Tattooed and pale, with an Arabic vocabulary of a few dozen words at best, 24-year-old American Peter Kassig is not who you would expect to see striding up and down the corridors of a hospital in Tripoli, Lebanon, clutching a wad of bloodied bandages. "This is one of the worst wounds we have on the floor; this one is pretty bad," he says as he works to help clean out the raw lower leg wound of a patient. "They were going to have to amputate the leg, but they were able to reconnect the artery, right," he asks Marwan, a 27-year-old nurse from Homs, Syria, who, like most of those Kassig works alongside, fled his homeland to treat his countrymen in Lebanon.
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American, 24, helps treat wounded Syrians in Lebanon
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He has served in Iraq but ooked for a 'game-changer' after returning home
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He hopes Americans understand what's going on in the region
Kassig has been struck by the resilience of the @placeholder he has met, by their ability to smile and somehow joke even in the darkest of circumstances.