Garcia's father was a career Marine, his brother and sister-in-law were in the military, and he even met his wife and the mother of his two young sons while she was serving an Army tour.
A self-described "unapologetic patriot," Garcia took it upon himself to get scuba diving and paratrooper training, and proudly wears a combat action badge on his dress uniform. A yen to do the extraordinary is what attracted Garcia to trauma medicine in the first place.
"It's the challenge that's the most fun for me," he notes. "You never know what you're going to do next, so you don't get to prepare for it ahead of time, like in elective surgery. I may take a spleen out, then two hours later I might be operating on somebody's heart, and then four hours later on somebody's liver.
"And you have to do it under the worst possible conditions, instead of the best conditions."
When his military commitment ends in 2012, Garcia wants to remain where he is.
"My plans are actually to stay here at Ryder," he says. "I love being in an academic medical center. I love working with residents and medical students and fellows.
"Next to operating, the teaching part is what I love most about my job."
