PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - -The goal Friday was to move 120 earthquake victims to the Navy's modern, sterile medical facility floating off the coast.

To coordinate the mission, the USNS Comfort sent a trauma surgeon who has served four combat tours and a security team to establish a landing zone outside Haiti's ruined National Palace and begin ferrying patients by helicopter.

But Friday did not turn out to be a day of humanitarian medicine for the Comfort's Rapid Assessment Team; it brought only frustration and wasted time. By day's end, stymied by logistical problems at every turn, the team had yet to send a patient to the ship. And the impact was palpable: The Comfort, which treated 102 patients Thursday, treated only 69 Friday.

The team's leader, Capt. Richard Sharpe, bitterly summed up the long, maddening wait: "Here we are out at the presidential palace. People die; captain takes nap."

The team had touched down by helicopter at 7:30 a.m. on the same palace lawn from which at least 60 patients had been flown to the Comfort on Thursday. But Sharpe had taken only a few steps from the helicopter when an Army officer told him that the landing zone was closed until 11 a.m.

The United Nations was planning to distribute food and other aid on the grounds, and did not want the U.S. military around, the Army officer said.

"This kind of thing happens," Sharpe said. "It happens in Iraq, it happens in Afghanistan, everywhere. We'll deal with it."

With the landing zone closed, the team waded into the crowds of downtown Port-au-Prince, Navy guards with assault rifles at front and back, in search of the patients they hoped to begin transporting in a few hours. At State University Hospital, three blocks away, they found what they had come for.

Broken and bleeding Haitians sat on beds and gurneys in the street or hobbled along the sidewalk. The dead were left behind the morgue, bloating in the sun. The Navy team also found 60 or more patients in urgent need of hospital care. They had been triaged by relief organization doctors at the hospital and were awaiting a flight to the Comfort.

"We're going to send a whole bunch of patients when [the landing zone] is opened up at 11," Sharpe said outside the hospital's blood bank.

"Good, we already have 12 femur fractures that need to go," said Army Lt. Col. Jozy Smarth, a nurse practitioner from Fort Bragg, N.C.

"We'll take them," Sharpe replied.

But he was impatient. "My plan was to jam them all in this morning," he said later from the front step of a hospital building. "It's intolerable having to wait."

The timing issue was made more complicated because the Comfort planned a helicopter resupply mission that would occupy the ship's helicopter landing pad from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Navy helicopters won't fly Haitians at night, so the team's window was closing fast. Sharpe's team worried that the Comfort's doctors would be idled by the delays, but no one knew whether patients were being ferried to the ship from other parts of the city.

"To me, it's irrelevant who closed [the landing zone]; I can't use it," Sharpe said. "I don't get involved in the politics. I take care of patients."

About that time, Sharpe received word from the Comfort that his team should move to a landing zone called Verreau that was near the airport and had patients waiting. Aid workers at the hospital were bewildered.

"What's the point of that? We already have all the patients triaged, lined up and ready to go," said Dr. Mark Hyman, a physician from Boston working with the organization Partners in Health.

"We're going to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and at 10:06 this morning, that's at Verreau. I wish they gave trauma surgeons helicopters," Sharpe responded.

With that, the team, which included civilian aid workers, trekked back out into the streets, through the filth and smells of the broken city, to return to the palace and fly somewhere they could help. But at the palace gates, they met an Army officer who told them it hadn't been the United Nations that shut down the landing zone, but a general. The officer, an aide to Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, said the general ordered U.S. military helicopters to stop landing at the palace out of concern that Haitians would think the Americans were taking over.

"We're here to assist," Sharpe replied in frustration.

"I know. The helicopter rotors can also make people think there's another earthquake. The folks next door need to get some rest," the officer said, referring to a sprawling tent camp with thousands of homeless Haitians.

It was not yet noon, and the team went onto the National Palace grounds to wait for helicopter pickup.

"It's intolerable," Sharpe said.

Looking out over the palace lawn, he recalled Thursday's busy helicopter shuttles to the Comfort. "It was beautiful. I had two Black Hawks here and here, and a '53' [helicopter] here, all spun up, jamming patients out to the ship."

"It's a small window of time we have left," said Dr. Larry Ronan a civilian physician from Boston who is working with Project Hope and was a member of Sharpe's team.

"Too small. I only have at the most two hours to move people," Sharpe said.

Two hours later, the team was still hoping for a ride. A documentary film crew that showed up at the palace said Verreau might not have any patients after all. So the team kept waiting on the palace lawn - under a mango tree with roosters and peacocks strutting around them - for a helicopter that never came.

"It's frustrating when you realize that every minute you're not doing something productive, someone else isn't getting the care they need," said Ronan, from Massachusetts General Hospital.

At one point, the team considered calling the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to send a helicopter, thinking maybe its crew wouldn't know the palace landing zone was supposed to be closed. And when about a half-dozen gunshots erupted outside the palace gates, they joked that a report of "shots fired" might get them the helicopter they needed.

As they waited, members of the Navy team had no idea what was happening on the Comfort. Were its receiving bays empty or full? Were patients dying because the helicopters didn't come?

By late afternoon, the whole crew was stretched out on the palace grass, leaning on their packs, resigned to the idea that they might be spending the night.

"We've lost a lot of ground," Ronan said.

"The only ground we lost was the 100 to 120 patients who needed our help and didn't get it," Sharpe replied.