thedrifter
06-30-08, 08:54 AM
For three combat tours, Gadsden native has answered the call of Marines wounded in battle
Monday, June 30, 2008
TOM GORDON
News staff writer
During two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, part of Dexter Lewis' job was removing chunks of shrapnel from wounded Marines.
The Gadsden native has even had to remove some shrapnel from himself. He has been carrying a piece in his right biceps for five years.
When one responds to calls of "Corpsman up!" - which is what Marines shout when one of their own has been wounded and needs medical attention - shrapnel bits and worse come with the territory.
"Whenever they need me, I'll be there," Lewis said recently from Pensacola Naval Air Station, where he is chief hospital corpsman at the Naval Branch Health Clinic. While helping provide medical care to sailors, Marines and their dependents at the clinic, the 34-year-old father of three soon will be teaching a combat casualty course to corpsmen heading to Iraq and Afghanistan in the months ahead.
Earlier this month, the Navy Hospital Corps observed its 110th birthday. Since 9/11, there have been more than 58,000 deployments of corpsmen in and around Iraq and Afghanistan. Lewis is among 12,000 corpsmen who have deployed more than once.
His first Iraq tour began when the war did, in March 2003. The 15-year Navy veteran was with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, which drove to Nasiriyah in south central Iraq and finished up in Al Kut. Eight months later, Lewis deployed with the same unit for a seven-month tour at a firebase in northeastern Afghanistan. In late April, he completed another seven-month tour in the Iraqi city of Haditha with Lima Company, a Montgomery-based Marine Reserve unit that was part of the 23rd Marine Regiment's Third Battalion. During that stint, he went on more than 140 patrols.
During each tour, Lewis and the Marines encountered resistance, and some of the fiercest came on the night of March 26, 2003, in Nasiriyah, about a day after a sandstorm rolled through and gave everything in its path the color of Tang breakfast drink powder.
"My company got hit by small arms and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades)," Lewis said. "It was about a 90-minute gunfight and we took approximately ... 36 casualties that night."
Lewis and other corpsmen had trained repeatedly in Kuwait and in Camp Lejeune, N.C., on how to treat wounds during combat. The training left him well prepared, he said. Still, the real thing in Nasiriyah was in a chaotic class of its own. Lewis has mental souvenirs from that night, as well as the physical one lodged in his right biceps.
"Well, the atmosphere around you is all hectic," he said. "I mean, explosions, there's gunfire, you have people screaming ... Every feeling that you can think of goes through you in seconds. You have fear, you have anger, confusion, you name it, it's all there."
Even homesickness.
Calm in the storm:
In the savage swirl of events, a well-trained corpsman needs a second to compose himself, Lewis said, "and then you just do your job.
"The main thing that kept me going was, `These Marines need me more than anything,'" he said.
After he and a Marine had treated a wounded Marine at a vehicle and arranged to get him moved to safer ground, an RPG hit the vehicle and knocked him off his feet.
"We both got shrapnel," Lewis said. "It just peppered my right side ... I just lay there a couple of seconds, quickly checked myself, got back up and continued on. I actually thought I was sweating so once the gunfight ended, we loaded all our wounded up in vehicles and took them back to the surgical team behind us and that's where one of the chiefs told me, `You're bleeding ...' So I ran my hand across my face and arms and sure enough, I was bleeding. And they wanted me to stay, but I couldn't. We just had too much going on."
`Do what's right':
In each of his tours, Lewis also did what countless corpsmen have done in past wars - treat some of those who, if given the opportunity, might have killed him.
"It's a weird feeling," he said. "But you know, as a corpsman, you're there to preserve life, whether it's enemy or friendly. So you just have to go dig down deep and find your morals and do what's right."
One of those he treated was an officer, hit by gunshots on his left side and left thigh, who arrived not only hostile but able to express that hostility in English.
"He was pretty much (saying) how he was going to kill us and how we were pretty much infidels and we were there just to take the land and the oil and to destroy Muslims," Lewis said. "But once he started talking to us as we were treating him, he realized that we weren't there for that, ... that we might be there for some good. He actually started talking to us and showing us pictures of his wife and children."
