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Patching bodies, minds
Line medics heal with quiet words and superhuman deeds
Stories by Kelly Kennedy - kellykennedy@militarytimes.com
Posted : July 09, 2007
ADHAMIYAH, Iraq — As soon as the Bradleys shoot out of the gate at Forward Operating Base Apache, Pfc. Timothy Ray starts planning.
“Whenever we leave out of that gate, the only thing that goes through my head is procedures for different possibilities,” he said, helmet outlined in a halo of dust in the back of a Bradley. “I’m always playing war games.”
If he runs out of bandages, what else can he use? If there’s no shade for the wounded, how can he improvise shelter? If one of his buddies is injured, how can he deny his emotions until his work is done?
“I know what to do,” he said. “I can do it without sleep — which I’ve done a lot. The hardest thing is losing somebody.”
By that day, June 22, Ray had lost four friends from his platoon, and talking about their deaths washed the sparkle from his blue eyes. But “Outlaw Stitches,” as his platoon calls him, soon flashed his sideways smile again as a buddy tossed a barb into the medic’s soft underbelly.
Riding in the 111-degree bowels of the tank — two soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter passing just one cigarette at a time for the sake of air quality — Ray laughed when a teammate said, “Doc, you’re harder than woodpecker lips.”
He has to be. And that day — the worst day — would prove it.
On his first Iraq tour, Ray, 27, stands as the rock of 2nd Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry: He’s the medic.
Long before wounded troops hit the sanitized confines of the big emergency room in Baghdad, line medics working in the field must stop the blood, restart the hearts and fill the lungs of guys they sleep, eat and work with.
Between patrols, power naps and meals, medics learn what their teammates love about their girlfriends, what their next tattoo will be and what they want to be when — if — they get out of the Army. They see their friends at their most alive moments: the moments when they dream about the future. They also see them after damage from the worst of this war’s weapons: rocket-propelled grenades, explosively formed penetrators and improvised explosive devices.
But their work goes beyond broken bodies. Line medics also often serve as the first line of care for mental health. Some of them quietly let it be known they can listen, while others actively ask, “Are you OK?”
They’ll rattle off the signs: the tapping foot, the quiet soldier who talks too much or the guy who moves slower than usual. And then they home in, taking on the problems of others even as they themselves face what could be the most traumatizing work in the military.
“They’re saving people,” said Lt. Col. Jason Wieman, division surgeon for Multi-National Division-Baghdad. “It gives you the chills sometimes. But it makes you wonder how they’re going to be five years from now after doing these things. I mean, they can’t save everybody.”
But then in a rush toward the positive that defines service members in the medical field, Wieman excitedly went through a list of ways the medics are saving lives that weren’t possible even three years ago.
“I’ve got soldiers on the line doing needle decompressions,” he said, referring to a technique that prevents pressure from building up after a lung injury. “Seventy percent of my doctor colleagues have never done that. We’ve got combat lifesavers saving people who would have died if they’d been hurt stateside.”
It’s the ones who don’t make it that the leaders worry about. Lt. Col. David Oclander, executive officer of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, said Charlie Company has taken the most losses in its battalion, and he worries about them.
Recently, an IED hit a Humvee and turned it into a fireball, he said. One soldier burned alive. Four others had third-degree burns over 70 percent of their bodies. One died this month.
“It’s devastating to think about,” Oclander said. “The thing that leaders suffer about is that these kids are going to be permanently scarred.”
Staying sane
Ray was there the day of the fire. Someone like him always is.
At least one medic is on every patrol, said Sgt. Major William Rost, MND-B’s chief medical noncommissioned officer, who is with the division surgeon’s office of the 1st Cavalry Division. And most patrols also have one or two combat lifesavers who usually have been trained by the medics.
Ray became a medic after finding out he was colorblind.
“I wanted to be a pilot, but now I’m here,” he said, grinning as usual. “Life throws you hardballs.”
He works with two other medics: Pfcs. Sean Lawson and Jonathan Hewitt, who go out in shifts on patrol, as well as four more experienced soldiers who work at the aid station, most on their second tour in Iraq.
Because their platoon mates expect the medics to be like the doctor back home — calm, wise, able to hear anything — the medics depend on each other to stay sane.
Sgt. 1st Class Chad Smith, 28, works at the aid station, but also goes out on patrol with the civil affairs team. He speaks in a deep, soft voice, exuding the calm his people need.
“They’re not just dealing with gunshot wounds anymore,” he said of the medics. “Now it’s burns, head injuries and blast injuries.”
