November 9, 2004, approximately 1000
We had just finished transferring Gunny Shane, Doc Lambotte, and the other wounded from the cultural center to a convoy headed to the Bravo Surgical Company, when I heard the sound of Humvees roaring toward the Battalion Aid Station at Checkpoint 84. A door flew open and one of my corpsmen, HN Joel Dupuis, came running toward me, screaming, “Sir, sir, fuckin’ Volpe’s hit, Volpe’s gonna die, sir, Volpe’s gonna die.”
Private First Class Paul Volpe was one of Lieutenant Kutilek’s dismounts. The third platoon, Weapons Company, had stayed in that ambush intersection at the cultural center until we pulled out in the APC, and they escorted us out to the exchange point. Amazingly, they took no casualties themselves, despite having pulled farther into the open intersection to provide better cover for us as we worked on the casualties. Call it luck, call it skill, call it aggressive tactics. Kutilek says he attributes it to the hand of God and his parents’ prayers. Good enough—it all works for me.
But their day was far from over. Kutilek immediately had his Marines stage their vehicles to go back in; he’s a huge military history buff, and he knows that you need to keep your men motivated and moving after an intense, emotional experience like they had just come through at the cultural center. For many of the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds, it had been their first real firefight, and it was about as violent as they come. Kutilek’s Marines snapped to, though, and set about preparing to reenter the city, resupplying water, reloading ammunition, cleaning weapons. Within fifteen or twenty minutes, while Specialist Cook was still cleaning out his ambulance, another call came in from the cultural center—more Marines had been wounded and needed an emergency evac. “We’re goin’,” Kutilek yelled, and his platoon pulled out and raced back into the city. And from there, he says, things just kept getting worse.
The insurgents had seen how we were collecting casualties, and realized that it was a vulnerable moment for our forces. They were communicating by cell phone and could move quickly through the city streets and a system of underground tunnels. They could swarm in anytime there was a Marine down. So this time, as Kutilek’s team headed back to that same intersection near the cultural center, it was like the insurgents were expecting them. The enemy was holed up in buildings along the route we had just taken and it seemed like the rounds were coming from every direction, and third platoon was faced with an even more intense firefight than the one we had just escaped. They strategically placed their vehicles to provide cover while they loaded up the casualties as well as another fatality, a Marine from another unit killed in action.
They’d barely started back toward the BAS when they got yet another call for a casualty pickup: another 1/8 Marine had been hit just a block away. Kutilek didn’t like the idea of leading his train of eight vehicles back into that firestorm again, too many targets. So he decided that it made more sense for him to dismount and sprint across Phase Line Ethan and pick up the guy himself. He ran across the same street where Lonny Wells had just been shot and made it, but then he needed to get the wounded Marine out of there. “Can you run, can you make it back around the corner?” Kutilek asked the young lance corporal, eighteen, nineteen years old, shot in the arm or upper torso, and terrified. “Yeah,” he said, and the two of them hustled back to the lead Humvee, where the wounded Marine immediately hit the floorboards, and no one could blame him for that.
Third platoon was ready to get moving back to the BAS, but just as they started pulling out they got yet another call, from Charlie Company this time, with casualties at or near the first house we had been to that morning to extract the wounded Force Recon corpsman. It was like a rerun of that first rescue—they couldn’t exactly describe their location. Kutilek got on the radio and started yelling, “Where are they at?” but everybody was on the radio at the same time and there was complete confusion. And in the meantime, they were getting shot at and needed to get the hell out of there. By now, Kutilek’s Humvee was at the rear of the line of vehicles because the platoon had executed a “reverse order, reverse route maneuver” as they headed back toward that first house where we found the wounded corps-man. The Humvees were spread out, about fifty to seventy-five meters apart, and they slowed down as they neared the casualty pickup area. Private First Class Volpe, who was in the lead vehicle, and the other dismount Marines had climbed out of their Humvees to walk beside the vehicles, weapons in hand, when a Marine from Charlie Company called out that there were two KIAs near a gray house about two hundred meters off the main road. You don’t want to leave fallen Marines out in the open, because you don’t want to give the enemy a chance to desecrate them. So Volpe and Staff Sergeant Steven Davis headed toward a wide, soccer-field-sized open space between the houses, with their Humvee following slowly behind.
And that’s when Kutilek heard the last thing a platoon commander ever wants to hear over his platoon frequency—Man down—there’s a Marine down!
