Rocco Armonda and I were draped in sea-blue surgical scrubs, standing over an open skull. Beneath us, on an operating table, a brain pulsed through a roughly six-inch hole carved by a bone saw. Armonda gently probed the glittering mass, picking out shrapnel. We were at Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro, Ukraine, the closest major medical center to the front lines. The man on the table, a Ukrainian soldier in his 20s, had been struck by Russian artillery hours earlier. This was Armonda's fifth surgery of the day'and he didn't even work there. Armonda is a 61-year-old neurosurgeon typically based in Washington, D.C., where he works at two major hospitals. When the war began, he was horrified by the images coming out of Ukraine and used his connections to organize shipments of much-needed medical aid. Then he heard about Mechnikov and went to volunteer in 2023. I met him there during his second visit, in February 2024. He was astonished by the chaos and brutality he'd witnessed, even though...
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