Medevac Teams: Putting It All on the Line to Save Lives
By Blankenship, Janie
From the battlefield to U.S. soil, the wounded rely on aeromedical teams to get them home. Often in today’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we hear of wounded troops waking in stateside hospitals with no recollection of getting there. Many times, they remember only their battlefield saviors, the Navy corpsmen and Army medics. While these care givers are critical to the survival of U.S. troops, there are others equally essential.
Medevac teams are charged with the responsibility of getting the wounded from the battlefield to combat field hospitals. The goal at such facilities like those in Baghdad or Balad in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan, is “throughput.” This means to treat and stabilize the patients enough to get them out of the country to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
For most, this is just the beginning of what is a very long and difficult journey home.
Helicopter crews are charged with the harrowing responsibility of flying into the war zone to evacuate the wounded. Pilots navigate through dangerous conditions to land in the countryside, city streets or anywhere in between.
The Air Force’s C Co., 2nd Bn., 227th Aviation Regt., 1st Air Cav Bde., is one such medevac unit. Members of this outfit have flown more than 1,780 missions and treated nearly 3,000 patients since Sept. 16, 2006.
“I flew south of Baqouba to pick up a kid that was shot in the head by a sniper,” Chief Warrant Officer 2 Michael Fusilier told the Washington Times. “A mission like that is time critical, so we flew right through the middle of the city [where they are especially vulnerable to ground fire] to try and shave off a minute or two of time.”
On another mission, it took the crew a mere 22 minutes to get from its base at Camp Tahji to the Iraqi army outpost and then on to the hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The patient was an Iraqi who had lost part of his leg.
“You want to be as fast and as accurate as possible because you know a person’s life depends on it,” Spc. Jessica Legier told the Washington Times.
Having served in Iraq in 2005, the Army’s 50th Medical Company also saw its share of wounded.
On one mission, the crew answered a call that a soldier had been wounded by a roadside bomb 15 miles north of Baghdad, where the 50th was located.
It took only seven minutes for the Black Hawk to arrive at the scene and another three to load Lt. William Rebrook. En route to the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, the crew began treating Rebrook for shock and administered morphine for his pain.
But units like these do more than fly in to rescue downed troops. They might transport blood or pick up a service member suffering from food poisoning. They also treat Iraqis, no matter what the circumstances.
In one such instance, members of the 50th received a call to pick up a badly burned Iraqi prisoner from a base hospital and transport him to the hospital at Abu Ghraib prison. He had tried to blow up a U.S. tank.
“One day we fly wounded Americans, and the next day we fly the guys who try to kill them,” Staff Sgt. Thomas Harris told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And we give them all the same medical care.”
There is no question that these men and women risk their lives to get the wounded on the road to recovery. Navy corpsmen volunteer to be part of casualty evacuation teams, known as caseVAC.
“We run out of the helicopter not knowing what could be out there waiting for us,” Hospitalman 3rd Class Jared Zieris told Marine Corps News. “All we know is there is a person out there depending on us and we need to get him out of harm’s way. The Marines are out there putting their lives on the line for us, so it’s our job to make sure they come home.”
Sgt. James Greene, a flight medic with the 50th, agrees: “Just because you have a red and white cross on your aircraft doesn’t mean these guys follow the Geneva Convention.”
Intensive Care By Air
Once stabilized enough for further transport, wounded troops are loaded onto a safe haven known as the C-17 Globemaster III. This aircraft is basically a flying intensive care unit.
Most of the wounded are on the way to Ramstein Air Base in Germany between 24 and 72 hours after being wounded. The Critical Care Air Transport (CCAT) teams make this turnaround possible. A critical care nurse and a respiratory technician join a physician specializing in something like pulmonology or anesthesia.
In addition to CCAT teams, the aeromedical evacuation crews are made up of flight nurses and technicians. The flight is equipped with ventilators, cardiac monitors, IV infusion pumps and a variety of medications.
In the book Operation Homecoming, Air Force Capt. Ed Hrivnak explains what it is like to treat seriously wounded patients en route to Ramstein, where they are then taken on to Landstuhl. Assigned to the 491st Expeditionary
Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, Air Mobility Command, Hrivnak writes of loading Marines and soldiers into the C-17 for flight to Germany. He noted the patience of the wounded, particularly one soldier who had gone too long between morphine shots.
“He tried to gut it out. He did not want to slow the loading of the airplane. We loaded him on the bottom rack and he immediately grabbed onto a litter above him. I looked down at him and saw his knuckles turn white with a death grip. Tears poured down his face, but he did not make a sound.”
