It’s roughly 6,200 miles from Baghdad to Fort Loramie, Ohio — give or take a few hundred. But for Paul Daugherty, it’s even further in state of mind.

Daugherty went from working as an ER medic at Ibn Sina

Hospital in the Green Zone of Baghdad to being athletic trainer for Fort Loramie High School.

“(In Ibn Sina) we only took the worst. We were the busiest hospital in Iraq and we saw the worst of the worst patients. It was all emergency care,” he said. “The only people who came in there were threatened with losing their lives, limbs or eyesight.”

Ibn Sina was the subject of the HBO documentary Baghdad ER in which Daugherty appeared.

Things are somewhat different today. When the bell sounds, athletes swarm into the training room with requests for taping, assessing, stretching and myriad other requests, all mild in comparison to Iraq.

But Daugherty said his military experiences are helpful.

“I’ve done so many backboards and injuries. I have seen so many things that when a football player goes down, I don’t panic. I am familiar with doing all the assessment and getting them to where they need to go and all that.”

A graduate of Bellbrook High School, Daugherty attended Cumberland College to study chemistry.

“I was getting kind of burned out on it and I ended up joining the Army as a Ranger. But I decided at the time that I would kind of like to go into medicine, so I switched.”

Trained as a combat medic at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, he was sent to South Korea where he worked as a medic in the demilitarized zone. He came back to Fort Campbell, Ky., and gained experience working a rotation in the Vanderbilt University

Medical Center ER.

“It was about nine or 10 months

we were at Fort Campbell and we got deployed,” he said.

After discharge, Daugherty finished his bachelor’s degree in athletic training at Franklin College (Ind.). Later he went to work as a pool athletic trainer for Good Samaritan where he was assigned to various schools throughout the region.

Wilson Memorial Hospital hired him for their Sports

Medicine program and assigned him to Fort Loramie.

He says he has no real regrets.

“I like working here and I have always liked sports. I got into athletic training when I was running cross-country and track at Cumberland. I was in the training room every day and I thought then that this was a job I could possibly go into.”