Tonight, as we continue our series the "Wounds of War" about U.S. medical care in Iraq, we'll tell the amazing story of a 5-year-old Iraqi girl who came close to death and got a second chance at life due to the efforts of some very dedicated Americans. Two organizations played a big role in helping her --  the National Iraqi Assistance Center and the Shriners Hospitals. The Iraqi Assistance Center was set up and is run by the U.S. military to provide charity care to a few of the many in that nation who need it. For more than 85 years the Shriners have been providing care for needy children from around the world with orthopedic, burn or spinal cord problems. I urge anyone who wants to help to contact those organizations via their Web sites above.

Many will watch tonight's story and ask why the girl could not be transferred to an Iraqi hospital. Simply put, the Iraqi medical system is in shambles. In most places there is no such thing as rehabilitation, so in the overcrowded and understaffed hospitals it is, as one American doctor put it to me, "survival of the fittest." Many Iraqi doctors, because of sectarian killings and kidnappings or threats of them, have fled the country. U.S. efforts to help set up a functioning health care system have been plagued by corruption and mismanagement. In fact, earlier this month Deputy Health Minister Hakim al- Zamili was arrested and charged with funneling millions of dollars given for health care to insurgents. So as we share this one girl's story tonight, I hope we remember the thousands of children injured in this war who get no second chance.

Tonight we begin a series on the treatment of the U.S. troops wounded in the Iraq war. In addition to the broadcast report, I wrote an article for the Health Section of MSNBC.com describing the overall medical care system in Iraq, and I blogged while on assignment and shooting this material. So I won't write much more here today. But I want to take a little space to thank the people who traveled with me to Iraq. They take the risks and don't get the credit I do. Craig White was the photographer, Susan Becerra did the sound and engineering, and Kevin Monahan was the field producer. Jane Derenowski and Maggie Kassner did not go to Iraq, but did a terrific job of editing in New York, as did M.L. Flynn, the senior producer. Thanks to these colleagues for helping me tell the story of the brave men and women who are so dedicated to treating the wounded soldiers of this war.

We flew in to Germany this morning on the C-17 that regularly shuttles the U.S. wounded from the battlefields of Iraq to the Army's regional medical center here in Landstuhl. Injured soldiers rest in gurneys stacked two or three high while teams of doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists offer care at 37,000 feet as good as most hospital intensive care units. It is quite a sight. The cargo bay of the huge jet is configured so that the medical teams can care for someone on a ventilator, give continuous oxygen, monitor vital signs and intervene when necessary. Last night as the plane hit choppy air, some of the wounded who were conscious groaned loudly in pain. The nurse gave them additional sedating drugs. A man with intestinal damage was continuing to bleed internally, so he got a blood transfusion in the sky.

To lessen the chance of a strike from a rocket, the plane takes off in the dark from Balad Air Base  with no lights on. It accelerates far faster than a commercial airliner, slamming inexperienced passengers in seats along the side against one another. All passengers are instructed to wear body armor for the take off. It is one last reminder of the dangers of Iraq. For me, after spending seven hours next to all those injured soldiers, no reminder is needed.

Later today we caught up with some of the wounded whose care we are following from the outlying hospitals in Iraq all here to Germany and then on to treatment in the U.S. The 21-year-old I described yesterday is doing fine. His face looks awful, but he will heal. There are many others who will not do so well, despite the efforts of the best-ever military medicine.

He's a 21-year-old soldier and amazingly upbeat considering that the right side of his face is peppered with shrapnel and there is a slit in his right eyelid.  His vision is blurred, but fortunately he is not blind.  His other injuries include a fracture of the bone in his right forearm so bad that the bone was sticking out of the skin and there is possible damage to his carotid arteries.

His story is, sadly, a very common one here at the Air Force's hospital in Balad, the hub for transporting wounded U.S. soldiers to the Army hospital in Germany and then back home for treatment in the states. 

This soldier, unnamed here because of concern his family has not yet been notified of his injury, was the driver of the lead vehicle in his convoy when an Improvised Explosive Device blasted his Humvee so hard the huge armored vehicle flipped over.

"One minute I was driving and the next thing I remember I was in the back of a tank," he told me.  "They say if you hear the explosion, you are OK. I didn't hear this one." 

Like many of the injured soldiers here, he had experienced IED explosions before, most recently last week.

Because every seriously injured U.S. soldier passes through here, it can seem to be an endless stream of misery. If it is not an IED then it is sniper fire or mortar rounds. The body armor the soldiers wear works well, but it can't cover everything. As a result, every night one helicopter after another deposits soldiers with mangled arms and legs or head injuries and often, like with this soldier, both.