In addition to treating gunshot wounds to the stomach, partial amputations, head injuries and illnesses, the crew must be available to listen to the emotional pain of their patients, above the roar of the airplane.
A life member of VFW Post 969 in Tacoma, Wash., Hrivnak said a soldier told him he saw Iraqi children get run over by a convoy since they were not allowed to stop.
“He tells me that some women and children have been forced out onto the road to break up the convoys so that the Iraqi irregulars can get a clear shot,” Hrivnak writes. “But the convoys do not stop. He tells me that dealing with that image is worse than the pain of his injury.”
The ultimate goal for this leg of the journey is to keep the patients stabilized and as comfortable as possible given the conditions.
“We do what we can for them,” Maj. Phillip Mason, a doctor who heads up CCAT team No. 175 at Balad, told Air Force Times. “Sometimes you see guys, they’re burned up and badly wounded. It sometimes gets you down, but then [they're] going home.”
Air Force Tech. Sgt. Stephanie Miller concurs. “You feel like you’re making a difference,” Miller said. “The things you see, when you see a soldier, airman or Marine, and they’re physically hurt, you would expect that they’d be very negative. I’ve seen just the opposite of that.”
Deployed to Qatar, the Delaware Air National Guard’s 142nd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron is on alert to respond to calls in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It transported 11 “night stalkers,” members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, from Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Germany after the C-47 Chinook they were traveling in crashed.
“It was a pretty hectic flight,” Capt. Karen Mackenzie told the Philadelphia Inquirer of the more than seven-hour trip. “We had seven critical patients with head injuries, chest wounds and spinal fractures.”
Less than a day after the crash, the 11 patients were at Landstuhl receiving major medical care.
Once there, patients may stay anywhere from a day to several weeks, depending on their injuries.
Sometimes the nurses and technicians find themselves taking on the role of flight attendants during the long flights to Germany and the U.S. They serve soda, pizza rolls and cookies to the wounded. Hrivnak noted that on Easter Sunday in 2003, the crew baked frozen pizzas and chocolate chip cookies on the way to Germany.
“I weaved between the seats and litter stanchions and let the boys grab the gooey cookies,” he wrote. “You should have seen the looks on their faces. It was on this mission that I realized that there is more to treating casualties of war than pushing drugs and dressing wounds.”
‘A Job That Has to be Done’
The trip back to the states is much the same as that heading for Germany. For the majority of wounded, the first stop back home is Malcolm Grow Medical Center at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
About 75% will remain there for nearly a day before being flown to their home bases for further care. Those in critical condition are taken to nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., or National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Based at Andrews is the 79th Medical Wing Aeromedical Staging Facility. It welcomes about three flights per week, which average 100 patients per flight.
Maj. Frederick Huiet, the 79th’s flight surgeon, said the first thing the crew must do once the plane has landed is to get on board and assess the conditions of the patients.
“On the plane, a lot of times we’ll find that the patients are in a lot of pain,” he told Air Force Times, “and we’ll treat them with morphine right then and there.”
As the troops are taken from the plane at Andrews, Army and Marine Corps liaisons are on hand to offer the wounded a sense of familiarity. And those who need it are given a $200 gift card to cover travel-related expenses. The most seriously wounded are offloaded first and are on their way within an hour. The others are loaded onto buses for Malcolm Grow, where volunteers from the Red Cross and Military Order of the Purple Heart greet them.
As of March 24, some 25,455 U.S. troops had been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Their families can feel better knowing that the journey from battlefield to home is in the hands of their fellow service members.
“We’re honored to do it,” Maj. Debbie Golden with the 146th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron told Air Force Times. “It’s a job that has to be done, and we’re happy to do it.”
Airmen and volunteers from the 332nd Medical Group Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility load injured military members onto a C- 17 Globemaster III on Feb. 21,2007, in Balad, Iraq. The crew of the C-17 is then responsible for patient care until they reach Landstuhl, Germany.
Airmen with the 379th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron carry a patient from a medevac helicopter at Camp Sather in Baghdad.
U.S. Navy Hospitalman 2nd Class Ryan Brink works to save the life of a wounded service member aboard a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter.
E- mail jblankenship@vfw.org
Editor’s Note: This is the second in an occasional series concerning medical care personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Copyright Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States Jun/Jul 2007
(c) 2007 VFW, Veterans of Foreign Wars Magazine. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.