Paratus Protection

Regarding Christopher Cruise's questions in his comment: There is no way for me to answer that with 100% certainty, but munitions are usually, by international law and operating under the K.I.S.S.principle for their own soldiers, marked with nomenclature that identifies its type and country of origin. Three keys to this, as I understand munitions, are as follows:

**Farsi nomenclature (spoken primarily in Iran and in small parts of Afghanistan and along the Silk Trail) is a key part of my reasoning;

**The revolutionary emblem seen on the RPG on the left is another key;

**And finally, Iran is no friend of Iraq and to my knowledge no munitions WITH Farsi was sent to Iraq pre-invasion (to any Arab speaking country).

I get these questions from time to time; this one was from a woman with a son who suffers from a physical impairment of his legs. My captain knows more of their details, so if you want them, write a comment and ask…. The point is that some of the local population believes that because I am American, I possess some additional powers that allow me to help them more than they can help themselves.

I swallowed hard and told her in my best bedside manner, “I will try.” She began to cry and in a mixture of Arabic and broken English said “Thank you sir. I am sorry..baby..Ipky (cries)….sorry sir.…”

Her son Hussein is probably only five years old, and he has this smile that is broad and innocent, and, well, boyish. I met him after she brought him here to my compound because of her inability to care for him, her other son and her ailing husband.

My first reaction when I saw the little boy was “Why in the world is this child in my compound? This is no place for a child!” I talked to my Captain, a Kurdish man who has worked with me for two years now, and asked him to tell the woman not to bring the child again.

Despite my request, two days later I saw her with the child, half-hidden in a restroom area that she was cleaning. Though my first reaction was anger, once I began to tell her to never bring the boy again she began to cry. She told me of how she had been kidnapped for three days and released after being severely beaten. She showed me the scars on her wrists from the restraints and repeated “Sorry sir, sorry sir.”

It was then that I took another look at the boy and saw his smile. I grumbled something about keeping the child clear of the men and she said softly, “Thank you sir.”

Since then he has become part of the family. The men have taken him in, and the little boy has begun to mimic them, wearing a beret, attempting push-ups and giving a “thumbs up” when we walk by.

It may not be a “thrust,” but I can tell you that this little boy may have helped me and my men more than we could ever help him.

His story is like so many other children here. Except his choices for a positive life, even despite the violence that will surely impact his future, are made nearly impossible by the challenges of being disabled in Iraq.

The day was like any other in Iraq. It started with a cool morning, a cup of strong coffee and reports of the previous day’s atrocities.

I finished them all and then began to check my men. A call came in: “Report of two bombs, sir.” “Coordinates,” I replied. As those were being verified I set my Intel men in motion and the phones, Internet and radios lit up. We began generating the Spot Report (an intelligence report that begins the alerts to all security operators and CFs about the incident).

Then the door to our Tactical Operations Center (TOC) opened, revealing several men on cell phones. I have a local network of folks, Iraqi’s, that help us identify what incidents are occurring and the scope of the incident. In this case it was too close to home.

One of my Iraqi security operators was home on leave when the first of the two bombs went off in a market that he and his family were shopping in.

The devastation was immediate and exacting – 35 dead and scores more wounded. My man, calling now from the hospital, was asking for our assistance in saving his sister, his mother and his uncle – all caught in the bombing.

I asked for calm, clarification on wounds and locations. I set my Intel men from passing on data to logging a mission. We would go in and assist these people in the middle of this tragedy.

Listen, in an incident like this, calm is superficial and clarification is always over the horizon; never fully realized.

Mission logged, men prepped and medical gear on board. Launch! For the man in charge of this kind of mission, three large SUV’s roaring down the desert highway at 160 KL/PH is nothing less than performing exacting maneuvers with 10,000 pounds of armored steel. Once inside a besieged part of a city, it is nothing more than driving through a plate of spaghetti hoping you don’t end up the meatball.

