DO - Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine

it, treating people as he goes and delivering his
spiritual message. His group also dispenses practical
items, such as water filters.
Some of the work he’s done in the Amazon has already
earned him honor among the people. One family was
thrilled just to receive some Children’s Motrin to lessen
a daughter’s pain from mouth sores. The little girl, on
the other hand, was not so pleased to learn that
Kubacki was a doctor. “The child immediately began
crying, afraid she was to receive a shot,” Kubacki wrote.
“Made me feel right at home!”
For an in-depth account of Kubacki’s work in Brazil,
see his blog at http://spaces.msn.com/members/kubacki6/
Service to His Country
As an embedded journalist for TIME magazine, it was
Michael Weisskopf’s job to ride along with soldiers
from a U.S. artillery survey unit when it patrolled the
streets of Baghdad. That’s where a grenade landed
in his vehicle. Weisskopf picked it up to toss it out,
according to TIME’s Dec. 29, 2003, issue, but it exploded.
Weisskopf’s hand was gone. His arm was bleeding
badly. When he was transported to the 28th Combat
Support Hospital, surgeon Gregory Hill, D.O. (‘86),
was on the job.
Located in Baghdad’s Green Zone, Hill’s hospital was
the referral center for support units patrolling and
fighting in places like Mosul, Falluja, Tikrit and
Baghdad. Though journalists weren’t Hill’s typical
patients (soldiers, Iraqi civilians, even insurgents
were), he had seen that kind of trauma plenty of
times during his two deployments in the Middle
“ A lot of times, docs can be aloof.
They’re on call 24 hours, and
they never get any rest. But Dr.
Hill was always right there.”
–Capt. Terry Partin
East–open fractures, gunshot wounds from arms
fire, and injuries from explosives. He also saw the
kinds of injuries you wouldn’t associate with wartime,
such as sprained ankles from basketball games, injuries
from car accidents, and plenty of somatic dysfunction.
“[Soldiers] were wearing body armor in the field and
on convoys and missions, sometimes for days at a time,”
Hill says. So he added trigger-point injections and
soft-tissue techniques to his regimen.
Hill always knew he was going to be a doctor, and
joining the military–a family tradition–
was a good way to pay for school. “All
of my [male] siblings have been in the
military,” he says.
Still, the Middle East was a long way from
where Hill began his medical career. He
did his internship and orthopedic surgery
residency at Cuyahoga Falls General
Hospital followed by a one-year handand
upper-extremity microsurgery fellowship
at the University of Buffalo.
Hill then headed for Akron, Ohio, to a
private practice, but after September 11, he
would be the first Ohio doctor mobilized
to Iraq. After six months, he was back in
Akron, but by August 2005, Hill again
found himself on a military plane headed
for the war.
The second tour would find him squarely
in the line of fire, the only physician
working in a battalion aid station not far
Gregory Hill, D.O. ('86), was the first Ohio physician mobilized to Iraq.
30 www.oucom.ohio.edu