According to the commander of this medical unit, 98 percent of the injured who make it here go out alive. And, indeed, it is a sobering sight to see the work of the doctors, nurses and medics here who treat all these severely injured people day and night. But last night they lost one U.S. soldier on the table in the operating room and everyone feels it today.

Tonight, as Nightly News airs in all the U.S. time zones, we'll be flying on the huge C-17 transport jet that is converted into a flying intensive care unit with this soldier and dozens of other injured Americans from here to Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, and then traveling on the Landstuhl Army Hospital, the next stage in the care.

Meanwhile, this soldier is thankful to be alive.

We're at a U.S. Air Force base in Balad, Iraq, 50 miles north of Baghdad and a world away. The 332d Air Expeditionary Wing has assembled here an enormous force of people and machines that looks to me anything but temporary. 

One of the unit's many missions is the transport of injured U.S. troops "out of theater" to Germany and then on to hospitals at home. Tonight alone, the five beds in the emergency room and the two operating rooms have turned over again and again as waves of wounded U.S. troops and Iraqis arrive by helicopter or airplane. I'll have lots more to say about the amazing care here online and on Nightly News soon, but back to Balad.

This was Saddam Hussein's air base and the American military first bombed it in 2003, then took it over and have been rebuilding and expanding it ever since. The commanders here like to brag that, including helicopter flights, this is now the second-busiest airport in the world after London's Heathrow. F-16s slam off the runway in shifts day and night with their afterburners blazing for surveillance missions -- and often to scramble to bomb a target. Giant transport planes bring in cargo that is then distributed in smaller planes to "forward operating bases" throughout the country. This avoids increasingly dangerous road travel whenever possible. A massive fleet of Black Hawk, Chinook and other helicopters ferries troops and material throughout the country.

The place looks like any Air Force Base in the U.S. or around the world with its PX, Difacs (dining facilities) and base housing in trailers. You just can't go out the gate. The vast majority of the service people here will see nothing else of Iraq, and what they see here is a lot of dust that now turns to mud with the occasional winter rain. Concrete blast walls surround every building closely. Everyone jokes that they wish they had the contract for the concrete. (Kellogg, Brown and Root is building and maintaining the place.) Mortar rounds still hit the facility almost daily, but cause little damage.

And I'll close with some good news: We just made contact with doctors at the Army hospital in Baghdad. The 6-year-old Iraqi girl I described here on Friday is doing great. A second surgery is giving hope that she will keep the use of her arm. Her parents found her and I'll have lots more to say about her story in the days to come.

We've just visited Camp Speicher near Tikrit -- Sadam Hussein's hometown -- as we continue reporting on medical care by the U.S. military. The tent hospital here is now staffed by the 399th Combat Support Hospital (CSH – or "cash" in military speak.) This is a reserve unit out of Boston, mostly Massachusetts folks, followed by many from Ohio and several other states. They tend to be older and less military in their bearing than their full-time Armed Forces colleagues, but they are certainly no different in their fierce dedication to patient care.

We heard this Sunni area was quiet now. It certainly was not during our visit. Many Medivac helicopters landed — some with warning, others with none.

As the CSH medics roll out their stretchers on  big wheels (called "rickshaws") to one of the choppers, the helicopter medic hands over four horribly wounded Iraqi men guarded by four U.S. soldiers.

The doctors, nurses and medics move calmly but very quickly to determine what is wrong. One of the Iraqi's legs is hanging off and he is bleeding massively from internal injuries. The doctors rush him into surgery. Some of the other wounded scream out with moans so loud it is hard for the medical staff to hear each other.

While the life-saving efforts continue, an intelligence specialist starts to determine what happened –- almost never an easy task in these first minutes in the emergency room, but the story emerges.  A U.S. helicopter spotted two men planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at the side of the road. The men ran away from their own car and hijacked a second car and tried to flee. The helicopter opened fire, hitting the two insurgents and two other men who had been in the hijacked car. The insurgents' abandoned car is full of explosive devices and a video camera to record their planned destruction of U.S. troops. The other two Iraqis seem to be among the many who are simply caught accidentally in the battle.

After the helicopter fired, a team of soldiers called a Quick Reaction Force, arrived on the scene and its medics administered first aid to all four and called for the Medivac helicopter.

In the emergency room at the CSH, the first case is one of the insurgents who is still bleeding so much that surgeons give him 30 units of transfused blood in a matter of minutes – almost depleting the hospital's supply. An urgent call goes out at the base for blood donors and within minutes several dozen U.S. soldiers form a long line. The soldiers are not told who will get the blood, but I ask one what he thinks if it goes to an insurgent. "A life is a life," he replies. "We have an obligation to save him no matter what he did to us."