We passed Snap VCP’s (road blocks) and balanced respect with crossed fingers that this was a legitimate road block and not an insurgent operation.

Then we see it. Just like I have seen so many times before. Throngs of people pressed against the gate of an understaffed and overwhelmed hospital. We pull up. I radio to be on the watch for “JUBA” (slang for snipers) and secondary attacks that have accompanied these scenes too many times in the past.

The Iraqi police wave us through the gates and people try and rush the gates like something out of those grainy techno-colored films of Operation Eagles Talon at the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam. Police fighting them back and us driving through this like foreign warships navigating a river of people.

Once inside the hospital it was more of the same, except outside our vehicles the only things stronger than the smell of burnt clothes, flesh and death were the screams and ghastly wailing of old women. Slapping their sun-beaten faces. Tears rarely present in their dark eyes. (Oddly, the men are the ones who literally cry whereas the women are more vocal.)

My men are trying to clear the hall as we walk through the grieving men and woman, and those who look up are either startled at our presence or their eyes light up in (sadly) the false hope of sorts for the relief of their loved ones.

“Salam-tec,” I say. (A greeting to the sick. Best I can explain it is “Peace to the sick.” Sort of the Western version of “my condolences…”) I say this as I pass them as respectfully as I can.

I enter the room and find it crammed with more than twice the amount of people it should hold.

I am led by my local security operator to two gurneys we have found in the crowd. One holds a young woman, maybe 19. The other an older woman; they are the mother and daughter we have come to help.

A quick assessment of the situation and setting of security. I look over the young woman first; I spot a large pool of smeared blood under and on what looks like a soviet era gurney. The blood is not hers. I see she is “bandaged” on her right hand and a thin “bandage” around her throat. I tell her that I am here to help, ask for the man in charge and repeat the same.

I turn to the mother. She is vomiting, and all who can touch her are trying to comfort her. She, as I assess it, is vomiting from sheer terror rather than internal injury. It is foul smelling bile. I again say “I am here to help.” She cries and pulls up her dress (a shocking thing, especially in this part of the world! This helped me to understand that she was terrified). She revealed her left breast and several very large blunt force trauma injuries. No penetration. I help her get her dress down to restore modesty in the room and pat her hand. (Remember that this happens in seconds, and in the midst of chaos.)

I turn to the young woman. I looked at her hand (what is left of it) and realize that it is primarily the flesh of her palm that is holding it together.

I look at her throat under the bandage. Nothing there. An old woman (a relative?) in a panic that I might miss her injuries, lifts the back of her head from the gurney. My heart almost stops. Her head was near 30 percent severed and her vertebrae were exposed through a 7-inch long by 4-inch wide gash of missing flesh.

I quickly grabbed her head to stabilize it and applied pressure (minor) to stabilize her now bulging vertebrae and to set her head back down. I tried several times to tell the old woman to not touch the head. I finally had to have one of my men take her to the back of the room.

I called for a specialized extraction device to be brought to me and called for my medic to get the larger trauma kit and an Israeli stretcher.

We then took to securing her hand. This is the first time she spoke. Her face “tattooed” from the blast suddenly crumpled, and wincing she cried in broken English, in a sweet voice that was so out of place in all of this. “Please sir, do not forget my hand. Please sir, no… lose… hand.”

I tried to comfort her but quickly got back to the mission…getting her to a place where she could receive care.

See, the hospitals are more like large aid stations immediately overwhelmed in these incidents, and people are left to the care of their relatives in almost every case.

We took the two women out of the hospital followed by throngs of people – both relatives and people who were hopeful that we would take their loved ones, too. We could not. People were stowing away and my men were had to force people out and away from our vehicles.

Once secured I double checked the men. All accounted for. It was at that point (usually is) when another of my men received a call. His relative was in the very hospital we were at. I called my team leaders over and told them to reposition the car while the medic and I would check this man.

We rushed as fast as we could through the dirty concrete halls to a bay of beds and found his relative. He had lost the top of his head in the blast and was being transferred from gurney to bed (by his family on a family supplied blanket.)