Such injuries can be more difficult to deal with than gunshots. In training, he said, the medics try to desensitize themselves by looking at pictures of what they’ll be exposed to.
Still, “There’s no way to simulate what you’re going to go through,” Smith said.
But they can relate to each other’s experiences, and they know each other well. If they can, they offer each other space, some time off or just an ear to listen.
In some ways, looking out for everybody else helps, Ray said. The troops in his platoon often come to talk to him about nightmares or trouble sleeping.
It’s not as stressful for him to listen to the problems of others as some might think, he said.
“We try not to talk about the bad things,” he said. “The bad things are pushed aside and talked about when necessary.
“I hand out plenty of Motrin and water,” he said, then laughs as a buddy in the back of the Bradley makes a request no good infantryman would fulfill.
“No back rubs,” he said.
Just like any other soldier, the medics handle the stress of trauma in their own ways.
Lawson practically skips when he hears a call come in, and grins as he prepares to handle the wounded. “The first time it happened, I was shaking,” he said. “Now when I get casualties, it relaxes me.”
In the typical “I’m immortal” mind-set of a 20-year-old soldier, he’s sure he’ll remain safe.
“I’ve had a grenade land in my truck and kill my gunner,” he said. “I was unconscious, but I woke up and treated the other guys. Ever since them, I’m calm. I almost died, and now it’s like I’m invincible.”
“The guys who are going out all the time — it amazes me at times that they’re able to deal with it,” Smith said. “It can be inspirational ... to see how much an individual can overcome.”
‘Tunnel vision’
Ray said he gets “tunnel vision” when things get bad. He focuses intensely on the patient he’s helping and trusts his platoon to cover him.
“The night we lost [Pfc. Ryan] Hill, I had [incoming] grenades, RPGs and small arms,” Ray said. “All I really had to do was worry about the patients. The guys automatically cover you.”
A soldier who is now recovering in the U.S. was wounded the same night Hill died. An explosion left a wound in his left side about six inches long and three inches wide. Ray worked to stabilize him before completing the job at the aid station.
“We had to treat a chest wound,” he said. “There’s only so much local anesthesia can do.”
He didn’t want his platoon to see the soldier’s pain, but “you can only shield them so much,” he said.
Within hours of a morning patrol in which he treated nothing more serious than a child scared by an early wake-up from big American soldiers, Ray’s words seemed prophetic.
At about 10 a.m., two Bradleys went out on a second patrol, with Ray in the trail vehicle. The first Bradley rolled over an IED so big that it flipped the vehicle upside-down and blew a crater big enough for a Humvee to fit in.
The Bradley caught fire with three soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter trapped inside, and the gunner trapped underneath.
Ray immediately broke the first rule for medics. Before his teammates had a chance to clear the area, he jumped out and tried to run to the first Bradley.
His tunnel vision had kicked in.
“There was small-arms fire,” he said, mud from the scene seeping through his boots. “I couldn’t get to them. The flames were too high and too hot.”
But eventually he did get close enough to try to help the gunner escape — a friend with whom Ray had spent the past year. Ray eventually got him out, but the soldier didn’t make it.
As Ray worked, Smith calmly assessed what his medics would need at the aid station. Soldiers ran back and forth from a radio to bring him updates. He knew almost immediately that the men trapped inside the Bradley were already gone, but also that the reports of small-arms fire meant more casualties. Humvees filled with Charlie Company soldiers raced out of the gate to help.
After an hour, the men were still trapped. A second explosion rocked through the compound, and the medics prepared for the worst. As Ray continued to dig around the Bradley and pry open the doors, reports came in of more casualties.
The soldiers brought in an Iraqi girl with burns covering 60 percent of her body, as well as two Iraqi adults. The aid station medics prepared them for an airlift to the closest hospital.
And then another explosion. An RPG had hit a Humvee filled with military police who had arrived to help, killing one MP instantly. Soldiers brought in an injured female soldier and a male soldier who had lost both legs. The aid station medics stabilized them for the run to the hospital. Four MPs were treated for smoke inhalation.
The medics began passing out body bags. Charlie Company was ordered inside the building, but Ray, Lawson and Smith stayed. Smith’s team would identify the bodies even as they comforted a chaplain bruised by shrapnel and faced a platoon that, counting the four soldiers and the interpreter who had died that day, had lost a total of nine people.
Ray rode in with the remains of his friends. Guys he ate with. Guys he joked with. Guys he dreamed with.
He walked past the aid station, the trauma of the day etched in lines around his eyes and mouth.
“This is the hardest part,” he said.