Not long after, an ambulance from Tikrit arrives with an Iraqi policeman shot in the head by a sniper. The staff struggles to save him, performing CPR,  pushing air into his lungs, and transfusing blood. But after 15 minutes of struggle, the doctor in charge sees large amounts of brain matter flowing out and declares the man "expectant" -– meaning he will die soon. "That is really tough," the doctor tells me later. "These guys are on our side."

Then a call comes in about a U.S. soldier arriving on a helicopter with a "head wound." The staff prepares.  But when the chopper unloads it turns out to be a hip wound, and a mild one at that. Such missed communications are common from the noisy helicopters.

The four men shot by the helicopter are stabilized by the end of the day. The staff relaxes and gives a cake, "homemade" in a bread making machine, to one of the female medics for her 28th birthday. After they sing Happy Birthday, they banter to relieve the tension while they wait for whatever will come in next.

In this past week I have seen a lot of horrific wounds and heroic attempts to save lives. I've been with the 28th Combat Support Hospital, the military's trauma center in Baghdad's Green Zone. But yesterday a case almost overwhelmed me emotionally. In the afternoon, two mortar rounds fell a few hundred yards away near the U.S. embassy. Loud speakers and sirens announce "a lockdown" of the heavily fortified area. People are not allowed to leave buildings. It proved a good call; a third round came in minutes later. Then a huge car bomb exploded just outside the Green Zone's gates. The tension level in the hospital rises immediately. Will there be casualties arriving? Within minutes a U.S. Army Humvee speeds to the gate and soldiers carry in a bloody and mangled Iraqi girl. I would guess her age to be 6 or 7 years. The doctors, nurses and technicians immediately start working on her with the same furious intensity they summon when a U.S. soldier arrives. "Two amputations and chest perforations," one of the doctors shouts. They rush her immediately from the emergency room to surgery.

Seeing the girl rushed in, I could not help thinking of my own children at her age. Tears welled up in my eyes. Later, when I talked to some of the nurses and doctors they said it is the same for them. They choke up with every child, even though, as one nurse told me, "we have seen 25 just like this in the last few months."

Very few Iraqis get care from the U.S. military, proportional to the number who are injured everyday in the sectarian violence. Usually it is those who are political connected, or those picked up in a moment's decision by a unit on patrol. It is hard to get the story of the girl straight. She was not hurt by the mortars in the Green Zone. It was either the car bomb or a separate IED. After dropping her off, the soldiers in the Humvee sped back to duty. The most likely reason she was picked up is that some soldier, possibly a medic, just thought of his own kids and could not leave her on the street.

Even though the girl was close to death, the surgeons and other staff in the operating room kept her alive. And though they need to amputate one leg, they worked for hours to save her arm that had been mangled.

What will happen to the girl? The hospital staff will keep her as long as they can, but they have few beds for long stays. The U.S. causalities who cannot return to duty in a day or two are flown to the U.S. Army Hospital in Germany and then on to hospitals in the U.S. for care. Eventually the girl will have to be transferred to "medical city" -- the Iraqi civilian hospital across the Tigris which is understaffed, overcrowded and short  of supplies as it takes in most of those who are wounded on the streets here daily.

Editor's note: If you missed Robert's report from the CASH hospital that aired on Tuesday's broadcast, click here or on the image to watch.

I have been in Iraq only two days and this is my first visit, so my impressions can only be those of a new set of eyes looking at a very well-examined place and situation. 

Still, two things stand out to me immediately: One is that at the hospital in the Green Zone where the 28th Combat Support Hospital (CASH in military speak) receives massive numbers of wounded soldiers, there is a sense of it all being so routine. And it is not just the medical staff that does such a sensational job; the troops I spoke with who woke up with missing limbs and other severe injuries seemed so stoic and calm. It is as though they know that their patrols here have such a high chance of encountering life-threatening trouble that they almost expect it to happen. 

People can talk about bravery and dedication, but when a young woman who just lost her leg tells me she is still glad to just see the sun rise and be in the Army, I'm so moved I start to cry.  Another impression: the Green Zone -- the international American-guarded sector -- Saddam's old palaces, where massively armed U.S. soldiers and a few Iraqis walk around in a calm atmosphere. One can see and feel huge explosions only hundreds of yards away, but it seems thoroughly incongruous. But today, seeing the mangled soldiers in the Green Zone made me know -- it is real.

Editor's note: If you missed Robert's report on Tuesday's broadcast, click here to watch.