“I knew one of my guys got shot,” Kutilek later recalled. “And I wanted to be there immediately. I mean, you love these guys. These are thirty-nine of your Marines and Sailors and you care the world for ’em. I didn’t know who it was or what was going on, but the immediate thing I wanted to do was get there.” Together with his corpsman, HN Dupuis, Kutilek started sprinting up toward the front of his column.
Marines are trained to approach such wide-open areas with caution because they are a perfect setup for an ambush. The gray house was on the far side of the field, so while Davis provided cover from behind a wall, Volpe had started running across the open space. He’d cleared about thirty yards when two men ran out of one of the houses and opened fire with AK-47s. Volpe was hit at least three times, maybe four—his leg was so messed up we were never sure how many bullets made impact. Volpe was down on the ground, in overwhelming pain and in the open, and still taking fire.
There’s a saying, Fire superiority is the only care under fire, and the Marines did everything they could to provide it. The lead Humvee roared up on the field and began laying down a barrage of suppressing fire. Private First Class Harry Johnson, from New York City, blasted away with his Mark 19, firing several dozen rounds into nearby fields and through windows into the surrounding houses. The MK19 fires high-explosive 40-millimeter rounds, and they detonate on impact. Private First Class Johnson was so close in that he was getting hit with shrapnel kicking back from the rounds he fired, but he didn’t let it stop him. But the dismounts were still trapped in a 3-D firebox: the field was a blind alleyway surrounded on three sides by buildings, and there was enemy fire coming from above, below, and all around the sides. In a replay of Gunny Shane’s courageous rescue attempt at the cultural center earlier that morning, Davis ran out and hoisted the 165-pound Volpe onto his back and started moving out. But he didn’t get far. A bullet sliced through Davis’s hand, nearly severing one of his fingers, before slamming into Volpe’s forearm. As the two hit the ground, Davis threw his body over Volpe, protecting the nineteen-year-old New Jersey native from the ongoing fire.
Staff Sergeant Matthew Smith entered firing. He was shot in the upper arm but shook it off, standing in the open and firing his M203 grenade launcher as well as his M16—he calmly fired and reloaded the single-shot M203 no fewer than ten times. As Kutilek arrived on scene, he saw Gunnery Sergeant Gordon Hill run into the field, throwing grenades at two hot spots, directing machine-gun fire at a third. Kutilek sprinted in, handed off his rifle to Gunny Hill, and started dragging Volpe out of the firebox, leaving a bloody trail in the dirt. “I remember thinking that I would get psycho strength,” Kutilek says; I had thought the same thing lifting Wells over the wall, but apparently that’s just how it happens in the movies. Volpe felt plenty heavy, but Kutilek managed to get them both to safety and threw him into a vehicle. By this time, both men were covered in blood. Dupuis and HN Joseph Maston immediately started working on Volpe, applying a tourniquet, packing his wounds, injecting him with a shot of morphine, but the young private didn’t look good to the platoon commander. “He was already starting to black out. He was really hurting. His entire lower extremity was saturated with fluid,” Kutilek recalled. “You don’t think human beings can bleed that much until you see it.” The Marines fell back in an Australian peel, a staggered retreat that keeps each man covered on his way out. They loaded up and sped out of the city, toward the BAS, as fast as they could go. Somehow, despite the speed of that vehicle, Dupuis managed to get an IV line going.
Four Humvees came screeching into the aid station flat out. Dupuis, a big, strapping kid from Louisiana, jumped out of the back of one and was running toward me, frantic, rambling that his best friend was dying. I ran to the back hatch of the Humvee, and there lay Volpe, unconscious, his eyes rolled up in his head, in complete shock and bleeding profusely—AK rounds in the arm, the calf, and the killer, the right thigh, the femoral vein. He was fluorescent white. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could be that white and still be alive. There was still a feeble pulse, but he was bleeding out, and fast.
My guys sprang into action and rushed the limp and cold Volpe into the aid station. We were moving so fast that Chief, who was helping with the litter, accidentally smacked right into Staff Sergeant Davis’s hand, which had been nearly cut in half during the ambush. Davis is a very intense Marine, with a well-developed ability to use very colorful language in the heat of the moment, and he was in a lot of pain. He let out a scream of agony and started yelling at one of the corpsmen, HM3 Hirkala. Davis really needed some morphine, but the focus had to be on Volpe. Hirk’s usually pretty timid, but he wasn’t taking it that day; he yelled right back and told Staff Sergeant Davis to shut up and wait.
