Editor's Note: (Zachary Iscol served as the deputy director of Javits Medical Center and is a US Marine veteran who fought in the Iraq war. He is now a business and non-profit entrepreneur and executive. Follow him at @zachiscol. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.)
(CNN) Two things have been true of the wars America has won. They had the support and participation of the public, and those fighting them quickly learned and adapted. The fight against Covid-19 is no different.
Five weeks ago, I arrived at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan just in time to hear New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announce its opening to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. He called it a rescue mission.
Shortly thereafter, I would join more than a dozen federal, state and city agencies to do something that had never been done. We would turn a low acuity medical shelter into one of the city's largest Covid-19 hospitals. For all of us, it was a race against time to help healthcare workers on the front lines and the patients in their care.
Many, if not most, of us had been to war at some point in the past two decades. But this war was different. This was an opportunity to save lives, not to take them.
At first, Javits Medical Station was not going to take Covid-19 patients. It was built using four 250-bed Federal Medical Stations, which are designed, equipped and staffed to provide accommodations to people displaced by natural disaster for a few days, not to provide acute medical care needed amid a national pandemic.
There was no similar blueprint or out-of-the-box solution for building a Covid-19 hospital, but the hope was that these medical shelters could be used to offload healthier non-Covid-19 patients from New York's hospitals. However, as they prepared for an onslaught of Covid-19 cases, New York City's hospitals had already sent most of their healthier patients home.
The day we opened, there were only five patients in New York's 11 city-run hospitals whom we could treat. Four of them required methadone, a highly controlled drug treatment we were not set up to provide. Immediately, we launched a frantic effort to be able to dispense methadone. It was the first of many battles we would fight to build capabilities and increase the level of care we could provide to help the overburdened hospitals.
Soon, it became apparent that a choice had to be made. We could try to replicate every capability within a hospital, a seemingly impossible task, or we could organize, staff, and equip around one core capability: treating Covid-19 patients. On Thursday, April 2, President Donald Trump and Gov. Cuomo agreed to order Javits to become a Covid-19 facility. Our team briefly celebrated and then kicked into action.
The challenges we faced seemed insurmountable. We were building an airplane while flying it through a highly infectious environment. How do you get enough oxygen into the building to serve 500 or 2,000 patients without turning it into the Hindenburg? We had to build capabilities as simple as a nurse call system and as complex as continuous monitoring of pulse oximetry.
Some problems bordered on the humorous, like how do you safely get hundreds of patients down the long hospital corridors to the bathroom trailers? We named it, "Operation Doody Calls."
Through it all, a single wasted minute felt like we were failing health care workers on the front lines. But soon we had built a scalable, 500- to 2,500-bed hospital with enough ICUs for sicker patients. With the addition of a remarkable management team from Northwell Health, we became a real hospital.
By the second week of April, we were doing over 100 intakes a day, half as many discharges, and had filled over 450 beds. Eventually, we would treat 1,095 patients.
Often, those of us who had served in the military found that our service overlapped. In 2004, Lt. Col. Leslie Curtis-Glanton and her then unit, the 31st Combat Support Hospital, took care of my fellow Marines wounded in Fallujah. Now, she was taking care of my fellow New Yorkers as the chief nurse officer for the 9th Hospital Center, which deployed to New York from Fort Hood to help with these efforts.
JB Cuartas, the New York City branch director from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, also served in Fallujah. And just about everyone who had previously worked in a disaster had served with Murad "Mojo" Raheem, the regional administrator from the US Department of Health and Human Services, at some point in their careers.
Dr. Renee Pazdan and Col. William Bimson, the Chief Medical Officers for the US Public Health Service and the 44th Medical Brigade, respectively, did their medical internships together at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and were there when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11. Richard Thomas, a SWAT officer and a tactical medic from HHS, and Col. Dave Hamilton, a US Army physician assistant and the commander of the 9th Hospital Center, would trade notes about experiences treating complex trauma.
Many of us working at the Javits Center seemed one or two degrees separated from each other. And many of us wore black memorial bracelets engraved with the name and branch of a fallen comrade from Iraq or Afghanistan. These bracelets serve as a solemn reminder for those of us who came home to live our lives for those who didn't.
Walking through Javits, I often thought about the words of one fallen Marine, Capt. John Maloney. John was killed in Iraq in 2005 and left behind a wife and two young children. He was one of my instructors at the Marine Corps' Infantry Officer Course.
"What was more important -- your mission or your Marines?" he once asked us. It was the summer of 2002, and, as young officers, many of us would soon have to balance accomplishing our mission in combat with risking the lives of our Marines. After some debate, Capt. Maloney weighed in, "You take care of your Marines and they'll take care of the mission."
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't have a clear mission. All we were really left to fight for was each other. But in the war against Covid-19, taking care of each other is the mission.
Though worlds apart, Capt. John Maloney would have loved Dr. David Langer, a neurosurgeon who volunteered in our ICU, while also working at his own hospital. During patient rounds, he explained to me that civilian doctors and nurses never expected they'd have to put their lives on the line to take care of their patients. Unlike most other diseases, treating Covid-19 is dangerous work for medical personnel. And yet, here they were, taking care of people at great personal risk.
The day before we started to treat Covid-19 patients, three ER doctors, Lauren Tomao, Adebanke Adebayo and Mollie Williams from The Brooklyn Hospital Center, came to talk to our doctors and nurses about treating the virus. They'd been tirelessly working on the front lines for weeks in one of the city's hardest-hit hospitals. Nevertheless, they took the time to come into Manhattan to help us prepare to treat for Covid-19. The military doctors listened intently. Many had been in combat, some had treated Ebola, but Covid-19 was a far more unpredictable and seemingly insidious disease than any of them had seen.
Before me that day was a remarkable cross section of America. Three brave, selfless, and tireless women from Brooklyn, who made me proud of our city. And military and civilian doctors and nurses from across the US, who made me proud of our country. They shared notes about how to care for others and how to take care of each other. John Maloney's spirit was alive and well in that moment.
And his spirit is alive and well outside of Javits or any hospital.
Whether you're on the front lines, staying home to stop the spread, or wearing a mask to protect others when you go out, taking care of each other is the only way we get through this. We all have a role to play in this rescue mission.