thedrifter
05-13-07, 06:58 AM
GEORGIANS@WAR: ANGELS OF WAR
They carry rifles around their shoulders and bandages in their backpacks. They run instinctively toward gunfire and bomb blasts. Combat medics are lifesavers on Iraq's battlefield, the first to heal and the first to feel the loss.
By Moni Basu
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/13/07
Ramadi, Iraq —- Spc. Keith Martin learned to kill and heal with equal verve.
The former Marine pursued his love of medicine in a second military career in the Army and after intensive training, emerged as a "68 Whiskey," the designation for a combat medic.
Here, deep in the devilish heart of Anbar province, Martin is savior to soldiers in 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment.
Combat medics, affectionately called "docs," are a special breed of men and women who run instinctively toward guns and bombs, to where blood is flowing.
The pace is particularly unforgiving in Ramadi, a stronghold for al-Qaida sympathizers where war's bloody imprint surfaces daily in brazen bombings, explosions and shootings. Fierce fighting has systematically leveled this city of 400,000 on the banks of the murky Euphrates River.
The medic's motto here: "I love not doing my job." But few days go by without incident.
To date, 273 soldiers and Marines have died in Ramadi; hundreds of others have been injured.
Still, in this 360-degree-angle war that lacks front lines, medics are apparently making a difference. The killed-in-action rate in Iraq is half what it was in World War II and a third less than Vietnam and the Gulf War, according to the Pentagon.
But every irreparable injury, every lost life, adds to a young medic's burden.
It surfaces on Martin's wilted face —- the 29-year-old Oklahoman has been patching up his brothers in arms since last fall when Colorado-based 1-9 Infantry arrived here.
The quiet, introspective father of 4-year-old twins knew that he would be the first line of defense for his company. He came to this war with a bag full of medical supplies.
And faith in God.
On an overcast day, Martin stands ankle-deep in mud, waiting to make the return journey from central Ramadi to Camp Corregidor a few miles east.
In the Humvee, he always positions himself facing outward in case he has to get to an emergency. Behind him, he keeps his olive drab backpack teeming with supplies.
"It's a lot different in Iraq," Martin says about a war in which horrific bomb blasts have become the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops. "We have to know procedures and carry equipment to treat severe trauma and hemorrhaging."
Martin trained hard for his job. The Army expected him to have the skills of a second-year medical student after only 16 weeks of class at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
Later, he spent extra hours teaching himself how to slap on tourniquets, coagulating bandages and chest seals. He learned to perform a tracheotomy at lightning speed. And he practiced it all in the dark. Then, a night came when everything he learned was not enough.
. . .
During a routine trip back to Corregidor, like the one he was about to make today, a makeshift bomb exploded under Martin's Humvee. The truck's 600-pound armored door blew off. The pressure from the blast sucked the gloves off Martin's hands. White hot shrapnel seared his neck.
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!" Martin cried.
He patted himself down, checking to see if everything was intact. He did the same for the gunner, and the driver, and began calling Staff Sgt. Joshua Hager's name.
Hager had been thrown partially out of the Humvee. His right arm and leg were gone. Martin knew —- from the gushing blood and heavy and irregular breathing —- that he could do nothing to save Hager.
The vow Martin once made to himself, that he would never let a buddy die, was about to become a farce.
He wanted to hear screams of pain. He wanted to feel Hager cringe when he bandaged him up. He wanted a chance to save him.
That was Martin's job. No U.S. patrol ever leaves a military base in Iraq without a medic.
Combat hospital doctors say it's vital that a soldier is treated within the first 15 minutes after an injury. They refer to the "Platinum 15," because massive hemorrhaging kills so many soldiers. If the medic on the field is able to quickly stabilize the bleeding, the soldier then has a "Golden Hour" to get to a hospital for care.
The medics know they are there to buy time.
"They are the absolute key to success," says 1st Lt. Ken McKenzie, a trauma nurse in the 28th Combat Hospital in Baghdad. "Without them, we'd be lost. If you have a heartbeat when you come in through [the hospital] door, you're going to go home."
That night, as he watched Hager mouth his last incomprehensible words, Martin was helpless. He watched him die.
"I feel cheated. I feel responsible," Martin says, his head dropping. "It's a different burden we carry," he says.
. . .
Each Army and Marine unit in Ramadi has its own medics and corpsmen who live and fight with their guys. At Camp Ramadi, on the western side of town, Spc. Corey Johnson recalls how his own unit, Task Force 1-77 Armor, lost soldiers. Surrounded by other medics from the Germany-based battalion, Johnson, 25, sits on the floor, holding his head in his hands. He could not save the lives of two men in his own section: Sgt. Corey Aultz. Sgt. Milton Gist Jr.
