"Let them die," one Marine muttered as he watched Navy doctor Manan Trivedi's team scramble to save the lives of the soldiers who had just killed Marine Lieutenant Therell Childers, 30 the war's first US casualty on Iraqi soil.

Trivedi and his seven corpsmen, attached to the Marine's 1st Division, 5th Batallion, found the Iraqis near death and kept them alive despite the fact they had ambushed Childers less than an hour before.

"The way I look at is, we lost one life. Let's try to save another. Life is life no matter what the uniform," Trivedi, a stocky 28-year-old from Pennsylvania, said explaining his decision a few days later.

Although top US military brass have urged soldiers to take the moral high ground in Iraq, inside the ranks, Trivedi's deed has elicited both praise and anger.

Asked about the incident, one Marine said on condition of anonymity if the doctor had been in his unit, he would never let him back in.

Trivedi and his medical team headed to treat prisoners of war early on March 21, the first full day of the US-British ground war when a Humvee raced down the road.

"Sir, we have critically wounded prisoners," Marines shouted and Trivedi looked inside at a grotesque heap of bodies.

"They were piled like logs," he recalled.

One man had a hole in the back of his head; one had gunshots to the buttocks, arms and left shoulder; one was shot in the belly; another had gun blasts to the face; the fifth had chest wounds. Their green army uniforms were splattered with blood.

Two others were less seriously wounded. The men were all between the age of 20 and 30. A revolver hung limply from one Iraqi's hand.

One Marine whispered to the doctor "these are the guys" who had pulled up in a pick-up truck and shot Childers in the stomach.

Trivedi told them not to tell anyone.

Corporal Brandon Wright, one of the Marines who shot the Iraqis after they mowed down Childers and then watched them wave a white flag in surrender, decided to help.

"It's indescribable the feeling you have when you hear about a Marine getting killed but I still knew I had to treat them with dignity," he said.

Trivedi and his team pressed gauze against the men's gushing wounds and gave them intravenous fluids. They called for a helicopter to rush them to the hospital, but the chance of a rescue was slim.

Kuwait would not accept the men due to its refusal to treat Iraqi prisoners -- a legacy of Iraq's seven-month occupation of the emirate between 1990 and

Instead, they would have to be flown out to a hospital ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf.

Trivedi and his team injected the men with morphine and kept piling bandages on.

After two hours, four of the Iraqis were teetering on the brink of death but three more had stabilised, including the man with a hole in the back of his head who was now asking for cigarettes.

Trivedi decided to move them to a prison camp guarded by Marines.

Escorted by Wright and a few others, the men lugged the Iraqis inside a small shack littered with broken glass and infested with flies. The Marines greeted them with dirty looks.

"They were torn. One of their brothers was killed," Trivedi said and paused: "We were torn."

He kept radioing out for helicopters. Eight hours later, the four seriously wounded were finally evacuated.

Even now, Trivedi seems stunned.

"Sometimes, I think I've finally done my job," he said.

But not everyone feels that way.

The doctor and his company's lieutenant, a friend of Childers, still have not discussed what happened.

Leaning by his truck, Lieutenant Chad Roberts, 26, a wiry man, weighed his words.

"I don't think they should have wasted that time. It could have put us in jeopardy," he said and took a deep breath.

"The military order should take precedence over the Hippocratic oath, especially when it comes to saving the enemy."

WAR.WIRE