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Medical Museum Displays Iraq Splatter Slab

December 14, 2008

In the latest of many unique exhibits, the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, is displaying part of a U.S. military tent “trauma bay” that used to be in Iraq.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a concrete slab that was under an operating table on which countless battlefield operations were performed. A press release from the Armed Forces Press Network calls the slab, “the place where the most American blood was spilled since the Vietnam War.”

Chopping a 7×7-foot, six-inch-thick concrete slab weighing almost 1.5 tons out of a floor in Iraq and air-mailing it to the U.S. is not something that just anyone can make happen. According to the press release, the man behind the slab is Congressman Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican who saw the slab when he was on a trip in Iraq, and who thought that other people should see it too. In August 2007 he wrote a letter to the military stating that the stained slab should be preserved, since it was “the most hallowed of ground in the entire country of Iraq.”

In February 2008 the slab was jack-hammered out of the floor, and it was recently unveiled in the museum under an eight-foot swatch of the hospital tent.

America’s romance with slabs is nothing new. But the ability to preserve stained slabs is new; it would have been unthinkable in previous wars. Advanced technology, which has saved many American lives in Iraq, is now also saving stained surfaces to be seen by our children, and our children’s children.

Before this, we had to rely on hoodoo.

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