SOMETIMES IT DOES TAKE A BRAIN SURGEON...

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The drab warren of tents set up in the middle of the desert is an unlikely place for a team of brain surgeons.

But Army doctors here are performing procedures they say have never been performed outside a major hospital, including one surgery that saved a U.S. soldier’s life by removing a section of his brain.

The 207th Neurosurgical Team includes physicians who are normally stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the service’s most technologically advanced hospital facility.

Now, the same doctors who are considered pioneers in their field of neurology — the treatment of the brain and spine — have donned combat fatigues to work at the 28th Combat Support Hospital at Camp Dogwood, a remote base southwest of Baghdad.