It's a good and worthy idea: to glimpse our current wars through the eyes of military doctors and nurses. The piece is straight acts and trax, based on interviews with several military health workers home from Iraq. There are compelling if predictable moments. A surgeon describes needing to live with triage choices he made when faced with a large number of badly wounded troops. A nurse tells of feeling sad when thinking of the loved ones of a soldier who's just died in front of her.

The report is at a calm remove from the reality of U.S. medical centers in Iraq and so, inevitably, it feels a bit dry. And the piece could have benefited from more direct writing at times, for example when the reporter refers to the arrival of a bunch of bloodied soldiers at an operating room as a "mass casualty situation." But "War and Medicine" has strengths and would make a good insert for many stations.