The Gift of Valor by Michael M. Phillips

Author:Michael M. Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780767921589
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2005-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

VI | Shock-Trauma Tent

Al Qa'im, Iraq

EVEN IN A TIME of smart bombs and aerial drones, the Marines envisioned war as a frenzied bayonet charge into enemy lines. During the invasion of Iraq, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Belcher, Matt Lopez's predecessor as commander of Third Battalion, had ordered his Marines to fix their bayonets to the barrels of their rifles whenever they encountered the enemy, and to embrace the “intimate brutality” of the bayonet thrust. He believed the sight of fixed bayonets would bolster his men's esprit and frighten the daylights out of the Iraqi defenders. “We will instill fear in our enemies by mastering the art of bayonet fighting and fostering the physical and mental strength to engage in it,” Belcher wrote in a three-page memo to his men outlining the battalion's “edged weapons policy.” The knife imagery was everywhere around battalion headquarters in the rail yards of al Qa'im. The battalion's radio call sign was Blade, its emblem a downward-pointing bayonet, and its nickname “The Cutting Edge.”

So the hand-painted plywood sign in front of the camp's house of worship that read “Cutting Edge Chapel” was a reference not to some heretical faith being practiced inside, but rather to the warrior mentality of the worshipers. The chapel was a makeshift affair in a stripped-down Iraqi railroad carriage parked on the tracks that ran through the middle of the base. Neatly arranged on the plywood floor were rows of red plastic patio chairs, which served as pews for the Marines who dropped in for services or postcombat group therapy sessions with Chaplain David Slater. Lieutenant Slater had joined the Navy three years earlier at the age of forty-three. A pastor in upstate New York at the time, he had been growing restless and fled to the woods for a spiritual retreat. When he emerged, he found a Navy recruiting letter in his mailbox, which he interpreted as a sign from above. After some hesitation, the Navy waived the usual age limits and let him in.

Lieutenant Slater was in his narrow sanctuary just after noon on April 14 when he heard the roar of a Blackhawk helicopter lifting off and speeding west toward Husaybah. He knew that sound was a sign that in fifteen or twenty minutes the birds would be back with fresh Marine casualties for the Navy shock-trauma platoon. He walked across the tracks to the trauma tent and prepared to soothe. What he found was chaos, as nine wounded Marines—1 percent of the entire battalion—arrived within a period of fifteen minutes.

The Navy medical team in al Qa'im led a more informal lifestyle than the combat Marines they cared for. Everyone lived together in the same air-conditioned Bedouin tent, men and women, enlisted and officers, middle-aged doctors and twenty-something corpsmen. After a few months the older officers got fed up with the rap music, indoor skateboarding, and “post adolescent hormone driven behavior, which gives us a constant source of amusement and/or irritation,” Commander Ed Hessel, a forty-four-year-old emergency physician, wrote to his family in Eugene, Oregon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.