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FeedTwin Healers
When two brothers took their medical talents to war-torn Afghanistan,
even the president noticed.
(page 1 of 2)
One of the latest developments in the extraordinary lives of Vince and Vance Moss is the stuff of movies. Identical twin brothers, the 37-year-old top surgeons based out of Crozer-Chester Medical Center took their passion for healing across the world to war-torn Afghanistan. In 2005 and 2006, they organized their own security force of Afghan National Army members and advisors, venturing deep into Al-Qaeda territory to help villagers in desperate need of treatment. They self-financed everything.
None of which should come as a surprise to anyone who knows the Moss twins. Washington, D.C.-bred graduates of Penn State and the Temple University School of Medicine, Vance, a urologist, and Vince, a thoracic surgeon, have always been overachievers. They were Eagle Scouts at 14, and both are majors in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
By the spring of 2005, the brothers were set to begin their medical careers. Then came the call to serve in Operation Enduring Freedom. Their four-month mission: to care for soldiers stateside, Vance in Texas and Vince in South Carolina. And though they were in different parts of the country, they heard similar stories from the soldiers they treated—harrowing reports of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq lacking the most basic medical care.
What the Moss brothers heard haunted them, and they were determined to do something about it. So they proposed a formal military mission to provide medical care in those countries. But the risks were deemed too great, and their request was denied. “Basically, this was a mission like no other,” Vance says. “Just about everybody had packed up and left the people without any healthcare because the situation was so dangerous.”
So the twins took things into their own hands, coordinating with the State Department, the Department of Defense and private entities to make the mission a reality. “We seem to thrive on things that people say can’t be done,” says Vance. “The challenge is what gets us going.”
When the doctors first arrived in Afghanistan, they had to earn the trust of the civilians. “For the first few weeks we were there, we ate with them, we lived with them, we intermingled with the community, we spoke to them through the help of interpreters,” Vance recalls. “It was crucial for them to understand that we weren’t there as occupiers; we were there to help them.”
Once they’d established that trust, word got out about the Moss brothers, with patients waiting in line for hours to be seen. Afghan children would cry out, “Doganagy, doganagy!”—meaning “same-faced healer.”
“That name resonated throughout the whole region up to the Pakistani border,” says Vince.
For four months in 2005, the Moss twins traveled throughout central Afghanistan, spending 15-hour days caring for up to 400 patients. They provided a range of treatments, from appendectomies to colon resections. Ironically, it was the first time the brothers had operated together. “We definitely had a unique bond,” says Vince.