Patching bodies, minds
Line medics heal with quiet words and superhuman deeds
Stories by Kelly Kennedy - kellykennedy@militarytimes.com
Posted : July 09, 2007
ADHAMIYAH, Iraq — As soon as the Bradleys shoot out of the gate at Forward Operating Base Apache, Pfc. Timothy Ray starts planning.
“Whenever we leave out of that gate, the only thing that goes through my head is procedures for different possibilities,” he said, helmet outlined in a halo of dust in the back of a Bradley. “I’m always playing war games.”
If he runs out of bandages, what else can he use? If there’s no shade for the wounded, how can he improvise shelter? If one of his buddies is injured, how can he deny his emotions until his work is done?
“I know what to do,” he said. “I can do it without sleep — which I’ve done a lot. The hardest thing is losing somebody.”
By that day, June 22, Ray had lost four friends from his platoon, and talking about their deaths washed the sparkle from his blue eyes. But “Outlaw Stitches,” as his platoon calls him, soon flashed his sideways smile again as a buddy tossed a barb into the medic’s soft underbelly.
Riding in the 111-degree bowels of the tank — two soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter passing just one cigarette at a time for the sake of air quality — Ray laughed when a teammate said, “Doc, you’re harder than woodpecker lips.”
He has to be. And that day — the worst day — would prove it.
On his first Iraq tour, Ray, 27, stands as the rock of 2nd Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry: He’s the medic.
Long before wounded troops hit the sanitized confines of the big emergency room in Baghdad, line medics working in the field must stop the blood, restart the hearts and fill the lungs of guys they sleep, eat and work with.
Between patrols, power naps and meals, medics learn what their teammates love about their girlfriends, what their next tattoo will be and what they want to be when — if — they get out of the Army. They see their friends at their most alive moments: the moments when they dream about the future. They also see them after damage from the worst of this war’s weapons: rocket-propelled grenades, explosively formed penetrators and improvised explosive devices.
But their work goes beyond broken bodies. Line medics also often serve as the first line of care for mental health. Some of them quietly let it be known they can listen, while others actively ask, “Are you OK?”
They’ll rattle off the signs: the tapping foot, the quiet soldier who talks too much or the guy who moves slower than usual. And then they home in, taking on the problems of others even as they themselves face what could be the most traumatizing work in the military.
“They’re saving people,” said Lt. Col. Jason Wieman, division surgeon for Multi-National Division-Baghdad. “It gives you the chills sometimes. But it makes you wonder how they’re going to be five years from now after doing these things. I mean, they can’t save everybody.”
But then in a rush toward the positive that defines service members in the medical field, Wieman excitedly went through a list of ways the medics are saving lives that weren’t possible even three years ago.
“I’ve got soldiers on the line doing needle decompressions,” he said, referring to a technique that prevents pressure from building up after a lung injury. “Seventy percent of my doctor colleagues have never done that. We’ve got combat lifesavers saving people who would have died if they’d been hurt stateside.”
It’s the ones who don’t make it that the leaders worry about. Lt. Col. David Oclander, executive officer of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, said Charlie Company has taken the most losses in its battalion, and he worries about them.
Recently, an IED hit a Humvee and turned it into a fireball, he said. One soldier burned alive. Four others had third-degree burns over 70 percent of their bodies. One died this month.
“It’s devastating to think about,” Oclander said. “The thing that leaders suffer about is that these kids are going to be permanently scarred.”
Staying sane
Ray was there the day of the fire. Someone like him always is.
At least one medic is on every patrol, said Sgt. Major William Rost, MND-B’s chief medical noncommissioned officer, who is with the division surgeon’s office of the 1st Cavalry Division. And most patrols also have one or two combat lifesavers who usually have been trained by the medics.
Ray became a medic after finding out he was colorblind.
“I wanted to be a pilot, but now I’m here,” he said, grinning as usual. “Life throws you hardballs.”
He works with two other medics: Pfcs. Sean Lawson and Jonathan Hewitt, who go out in shifts on patrol, as well as four more experienced soldiers who work at the aid station, most on their second tour in Iraq.
Because their platoon mates expect the medics to be like the doctor back home — calm, wise, able to hear anything — the medics depend on each other to stay sane.
Sgt. 1st Class Chad Smith, 28, works at the aid station, but also goes out on patrol with the civil affairs team. He speaks in a deep, soft voice, exuding the calm his people need.
“They’re not just dealing with gunshot wounds anymore,” he said of the medics. “Now it’s burns, head injuries and blast injuries.”