There was nothing we could do. I double checked with the medic and he concurred. Moving him during a 1½-mile trip while he is lying in the back seat of an SUV going to the other hospital would surely kill him, and because his injury was brain, we were ill-equipped to keep him alive.

I am not ashamed to say that I placed my hands on the man’s chest and prayed for God to “ease his suffering and to forgive me.”

I simply gave a thumbs up and said “good…good,” as I tried to escape from the people and guilt. As I was leaving I was quickly handed a wad of bandage by two men I did not know. I opened it. It was a combination of metal, brain matter and skull….from the man I just left.

We arrived at my compound to stabilize the two women for the longer part of the journey. They were now safer and we had a controlled environment to prepare them for the trip.
We cleaned the young woman’s hand. It was terrible. She repeated again in broken English and through my interpreter that she was a student and did not want to lose her hand. Her hand was so badly mangled; through the cleaning of it we realized that the reason for the lack of blood loss was that the entire wound was filled with nothing but bone shards and a solid piece of metal.

The metal was 90 percent the length of her hand and at its widest point ran from the finger joint to her wrist. It was obvious that the blast had wedged a piece of metal into her hand – not clean like a knife, but flat like a pancake burying itself deep into her hand resting on the thick skin of her palm.

She was going to lose her hand. It was this metal both from pressure and the searing heat at entry that had caused it to bleed so little. The only way to get the metal out, as it was flat, was to cut around. A serious surgery. Knowing hospitals here, that was sure to mean she would lose her entire hand to the wrist.

She was taken to the other hospital after we stabilized her and her mother. Before my men drove off the last I saw of her was when I poured several caps full of water into her mouth to ease the dryness from the heavy pain medication we had given her and I responded to her thanks and the barley audible now…. “Please sir”….”Please sir….with “Salam-Tec.”

GRAPHIC PICTURES FOLLOW
We have all heard the saying “it can happen when you least expect it.” That’s especially true here in Iraq. As the violence rages I am constantly reminded of how precious each moment is. Not in some sappy greeting-card kind of way. But in a way that seems to be branded on my soul by the searing heat of the reality of war.

This time it came in the form of an attack that involved two of my men. There is nothing poetic about how it occurred. No heroics. Not even much to the story.

I sat and thought about what had happened and how I could share the experience. But how do I share something so random? The details are short, simple and plain. Two of my men were stopping to buy cigarettes when two rockets slammed into the sidewalk where they were. One of the men was nearly untouched. The other had his eyes blown out of their sockets. The swollen tissues and caked blood was all that held them from dangling on his cheeks.

Some have said that writing about what I see may be “cathartic.” It isn’t. The feelings of helplessness that day will never go away. How do you help a man that you have trained with and worked with daily for months, when you know that pulling the shrapnel embedded in his eye would be nothing short of torture?

(Pictures by Marshall Young/Paratus Protection)

We could barely give him enough medicine because he was in such a state of shock we would have had to clear an airway and breathe for him just to relieve it.

Mind you all of this has to take place in the back seat of an SUV. The first of the three hospitals we took him to had not so much as enough tape to hold down the IV catheter put in his arm.

By the time we reached the final hospital his eye had fully migrated from the socket and stared blankly up and to the right. His iris had turned grey from the pressure and drying fluid. Even as I write this the bile starts to rise in my throat.

How did it happen? A piece of shrapnel entered into his left temple and traveled though to his right eye socket. The shard of metal then struck a bone and ricocheted out his right eye. His skull was fractured in several places and the metal was left protruding from his right eye.

After my medic and I worked on him for hours, even while he was at the hospital we finally left, leaving two men with him.

I sat for the past few days thinking about this incident. The true feelings I have about this cannot be written down in a way that would do them justice. It will have to suffice to know that this man was blinded by another man for nothing more than a political statement that was lost in the smoke and screams of that day. It was lost and buried with the dozens who died on that sidewalk.