Trauma Red by Peter Rhee

Trauma Red by Peter Rhee

Author:Peter Rhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner


CHAPTER 7

A GOOD BAD DAY AT CHARLIE MED

The good bad day at Charlie Med started out good enough. The line of plastic Porta-Johns in the company area had just been emptied and hosed out and sprayed with disinfectant, and I was the first one there that morning, which meant I had a nice clean place to relax and ponder the issues of the day.

Believe me, when you’re in the combat zone, it’s those little things that count.

It was December 7, 2005—Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Hawaii—and the end of my first month at Charlie Med, an Echelon II medical facility in Ramadi, Iraq, a dusty city of half a million people situated on the banks of the Euphrates River seventy miles west of Baghdad. Ramadi was both the capital of the vast Anbar Province that covered most of western Iraq and the center of the Sunni anti-US insurgency that was killing and maiming so many young Americans. Charlie Med, short for “C” Medical Company, 228th Forward Support Battalion of the 2-28th Brigade Combat Team, was a unit of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard charged with providing medical services for US troops fighting in and around the city.

How I wound up there, attached as a Navy surgeon to a Pennsylvania Army National Guard unit, takes a little explaining.

After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I was once again champing at the bit to get into the combat zone—and once again the Navy wasn’t cooperating. We had started the Navy Trauma Training Center program at County-USC just six months earlier, and it was being widely lauded as a big success. The Navy wanted me to keep on training other surgeons and medical staff in trauma techniques, instead of having me take my trauma skills to the battlefield personally. Professionally, I could understand the argument. Personally, I felt that the combat zone was where I was needed most. I had spent my entire professional life learning how to be a trauma surgeon on the Navy’s dime, and now that there was a war on, it was time for me to pay the Navy back. As I said earlier, for me to not be deployed to the war zone was like being a firefighter who wasn’t allowed to go near a fire.

Then in the fall of 2005, two and a half years after the war began, I caught a break. The Navy and the II Marine Expeditionary Force, which was then in command of the fight in Anbar Province, found itself short a surgeon and needed a replacement. After pulling a lot of strings and calling in a few favors—I hadn’t spent twenty-two years in the Navy for nothing—I got the job. I went down to Camp Pendleton to get my orders cut and draw my gear: cammies, flak vest, Kevlar helmet, and 9-millimeter sidearm.

I was a Navy captain by then, an O–6, the equivalent of a Marine full colonel, which certainly had its privileges. It usually takes a week to draw combat gear; I got it done in a day.



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