Such injuries can be more difficult to deal with than gunshots. In training, he said, the medics try to desensitize themselves by looking at pictures of what they’ll be exposed to.
Still, “There’s no way to simulate what you’re going to go through,” Smith said.
But they can relate to each other’s experiences, and they know each other well. If they can, they offer each other space, some time off or just an ear to listen.
In some ways, looking out for everybody else helps, Ray said. The troops in his platoon often come to talk to him about nightmares or trouble sleeping.
It’s not as stressful for him to listen to the problems of others as some might think, he said.
“We try not to talk about the bad things,” he said. “The bad things are pushed aside and talked about when necessary.
“I hand out plenty of Motrin and water,” he said, then laughs as a buddy in the back of the Bradley makes a request no good infantryman would fulfill.
“No back rubs,” he said.
Just like any other soldier, the medics handle the stress of trauma in their own ways.
Lawson practically skips when he hears a call come in, and grins as he prepares to handle the wounded. “The first time it happened, I was shaking,” he said. “Now when I get casualties, it relaxes me.”
In the typical “I’m immortal” mind-set of a 20-year-old soldier, he’s sure he’ll remain safe.
“I’ve had a grenade land in my truck and kill my gunner,” he said. “I was unconscious, but I woke up and treated the other guys. Ever since them, I’m calm. I almost died, and now it’s like I’m invincible.”
“The guys who are going out all the time — it amazes me at times that they’re able to deal with it,” Smith said. “It can be inspirational ... to see how much an individual can overcome.”
‘Tunnel vision’
Ray said he gets “tunnel vision” when things get bad. He focuses intensely on the patient he’s helping and trusts his platoon to cover him.
“The night we lost [Pfc. Ryan] Hill, I had [incoming] grenades, RPGs and small arms,” Ray said. “All I really had to do was worry about the patients. The guys automatically cover you.”
A soldier who is now recovering in the U.S. was wounded the same night Hill died. An explosion left a wound in his left side about six inches long and three inches wide. Ray worked to stabilize him before completing the job at the aid station.
“We had to treat a chest wound,” he said. “There’s only so much local anesthesia can do.”
He didn’t want his platoon to see the soldier’s pain, but “you can only shield them so much,” he said.
Within hours of a morning patrol in which he treated nothing more serious than a child scared by an early wake-up from big American soldiers, Ray’s words seemed prophetic.
At about 10 a.m., two Bradleys went out on a second patrol, with Ray in the trail vehicle. The first Bradley rolled over an IED so big that it flipped the vehicle upside-down and blew a crater big enough for a Humvee to fit in.
The Bradley caught fire with three soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter trapped inside, and the gunner trapped underneath.
Ray immediately broke the first rule for medics. Before his teammates had a chance to clear the area, he jumped out and tried to run to the first Bradley.
His tunnel vision had kicked in.
“There was small-arms fire,” he said, mud from the scene seeping through his boots. “I couldn’t get to them. The flames were too high and too hot.”
But eventually he did get close enough to try to help the gunner escape — a friend with whom Ray had spent the past year. Ray eventually got him out, but the soldier didn’t make it.
As Ray worked, Smith calmly assessed what his medics would need at the aid station. Soldiers ran back and forth from a radio to bring him updates. He knew almost immediately that the men trapped inside the Bradley were already gone, but also that the reports of small-arms fire meant more casualties. Humvees filled with Charlie Company soldiers raced out of the gate to help.
After an hour, the men were still trapped. A second explosion rocked through the compound, and the medics prepared for the worst. As Ray continued to dig around the Bradley and pry open the doors, reports came in of more casualties.
The soldiers brought in an Iraqi girl with burns covering 60 percent of her body, as well as two Iraqi adults. The aid station medics prepared them for an airlift to the closest hospital.
And then another explosion. An RPG had hit a Humvee filled with military police who had arrived to help, killing one MP instantly. Soldiers brought in an injured female soldier and a male soldier who had lost both legs. The aid station medics stabilized them for the run to the hospital. Four MPs were treated for smoke inhalation.
The medics began passing out body bags. Charlie Company was ordered inside the building, but Ray, Lawson and Smith stayed. Smith’s team would identify the bodies even as they comforted a chaplain bruised by shrapnel and faced a platoon that, counting the four soldiers and the interpreter who had died that day, had lost a total of nine people.
Ray rode in with the remains of his friends. Guys he ate with. Guys he joked with. Guys he dreamed with.
He walked past the aid station, the trauma of the day etched in lines around his eyes and mouth.
“This is the hardest part,” he said.