"And I got two guys who are in the hospital back in the States right now," Johnson says, sobbing. "You see a lot of death, but the dude that you eat chow with every day, that's the one you think about."
Silence falls around him.
"All you can do is keep your eyes open," he says after regaining his composure. "Sometimes, that's not good enough." Johnson worked as an EMT in Eureka, Calif., and is now the medic for the battalion commander's personal security detail in Ramadi. On an ambulance back home, Johnson had everything he needed. In Iraq, he has to make difficult choices.
Johnson doesn't like playing God.
What do you do if you have three guys down and enough supplies in your aid bag to treat only two? Do you try to save all three with what you have or do you work more comprehensively on two? Who do you treat first —- an American or an Iraqi?
"In the heat of the moment, you do what you have to do automatically," he says. "It's only afterward that you think about it.
"A life is a life, but in the back of our minds are always our guys."
Johnson says he'd be angry if he depleted his supplies on an Iraqi patient and could not replenish in time to save an American.
"My goal here is to make sure all our guys go home to see their families."
In war, the medic's role as caregiver overflows from the battlefield to the tents and trailers on the military bases. If platoon sergeants are the daddy to their soldiers, then medics are the mothers, as Johnson describes it.
"I live with these guys. They come to me with cuts, boo-boos and owees," Johnson says.
They confide in him and tell him things they don't tell anyone else —- about sexually transmitted diseases or lumps on embarrassing parts of the body. Nightmares. Loneliness. Depression. Suicidal tendencies.
"I make sure they are doing OK," Johnson says. "I know them. I live with them, so I know when something is different. That's my cue to check for combat stress."
. . .
Navy Hospitalman Tristan McCauley, 22, shares crowded quarters with 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, from Camp LeJeune, N.C., in a dilapidated low-rise Ramadi school. His bunk is at the end of the first-floor hall, next to a mint-green room that serves as the joint American-Iraqi security station's clinic.
Plaster is peeling off walls damaged by rifle fire and mortar rounds. Sunlight pierces into the depressingly dark building through bullet holes and cracks around doorways.
The young medic from Atlanta recently treated a Marine who suffered a gunshot wound. He couldn't tell where the bullet went in or where it came out. He knew he had to stop the bleeding so that the wounded Marine could get on a medical evacuation chopper to one of several combat hospitals in Iraq. His hands, it seemed, went into autopilot.
"All I know is that I have to get this guy to a higher level of care," he says, standing in the stark clinic.
McCauley knows when he is facing a femoral artery bleed, time is against him. He laughs at the "Platinum 15, Golden Hour" mantra. "Fifteen minutes? You have 120 seconds to get a tourniquet on, or you are going to lose him," he says.
"Some of these guys —- they are not just your patients, they are your friends, your brothers. When you care for them, you tend to go that extra mile."
When he was growing up, McCauley's biggest crisis in life was when he "borrowed" his mother's car from the College Park MARTA parking lot, drove it around without a license and lied about it. Life-and-death decisions were beyond the carefree boy who ran his mouth too much at Riverdale High School.
Now he lives with haunting images.
A mortar round crashed into the back wall of this joint security station a few months ago and left a fellow corpsman with a gaping hole in his head.
McCauley knew the dangers of applying pressure on a head wound. At the same time, he had to stop the blood. All he could do was wrap his head in bandages. His buddy didn't make it.
Like all combat medics, McCauley does his own equipment check every time he rolls out into the city.
The Marines carry 62 pounds of extra weight in body armor, ammunition, grenades, guns. McCauley has all that —- and his hefty medical bag. He can inflict injury as well as cure it.
"I have to know what they do. I could be the only man standing," he says.
. . .
More ominous clouds are drifting into Ramadi as 1-9 Infantry soldiers prepare to roll back to their eastern base.
Martin, the soldier from Oklahoma City, says every medic prepares for the worst-case scenario. Even now, he is going through all the "what ifs?" His supplies reflect answers to grim questions. He is a walking clinic.
In his right pant leg pocket Martin carries a tourniquet. An Israeli bandage sits in his upper left arm pocket. Packed in his compartmentalized medical backpack are a scalpel, bandages, airways, baby wipes, splints, latex gloves, crinkled gauze, clotting agents and drugs like atropine to calm the wounded.
"Here you see a lot of ugly stuff here," he says. "Stuff you'll never forget."
Martin has confidence in his abilities. But he no longer has confidence in knowing what to expect. Not in Ramadi.
When he unzips his backpack, a paperback Bible, sitting right on top, falls out into the mud. He picks it up, wipes it clean. Then, he tucks it back safely —- with all the other things he relies on every day in Iraq.
