Hello, it's me, Lauren Laverne, and this is Desert Island Discs Postcards,
your hand-picked selection of unforgettable moments from some of our favourite castaways.
This postcard comes from the surgeon David Knott, who spoke to Kirsty Young in 2016.
He'd just come back from working in Syria.
After the recording,
our Desert Island postbag was inundated with people telling us how moved they were by Dr Knott's interview.
In this short clip,
David is telling Kirstie about his experiences of working in a war zone for the first time back in the early 90s.
It was a huge shock.
I remember even sitting on the Aleutian aircraft landing into Sarajevo and he had about five minutes to get off the airplane
because it was one of those turnarounds and we had a nosedive into the airport,
found it very exhilarating to be honest, and then we got picked up by a bullet proof.
MSF vehicle which took me to one of the hospitals and I was on my own then in the city's state hospital in the city centre which is called the Swiss cheese hospital
because it had so many holes in it which hit all the time and it was the first time I ever felt that you know hang on a minute you know international humanitarian law should be here to help me I'm a doctor you know why are you shooting hospitals we didn't know much about trauma at the time patients would come in and unfortunately they die on the operating table
because it was so cold one particular time I remember I was operating on a young lad who had had a fragment injury to his major blood vessel in his abdomen and a rocket had hit the hospital,
the whole place shook, and I was operating with an anesthetist and a scrub nurse and somebody else,
and suddenly the lights went off, and it was completely pitch black.
And so five minutes passed, 10 minutes passed, nobody came.
I don't know, 15 minutes later, the lights went on,
and I was the only person in the operating theatre.