In the Blood

The incredible true story of how two down-on-their-luck industrialists invented a once-in-a-generation lifesaving product--and were then attacked by the U.S. Army for doing so.  At the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized by the popular film Black Hawk Down, the majority of soldiers who died bled to death before they were able to reach an operating table, a tragedy that reiterated the need for a...
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The incredible true story of how two down-on-their-luck industrialists invented a once-in-a-generation lifesaving product--and were then attacked by the U.S. Army for doing so. 



At the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized by the popular film Black Hawk Down, the majority of soldiers who died bled to death before they were able to reach an operating table, a tragedy that reiterated the need for a game-changing treatment--either a drug or bioengineered bandage--that could revolutionize trauma medicine on the battlefield.



So when two quirky inventors, Frank Hursey and Bart Gullong--who had no medical or military experience whatsoever--discovered a cheap, ground-up rock called zeolite had blood-clotting properties, they brought it to the military's attention. The U.S. Navy and the Marines adopted it immediately. The U.S. Army, however, was resistant to use QuikClot. It had two products of its own that were being developed to prevent excessive bleeds, one of which had already cost eighty million dollars. The second drug, however, "Factor Seven," could be more costly than the first--its side effects could be deadly for the wounded. Unwilling to let its efforts end in failure, however--and led by a highly influential Army surgeon named Major John Holcomb--the Army set out on a six-year campaign to smear the reputations of the inventors whose product, they claimed, had its own dangers: about two percent of the time, QuikClot could severely burn the tissue surrounding deep wounds.



Over the course of six years, Hursey and Gullong engaged in an epic struggle with Holcomb for recognition--until a whistle-blower from inside the Army came forward and exposed Major Holcomb's financial ties to the pharmaceutical company that produced the product he was championing, a discovery that led to a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, along with 23 states plus the District of Columbia.



By withholding QuikClot--which would later become the medical miracle of the Iraq War--from hundreds of thousands of Army combatants over a six-year period, and instead using Factor Seven with its known life-threatening risks, Holcomb imperiled the lives of hundreds of American soldiers. Using deep reportage and riveting prose, Blood Wars recounts this little-known David-and-Goliath story of corruption, greed, and power within the military--and the devastating, sometimes fatal consequences of unchecked medical and institutional arrogance.