Ellie
They carry rifles around their shoulders and bandages in their backpacks. They run instinctively toward gunfire and bomb blasts. Combat medics are lifesavers on Iraq's battlefield, the first to heal and the first to feel the loss.
By Moni Basu
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/13/07
Ramadi, Iraq —- Spc. Keith Martin learned to kill and heal with equal verve.
The former Marine pursued his love of medicine in a second military career in the Army and after intensive training, emerged as a "68 Whiskey," the designation for a combat medic.
Here, deep in the devilish heart of Anbar province, Martin is savior to soldiers in 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment.
Combat medics, affectionately called "docs," are a special breed of men and women who run instinctively toward guns and bombs, to where blood is flowing.
The pace is particularly unforgiving in Ramadi, a stronghold for al-Qaida sympathizers where war's bloody imprint surfaces daily in brazen bombings, explosions and shootings. Fierce fighting has systematically leveled this city of 400,000 on the banks of the murky Euphrates River.
The medic's motto here: "I love not doing my job." But few days go by without incident.
To date, 273 soldiers and Marines have died in Ramadi; hundreds of others have been injured.
Still, in this 360-degree-angle war that lacks front lines, medics are apparently making a difference. The killed-in-action rate in Iraq is half what it was in World War II and a third less than Vietnam and the Gulf War, according to the Pentagon.
But every irreparable injury, every lost life, adds to a young medic's burden.
It surfaces on Martin's wilted face —- the 29-year-old Oklahoman has been patching up his brothers in arms since last fall when Colorado-based 1-9 Infantry arrived here.
The quiet, introspective father of 4-year-old twins knew that he would be the first line of defense for his company. He came to this war with a bag full of medical supplies.
And faith in God.
On an overcast day, Martin stands ankle-deep in mud, waiting to make the return journey from central Ramadi to Camp Corregidor a few miles east.
In the Humvee, he always positions himself facing outward in case he has to get to an emergency. Behind him, he keeps his olive drab backpack teeming with supplies.
"It's a lot different in Iraq," Martin says about a war in which horrific bomb blasts have become the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops. "We have to know procedures and carry equipment to treat severe trauma and hemorrhaging."
Martin trained hard for his job. The Army expected him to have the skills of a second-year medical student after only 16 weeks of class at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
Later, he spent extra hours teaching himself how to slap on tourniquets, coagulating bandages and chest seals. He learned to perform a tracheotomy at lightning speed. And he practiced it all in the dark. Then, a night came when everything he learned was not enough.
. . .
During a routine trip back to Corregidor, like the one he was about to make today, a makeshift bomb exploded under Martin's Humvee. The truck's 600-pound armored door blew off. The pressure from the blast sucked the gloves off Martin's hands. White hot shrapnel seared his neck.
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!" Martin cried.
He patted himself down, checking to see if everything was intact. He did the same for the gunner, and the driver, and began calling Staff Sgt. Joshua Hager's name.
Hager had been thrown partially out of the Humvee. His right arm and leg were gone. Martin knew —- from the gushing blood and heavy and irregular breathing —- that he could do nothing to save Hager.
The vow Martin once made to himself, that he would never let a buddy die, was about to become a farce.
He wanted to hear screams of pain. He wanted to feel Hager cringe when he bandaged him up. He wanted a chance to save him.
That was Martin's job. No U.S. patrol ever leaves a military base in Iraq without a medic.
Combat hospital doctors say it's vital that a soldier is treated within the first 15 minutes after an injury. They refer to the "Platinum 15," because massive hemorrhaging kills so many soldiers. If the medic on the field is able to quickly stabilize the bleeding, the soldier then has a "Golden Hour" to get to a hospital for care.
The medics know they are there to buy time.
"They are the absolute key to success," says 1st Lt. Ken McKenzie, a trauma nurse in the 28th Combat Hospital in Baghdad. "Without them, we'd be lost. If you have a heartbeat when you come in through [the hospital] door, you're going to go home."
That night, as he watched Hager mouth his last incomprehensible words, Martin was helpless. He watched him die.
"I feel cheated. I feel responsible," Martin says, his head dropping. "It's a different burden we carry," he says.
. . .
Each Army and Marine unit in Ramadi has its own medics and corpsmen who live and fight with their guys. At Camp Ramadi, on the western side of town, Spc. Corey Johnson recalls how his own unit, Task Force 1-77 Armor, lost soldiers. Surrounded by other medics from the Germany-based battalion, Johnson, 25, sits on the floor, holding his head in his hands. He could not save the lives of two men in his own section: Sgt. Corey Aultz. Sgt. Milton Gist Jr.
