Did You Ever Know That You're My Helo?

This morning's training on extraction began as many mornings do, with Powerpoint. Major Burns explained to us that there are four types of people in this world. The sheep just cower and wait for someone else to act upon them. The wolves prey on the sheep. The sheepdogs stand against the wall and say "everything's going to be alright." The wolfhounds track down the wolves and destroy them so they are no longer a threat. He neglected to mention a fifth type of person--the computer techs. Without them, neither the wolfhounds nor the sheepdogs can get their Powerpoints to work.

During the interlude while we waited for tech support, Lieutenant Brian Pomerantz from one of the other alpha platoons demonstrated how to remove an injured victim from a crashed car without aggravating any potential spinal injuries. Apparently, the the best way to keep them on a backboard is duct tape. Why is everything cooler when it involves duct tape? I sometimes get so caught up in how awesome our platoon is that I forget that our entire class is filled with people who are pretty darn spiffy. We've been operating in closer quarters with them today as we rotate through various missions, and I've been impressed with how often it occurs to me "oh, wow, it'd be great to have him/her on my team, too." I guess what makes our platoon exceptional to me is that it's filled with people who are under-the-radar awesome. Take Ensign Seamus Cobb, the delta team leader. Who would have bet the quiet, skinny redhead kid would have taken first of all the men in the class Marine PT test competition, beating out all the ostentatiously macho men in our class? (Though not, it must be noted, beating Amy Alexander.) During our third extraction exercise this morning, Seamus was promoted to platoon sergeant, and, as medic, I was assigned to stick with him like glue until there were casualties to treat. I could barely keep track of all the decisions he was making, seamlessly coordinating intel and orders from up front and reconnaissance from the flanks and behind to direct the movements of two rear squads, all of them operating with new leadership. He kept his cool when we were engaged from close range, adapted to changes in operation orders without flinching, and knew not only where all his chess pieces were at all times, but where they would need to be three moves ahead and how to get them there safely. Expect great things from that man.

But I am ahead of myself. Our first exercise involved extracting an IED victim from a Humvee that looked suspiciously like Major Burns's wife's Yukon. Minutes before the operation started, however, all three squad leaders and our platoon leadership had simultaneous cardiac arrests (have they no age caps on med students anymore?) and were taken out of the picture. Nicole moved from my Charlie team leader to second squad leader, and, by a careful and thorough rock-paper-scissors deliberation, I was chosen to take over Charlie team. It is so much more complicated to play the chess game than to be a chess piece. It's not enough for me to hear "bang-bang" and drop, point towards it, and yell it back. But when you're a leader, you have to think about where everybody else is supposed to drop and whom to leave covering security when the fire is suppressed and how to fill in gaps as each segment advances. You have to decide whether being able to see the opposing force is sufficient reason to hold everybody ready to attack or whether the fact that they're not actively firing means you can spare a few to fulfil other aspects of the mission. We managed to hold a solid perimeter, though, long enough that Catherine Imes the Supermedic could stabilize the victim and Anthon Lemon and Kevin Gray could carry him, first to the casualty collection point (CCP), then all the way up to the helo landing zone (LZ). I know these men in real life, and still I am amazed at the speed they carried that litter up that hill. Even simulated desperation seems to work for an adrenaline boost.

Our second mission was a hostage rescue. Our trek through the woods went wonderfully, easily suppressing the minimal hostile fire, until the opposing force saw us coming and detonated the bridge across the ravine. (Jaime Piercy, our real-world walking-wounded casualty, took on photo duties and trekked back and forth across the woods and even took some great aerial shots from the top of the out-of-play bridge.) So we--that's right--crossed the water. You can't really get away with "let's just not and say we did" when the building with your hostages is on the other side. For the sake of all the real-world cars in the parking lot surrounding our target building, we went on non-tactical mode to cross the parking lot, then set up road guards and attempted to secure a perimeter around Building 59.

And then things began to go wrong. Edward Dolomisiewicz directed me to guard a four-foot gap between a corner of Building 59 and one of the brain research labs while the first squad entered the building and secured the combatants and hostages, but I was on the medic's support team that needed to follow them up to help bring down wounded. My squad leader, Dan Bailey, who had managed to guide us all across the ravine faster than I ever thought I could run up and down such a steep gradient, placed Ensign Sameer Saxeena at the guard post on the corner. Sameer inched forward just a few inches too far, and one of the insurgents grabbed the musket of his rifle, came around the corner, and shot Sameer and our entire medic support team before any of us knew what was happening. I have to hand it to Bailey, everything we accomplished as a platoon outside the building from that moment on was a result of his quick reshuffling. With Jen Nuetzi, our original medic, now out of commission, Catherine Imes took the supply bag and an extraction team up into the building to bring down casualties while Bailey tightened our thinner perimeter security as more guards were taken off line to watch EPWs (enemy prisoners of war) and care for the wounded at the CCP. I didn't mind being dead so much, slumped along the side of the building and being carried into the shade, until a bug flew into my nose. When you're dead, you can rehydrate and reapply sunscreen and shout warnings at the guards not to place EPWs so close to piles of rifles. When the building was finally cleared (the two hostages we had been sent to rescue were nowhere to be found, rendering the whole mission gratuitous), the medivac came and magically healed and/or resurrected the rest of us casualties so we could escort the prisoners back across the ravine and woods to our original HQ. We took some fire from the sides and had a moment of chaos before the platoon leadership realized that they couldn't send EPW teams to pull peripheral security, but made it back with no new casualties.

Our third mission involved rescuing downed pilots--you guessed it--on the other side of the ravine. By this time Seamus was already wet to almost his waistline from plowing through the water on the last mission, and most of the rest of us had at least boots wet with sewage run-off stream water. But this time I was medic, so got to watch most of the chess game from the inside. Dan Raboin was platoon leader, and I have to say I was blown away by how effective and thorough communication was this time around. Unfortunately, somehow we misunderstood the original scenario and did not realize there was a second pilot to rescue until the litter team came back with the first one. They were tired and fairly deserved to switch out, but they were also already familiar with the terrain where the plane had gone down, so they had to do a second set of stream crossings and were not relieved until I had treated the burns and hemorrhages of the two mannequins. Watching my friends struggle to carry these mannequins made me much less sympathetic to the people who want weight limits in the military to be relaxed.

In the afternoon, we went over communications codes, both within ground forces and between the ground and a helicopter. Then we went back out into the fields to practice 9-lines, hand signals with noise discipline, and helo directions. (In between, one of the NNMC departments having a picnic in the pavilion invited us to eat their spare cookies, burgers, and chicken. It doesn't count as raiding and pillaging if you're invited, does it?) If you're ever looking for group participation, just call out "who wants to be the helicopter?" I can't think of a single time before this when all of us volunteered at once. Who doesn't want to be the helo? Then you can sing along with Enrique Iglesias, "I can be your helo, baby. I can kiss away your pain (oh, yeah). I will stand by you forever...." Anyway, today Dan Bailey was my helo.