We got Volpe up on a table with IV access and cut away his clothing. Volpe looked bad, as bad as Lonny Wells had or worse. All I could think was: I can’t let this happen again or there’s no point in me being here. Kennedy was already packing the groin wound, and he was doing a good job, but by then I knew—good wasn’t going to be good enough. “You fucking pack that tighter than you’ve ever packed anything in your life!” I barked. “If you have to jam your knee or hand in the wound, do it!” While I held Volpe’s leg, Kennedy bore down on the wound like a wrestler going for the pin.
We couldn’t get a blood pressure reading on Volpe, and the corpsmen were struggling to get another needle into the private’s collapsing veins so that we could get more fluid into him; Dupuis stepped up and took over. Miraculously, he managed it again—he got a wide-bore IV needle started and we pumped Volpe with Hespan, the blood expander—500 cc’s, and then another 500. A full liter, which is an awful lot.
And then the most amazing thing happened. Volpe’s color started to come back. He opened his eyes suddenly, very weak but alert, and looked around, asking, “What the hell is going on?”
It was like Frosty the Snowman coming back to life. It was the most rewarding thing you ever saw. We were all too surprised to answer. He saw the fear and confusion on his friend Dupuis’s face, and I guess he got it then. Dupuis managed to ask, “You doin’ all right?” and Volpe came back with, “I’m all right. Hell, I can see your ugly-ass face.” Our laughter was a sweet relief on a day of unbelievable pain. I don’t know if there was a man in that BAS tent who thought it was possible that Volpe would actually survive, let alone have the grit to crack a joke as he came out of it. Dupuis went almost nuts with relief, and we were all pretty much overwhelmed with surprise—all maybe except for Kutilek. He took a moment and said a prayer. As Kutilek leaned over, Volpe looked him right in the eye. “Sir, did I let you down?” Volpe asked. Kutilek was stunned. Here’s this nineteen-year-old kid, who’s just been shot three or four times, and that’s what he’s got to say, he’s worried that he let down his platoon commander. Kutilek struggled to maintain his composure. “Absolutely not,” Kutilek assured him. “You did more than I could ever have expected of you.”
My mind was already wringing the lessons out of the morning’s tragedies. Two severe wounds, and two radically different outcomes. The quick initial action of the line corpsmen, Maston and Dupuis, had definitely saved his life, but even so, if Volpe had come in one minute later, just a few seconds more delay, he would have been dead. He’d had absolutely no time to spare. Could I have saved Sergeant Wells if I had gotten to him sooner? Should I have tried to get IV fluid into Wells on the track? Could I have tried harder to stop the bleeding? Specialist Cook says he remembers me in the ambulance, getting deep into Wells’s wound, trying to find the bleeding vessel with my fingers. I don’t remember doing that, and I wonder why I can recall telling Cook to move on, but not that? Lonny Wells was the first Marine to die in my arms, or die in my care. Not the last, but the first. Under fire, with so many other men to care for, should I have moved so fast? Could I have saved him under more controlled conditions? I don’t know for sure, but what I learned from Lonny Wells—seeing how fast he bled out, even though it looked like venous blood, not arterial—had saved Paul Volpe’s life. If I hadn’t seen Wells, I wouldn’t have known to tell Kennedy to pack him harder, and harder, and harder.
Tamponade—that French term again, it just means packing. It’s such a simple concept, but so crucial. You can’t apply a tourniquet on a groin wound, no amount of blood-clotting agent is going to help, and it’s a tough spot—you’re trying to pinch off a vessel by pushing it into more soft tissue. Intense pressure is the only thing that can stop a bleed like that. We all knew that going in, we’d practiced it, talked about it. Stuff the wound with gauze; if it’s big enough, stuff a whole roll of Kerlix in there like a tampon. Stuff it, cover it, and then apply pressure, everything you have. We all knew that, we just didn’t know what “everything” really meant until Lonny Wells.
But there was another lesson, and I was determined we would learn that one, too. Volpe made it by the very slimmest of margins. He was moments, literally seconds away from leaving an agonizing emptiness in his mother’s heart. I had come to this war for one reason—to keep as many mothers from feeling that pain as I could—and it was now clear to me what we had to do. We need to follow the fight into the city, I thought. We need to get closer.