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.”