E-mail: tgordon@bhamnews.com Hear Chief Hospital Corpsman Dexter Lewis talk about being wounded and treating wounded Marines in Iraq on al.com, the online home of The Birmingham News: blog.al.com/bn/soldierstories
Ellie
Monday, June 30, 2008
TOM GORDON
News staff writer
During two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, part of Dexter Lewis' job was removing chunks of shrapnel from wounded Marines.
The Gadsden native has even had to remove some shrapnel from himself. He has been carrying a piece in his right biceps for five years.
When one responds to calls of "Corpsman up!" - which is what Marines shout when one of their own has been wounded and needs medical attention - shrapnel bits and worse come with the territory.
"Whenever they need me, I'll be there," Lewis said recently from Pensacola Naval Air Station, where he is chief hospital corpsman at the Naval Branch Health Clinic. While helping provide medical care to sailors, Marines and their dependents at the clinic, the 34-year-old father of three soon will be teaching a combat casualty course to corpsmen heading to Iraq and Afghanistan in the months ahead.
Earlier this month, the Navy Hospital Corps observed its 110th birthday. Since 9/11, there have been more than 58,000 deployments of corpsmen in and around Iraq and Afghanistan. Lewis is among 12,000 corpsmen who have deployed more than once.
His first Iraq tour began when the war did, in March 2003. The 15-year Navy veteran was with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, which drove to Nasiriyah in south central Iraq and finished up in Al Kut. Eight months later, Lewis deployed with the same unit for a seven-month tour at a firebase in northeastern Afghanistan. In late April, he completed another seven-month tour in the Iraqi city of Haditha with Lima Company, a Montgomery-based Marine Reserve unit that was part of the 23rd Marine Regiment's Third Battalion. During that stint, he went on more than 140 patrols.
During each tour, Lewis and the Marines encountered resistance, and some of the fiercest came on the night of March 26, 2003, in Nasiriyah, about a day after a sandstorm rolled through and gave everything in its path the color of Tang breakfast drink powder.
"My company got hit by small arms and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades)," Lewis said. "It was about a 90-minute gunfight and we took approximately ... 36 casualties that night."
Lewis and other corpsmen had trained repeatedly in Kuwait and in Camp Lejeune, N.C., on how to treat wounds during combat. The training left him well prepared, he said. Still, the real thing in Nasiriyah was in a chaotic class of its own. Lewis has mental souvenirs from that night, as well as the physical one lodged in his right biceps.
"Well, the atmosphere around you is all hectic," he said. "I mean, explosions, there's gunfire, you have people screaming ... Every feeling that you can think of goes through you in seconds. You have fear, you have anger, confusion, you name it, it's all there."
Even homesickness.
Calm in the storm:
In the savage swirl of events, a well-trained corpsman needs a second to compose himself, Lewis said, "and then you just do your job.
"The main thing that kept me going was, `These Marines need me more than anything,'" he said.
After he and a Marine had treated a wounded Marine at a vehicle and arranged to get him moved to safer ground, an RPG hit the vehicle and knocked him off his feet.
"We both got shrapnel," Lewis said. "It just peppered my right side ... I just lay there a couple of seconds, quickly checked myself, got back up and continued on. I actually thought I was sweating so once the gunfight ended, we loaded all our wounded up in vehicles and took them back to the surgical team behind us and that's where one of the chiefs told me, `You're bleeding ...' So I ran my hand across my face and arms and sure enough, I was bleeding. And they wanted me to stay, but I couldn't. We just had too much going on."
`Do what's right':
In each of his tours, Lewis also did what countless corpsmen have done in past wars - treat some of those who, if given the opportunity, might have killed him.
"It's a weird feeling," he said. "But you know, as a corpsman, you're there to preserve life, whether it's enemy or friendly. So you just have to go dig down deep and find your morals and do what's right."
One of those he treated was an officer, hit by gunshots on his left side and left thigh, who arrived not only hostile but able to express that hostility in English.
"He was pretty much (saying) how he was going to kill us and how we were pretty much infidels and we were there just to take the land and the oil and to destroy Muslims," Lewis said. "But once he started talking to us as we were treating him, he realized that we weren't there for that, ... that we might be there for some good. He actually started talking to us and showing us pictures of his wife and children."
E-mail: tgordon@bhamnews.com Hear Chief Hospital Corpsman Dexter Lewis talk about being wounded and treating wounded Marines in Iraq on al.com, the online home of The Birmingham News: blog.al.com/bn/soldierstories
Ellie