News From the Cause
Sangin docs aid Marines, bomb dogs, themselves: (MILITARY TIMES)
August 18, 2011
SANGIN, Afghanistan — Hospitalman Chris Carson dialed the phone and placed it into the lance corporal’s bloody fingers. It was 7 a.m., and cool and quiet inside the battalion aid station here at Forward Operating Base Jackson. An Air Force medical evacuation helicopter was on its way.
“Dad?” the wounded Marine said into the handset. “I’ve been hit.”
A member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., which has seen its share of casualties since arriving in Sangin in March, the Marine told his parents that he had seen the improvised explosive device before it was detonated by someone hiding nearby, and that he was able to dart away from it quickly enough to avoid catastrophic injuries. He was thrown by the blast wave as it clipped the left side of his body, causing fractures and an eye injury he didn’t yet know would take him out of the fight.
“I’m going to be OK,” he told them, confident in his return to the battlefield “after they patch me up.”
Many Marines who arrive here on stretchers express the same sentiment. They want to rejoin their buddies and the all-important mission of securing the nastiest place in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
But members of the medical staff see it differently. While most patients who come through are Afghan nationals, the violence that’s plagued Sangin for months is such that even stalwart Navy doctors and corpsmen give pause.
“We’ve seen Marines come through here who survive a gunshot or an IED, then they go back out and they get killed, or come back with their legs blown off,” said Navy Lt. Rich Whitehead, 1/5’s battalion surgeon. He conceded after the lance corporal’s departure that he hoped the wounded rifleman would be sent home.
When Marine Corps Times visited FOB Jackson in early July, the volume of activity at 1/5’s battalion aid station was down noticeably from just a few weeks prior, when the eight-member Shock Trauma Platoon co-located with Whitehead’s team treated scores of wounded Marines and Afghan security forces, including some with multiple amputations. Nine of the battalion’s 12 combat deaths happened in June, and on June 12 alone, Whitehead said, they had 12 medical evacuations.Click here to view more
