The Navy has turned to graphic novels to help hospital corpsmen cope with stress due to war and combat deployments.  The Docs: A Graphic Novel focuses on four characters deployed as corpsmen in Iraq.  Developed for the Navy Medicine‘s Care for the Caregiver program the story is based on what real corpsmen and Marines face in combat and their personal experiences.  The Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) in San Diego developed the book.

Heidi Kraft, a clinical psychologist at the NHRC said:

Many of them are asked to play these dual roles, to function as one of that line unit but when someone is hurt, they are immediately turned to the caregiver role… Data shows our expeditionary corpsmen are struggling with a lot of these issues, and certainly that is not a surprise.” Kraft is also a former lieutenant commander and author of a war memoir, “Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital.

The goal was to find a way to get through and provide a training tool for the corpsmen and they felt graphic novels and comic books were popular with that age group.

You can read the graphic novel online here.