Shurer had turned the mountain into a makeshift emergency room. The conditions were less than ideal, and he braced himself for the possibility that insurgents above would toss grenades down to their position, or fire an RPG in their direction. It’s just a matter of time, he thought. It was tough even to think straight with all the chaos. Shurer had trained for this. He knew this day might come when he enlisted and pushed to be a medic. But reality was different from training, and this was his first real battlefield test. He had to stay in control.
Like Behr, Morales was in poor shape. Not as bad as Behr, but close. Morales had highly visible wounds in his right thigh and ankle. Shurer administered a morphine shot and began closely examining his teammate’s injuries. It wasn’t pretty. His right leg was badly damaged. Shurer could put his hand straight through Morales’s thigh. It was just flayed open. But Morales had been lucky; there was no femoral damage, or injury to the femur.
Shurer knew the key would be to apply enough pressure on the thigh to keep it from swelling. With that much tissue damage, the thigh would normally swell up and, left untreated, would keep swelling. If that happened, the bleeding would continue. But the blood loss wouldn’t necessarily be visible. It would be hidden under the swelling. A real danger.
So Shurer packed the wound with Celox—a hemorrhage-control medication that quickly stops bleeding. (Pouring Celox into a wound prevents blood loss by forming a gel-like clot as the medicine binds to the surface of red blood cells.) Shurer then wrapped the area as tightly as he could to keep pressure on the thigh.
He then turned his attention to Morales’s ankle. He cut off Morales’s boot—and tossed it so far it tumbled off the mountain. But after examining the wound, he realized the only thing he could do was to try to stop the bleeding. He didn’t have time to do anything else. He used a bandage and, after the bleeding was under control, gave Morales a “fentanyl lollipop.” (Fentanyl is more powerful than morphine.) The lollipop helped ease the pain.
After that, Shurer bounded to CK, whose body had been moved by the soldiers near the rock wall. Shurer, who didn’t know that Walton had already examined CK, wanted to perform a more thorough examination of his friend. Maybe there was a chance—albeit a slim one—that he was still alive. People can be nearly dead and you might not see it with a quick glance. So this time, Shurer checked the terp’s pulse. Checked his breathing closely. Nothing. CK was dead, and Shurer had to regroup and focus his attention on the living.
When he returned to Behr, he heard Ford’s voice.
“Where’s the Skedco?” Ford asked. Made from a special plastic formula, a Skedco is a portable stretcher that unfolds like a Fruit Roll-Up. (Skedco is the name of the company that manufactures the stretcher and other military equipment.)
“I didn’t bring it,” Shurer said. Shit, it figures, he thought. It would have been stupid to bring the Skedco, which weighs about twenty-five pounds. Ford had encouraged his team to pack light for the mission. Keep the rucksacks lean, he said, because they would be climbing a steep hill. If every pound was going to be important, it was better to leave the Skedco behind, Shurer figured. He did pack a poleless litter—an ultralight polypropylene stretcher. It rolled up to the size of a towel and weighed only a few pounds. But it wasn’t as sturdy as a Skedco.
Shurer knew Ford was coordinating the evacuation plan and was trying to assess what equipment they had to move the injured soldiers. Sanders and Walding’s element had a pole-less litter—and they needed it now. But both men were on a ledge above them, firing at enemy positions. It could take some time.
While Shurer worked on Behr he could hear Walton and Rhyner on the radios, frantically calling in air strikes and trying to get medevacs in the area to rescue them. They also were talking to the other ODAs that had been cut off from their position. Neither could reach them because of the heavy fire.
Shurer glanced at Behr’s pelvic wound and it wasn’t getting better. So he turned to Celox—the same medicine he had just used on Morales. With Behr, it was a more complicated process. The bleeding was intense. He poured the Celox on top of the wound and then, with his fingers, shoved what he could inside. Then he poured a little bit more and repeated the process until he thought he had used enough. But with each step he had to apply pressure for at least five minutes or the Celox wouldn’t hold.
It was when he was applying Celox to Behr that the medic heard Walding scream and saw that he had been shot. Shurer wanted to run and help him, but at the moment he couldn’t. He had to keep his hands inside Behr’s wound so the Celox would hold.
Walding was just twenty-five feet from Shurer. But it might as well have been a mile. Walding couldn’t move, and Shurer couldn’t leave his position. For Shurer, it was a tough decision. If he left Behr in order to help Walding, who knew if the Celox would hold? If it didn’t, this would create another set of problems. If you release the pressure even just a little, you could break the newly forming clot. If that happened, the bleeding would be buried underneath all the junk you just put on top of the wound and you would never gain access to it.
Again, Shurer had to quickly evaluate the situation. Walding had suffered a traumatic amputation. The wound was below the knee and the bottom part of his leg was nearly severed. Get a tourniquet on it and it will be fine, Shurer thought.
Of the three injuries, Walding’s was visually the most shocking and most upsetting. But in the medic’s view, it was the easiest one to deal with: Put a quick tourniquet on the thigh. Squeeze the tourniquet around the femur. Squeeze it around the femoral artery. And that should stop the bleeding.
But nothing on this mountain was easy.