"And I got two guys who are in the hospital back in the States right now," Johnson says, sobbing. "You see a lot of death, but the dude that you eat chow with every day, that's the one you think about."
Silence falls around him.
"All you can do is keep your eyes open," he says after regaining his composure. "Sometimes, that's not good enough." Johnson worked as an EMT in Eureka, Calif., and is now the medic for the battalion commander's personal security detail in Ramadi. On an ambulance back home, Johnson had everything he needed. In Iraq, he has to make difficult choices.
Johnson doesn't like playing God.
What do you do if you have three guys down and enough supplies in your aid bag to treat only two? Do you try to save all three with what you have or do you work more comprehensively on two? Who do you treat first —- an American or an Iraqi?
"In the heat of the moment, you do what you have to do automatically," he says. "It's only afterward that you think about it.
"A life is a life, but in the back of our minds are always our guys."
Johnson says he'd be angry if he depleted his supplies on an Iraqi patient and could not replenish in time to save an American.
"My goal here is to make sure all our guys go home to see their families."
In war, the medic's role as caregiver overflows from the battlefield to the tents and trailers on the military bases. If platoon sergeants are the daddy to their soldiers, then medics are the mothers, as Johnson describes it.
"I live with these guys. They come to me with cuts, boo-boos and owees," Johnson says.
They confide in him and tell him things they don't tell anyone else —- about sexually transmitted diseases or lumps on embarrassing parts of the body. Nightmares. Loneliness. Depression. Suicidal tendencies.
"I make sure they are doing OK," Johnson says. "I know them. I live with them, so I know when something is different. That's my cue to check for combat stress."
. . .
Navy Hospitalman Tristan McCauley, 22, shares crowded quarters with 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, from Camp LeJeune, N.C., in a dilapidated low-rise Ramadi school. His bunk is at the end of the first-floor hall, next to a mint-green room that serves as the joint American-Iraqi security station's clinic.
Plaster is peeling off walls damaged by rifle fire and mortar rounds. Sunlight pierces into the depressingly dark building through bullet holes and cracks around doorways.
The young medic from Atlanta recently treated a Marine who suffered a gunshot wound. He couldn't tell where the bullet went in or where it came out. He knew he had to stop the bleeding so that the wounded Marine could get on a medical evacuation chopper to one of several combat hospitals in Iraq. His hands, it seemed, went into autopilot.
"All I know is that I have to get this guy to a higher level of care," he says, standing in the stark clinic.
McCauley knows when he is facing a femoral artery bleed, time is against him. He laughs at the "Platinum 15, Golden Hour" mantra. "Fifteen minutes? You have 120 seconds to get a tourniquet on, or you are going to lose him," he says.
"Some of these guys —- they are not just your patients, they are your friends, your brothers. When you care for them, you tend to go that extra mile."
When he was growing up, McCauley's biggest crisis in life was when he "borrowed" his mother's car from the College Park MARTA parking lot, drove it around without a license and lied about it. Life-and-death decisions were beyond the carefree boy who ran his mouth too much at Riverdale High School.
Now he lives with haunting images.
A mortar round crashed into the back wall of this joint security station a few months ago and left a fellow corpsman with a gaping hole in his head.
McCauley knew the dangers of applying pressure on a head wound. At the same time, he had to stop the blood. All he could do was wrap his head in bandages. His buddy didn't make it.
Like all combat medics, McCauley does his own equipment check every time he rolls out into the city.
The Marines carry 62 pounds of extra weight in body armor, ammunition, grenades, guns. McCauley has all that —- and his hefty medical bag. He can inflict injury as well as cure it.
"I have to know what they do. I could be the only man standing," he says.
. . .
More ominous clouds are drifting into Ramadi as 1-9 Infantry soldiers prepare to roll back to their eastern base.
Martin, the soldier from Oklahoma City, says every medic prepares for the worst-case scenario. Even now, he is going through all the "what ifs?" His supplies reflect answers to grim questions. He is a walking clinic.
In his right pant leg pocket Martin carries a tourniquet. An Israeli bandage sits in his upper left arm pocket. Packed in his compartmentalized medical backpack are a scalpel, bandages, airways, baby wipes, splints, latex gloves, crinkled gauze, clotting agents and drugs like atropine to calm the wounded.
"Here you see a lot of ugly stuff here," he says. "Stuff you'll never forget."
Martin has confidence in his abilities. But he no longer has confidence in knowing what to expect. Not in Ramadi.
When he unzips his backpack, a paperback Bible, sitting right on top, falls out into the mud. He picks it up, wipes it clean. Then, he tucks it back safely —- with all the other things he relies on every day in Iraq.
Ellie