The marine assisting Katie raised his head. “On my shout we get up and drag this guy back to the compound like fucking hot shit,” he shouted. “You grab the IV and we move like our asses are on fire.”
Katie nodded and took the IV bag from the casualty’s stomach. The second she had done so, her companion screamed, “Go.”
Without thinking, her mind mercifully blanking out any thought of how exposed she was, Katie straightened up and ran as fast as she could—hand gripping the injured man’s webbing. The resultant tilted weight tore at her right shoulder muscles. Air whistled in and out of her lungs. Sweat stung in her eyes. Her mouth was dry.
She couldn’t contemplate the damage that the rough handling might be doing to the abdominal wound suffered by the marine so she focused her attention on the nearing compound wall, pulling the man behind her with what little strength she had left.
Ten meters from the perimeter wall, the fourth member of fire team one joined them and two more marines came running out from the opening. They pushed Katie aside roughly then took the injured man from her, ripping the IV bag from her grasp, lifting him up then ran the rest of the way to the safety of the compound.
Katie stumbled the last few meters through the gap, exhausted and completely out of breath, tripped and slammed against the inner wall of the compound. She found herself pressed against the rough powdery stone, her right cheek resting against the wall, unable to get her breath, feeling nausea roil through her stomach.
Turning, she leaned her back against the solid surface, her whole body trembling violently, pumped full as it was with adrenaline but weak with exhaustion and for brief seconds she felt as though she were going to pass out. She stood spread-eagled, eyes closed, willing the sparkling blackness behind her eyelids to dissipate and the fog in her brain to clear.
Someone thrust an open water bottle into her hand and she took a large mouthful, closing her eyes and swallowing the cool liquid. Finally, regulating her breathing, she opened her eyes and glanced straight into Joe’s face. He was staring at her intently with such a look of horror in his gaze that she would remember it for as long as she lived.
“In one piece, Corporal Anderson?” he asked, appearing to enunciate each word carefully with an intense control. Katie believed that she was the only one who heard the slight tremble in his voice as he asked the question of her.
Katie nodded. “In one piece, Staff Sergeant,” she replied softly, but there was no time to reassure him any further.
Glancing around, she searched frantically for the casualty and saw that he was lying on the ground surrounded by the marines who had escorted her back to the compound. She straightened up from the wall, tried to force words from her dry throat and found that she couldn’t, coughed then shouted, “Get him into the courtyard.”
He was lifted into the air and borne away at a run. Katie’s shouted order had gone unquestioned. As she followed them at a jog, forcing her tired body to co-operate, she turned and shouted over her shoulder, “We need that medevac now.”
Entering the courtyard, Katie made her way to where the casualty was lying on a sleeping pad. She flung her rucksack to the ground, dragged off her helmet and, letting it fall, dropped to her knees beside it.
Without raising her head, she ordered, “I need some help here. Somebody get his combat shirt and T-shirt out of the way to give me a clean area to work in.”
While she pulled out medical supplies, scattering them on the dry ground, one of the marines who had helped carry the man into the courtyard knelt down on the opposite side to Katie and quickly began to push the man’s uniform up his chest as far as it would comfortably go.
The injured man remained unmoving and unresponsive. Conscious of precious time ticking on, Katie checked the pad of hemostatic dressings that she had applied earlier and saw with a sense of desperation that dark red blood saturated them, the life-giving fluid still oozing slowly and steadily out of the young man.
“Oh, fuck!” Katie exclaimed.
With no time to think or finesse her movements, she quickly took out another bag of plasma volume expander and deftly changed the bag, which was now almost empty. She then took out a bottle of sterile water, a bottle of dry powdered antibiotics, a small plastic container and a sealed hypodermic syringe. Ripping open the sealed packet containing the syringe, she proceeded to draw up ten ccs of water and squirted it into the small plastic container. She then sprinkled the required amount of antibiotic powder into it, quickly mixing the contents together to form a white milky substance. Drawing up all of the liquid into the syringe, she injected a small amount into the hub of the catheter at its entry point into the casualty’s hand, waited for two minutes, then injected some more. After waiting for the final amount of time to pass, she injected the last of the mixture.
She then flushed the hub site through with sterile water and, extracting a bag of lactate ringers, proceeded to connect it to a shorter length of tubing before attaching it to the hub. She turned the drip to a fast flow-through then pumped up the abdominal tourniquet until the gauge showed one-hundred pounds.
Once again, Katie placed her fingers against the man’s carotid pulse, noting that it was still rapid and faint. As she did so, the marine suddenly opened his eyes and looked directly at her.
Her heart thundering painfully with compassion, she watched as a tear trickled from the corner of the man’s eye. He tried to speak, failed, then finally, after licking his dry, cracked lips whispered, “Don’t let me die.”
Katie took his cold hand and squeezed it gently.
“Hey, Marine,” she replied soothingly. “Nobody is going to die. You’re going to be fine. Stay with me. Keep talking to me. Come on. You can do it.”
She became aware of the sound of boots coming up behind her and one of the marines with her asked quietly of the new arrival, “What’s going on out there?”
“The Staff Sergeant has ordered an air strike. Gonna blow the bastards to hell,” came the quiet reply from behind Katie. “How’s old Dougie doing?”
There was no answer forthcoming to the question from Katie’s companions and when she glanced up, she saw the marine who had been assisting her shaking his head silently.
“Don’t you do that!” she exclaimed angrily, and turned back to her patient, furious at the negative atmosphere around her.
She saw that the young marine had begun to tremble violently. Keeping hold of his hand, she used her other to pull out a folded combat casualty blanket which she shook out and draped over him. It was as she was doing this that Katie sensed a change in the man’s breathing.
His chest began to spasm, his breath hitching in and out of his open mouth as though he could not draw enough oxygen into his lungs. Katie’s sixth sense sprang into action and went onto high alert. She knew instinctively that the marine before her was dying. Despite having done the best she could for him, she was fully aware that she did not have the equipment or medical supplies to treat a wound of this magnitude in the field, and it filled her with frustrated helplessness and grief. She watched with silent, suppressed horror as the man struggled to take a deep breath, saw it slowly hiss out of him then his chest was still.
No, Katie wailed silently.
Dropping the man’s hand, she crawled up and positioned herself to the side of his head. She quickly checked his carotid pulse again and finding none, tilted her head down to watch for the telltale sign of the rise and fall of the casualty’s chest. Seeing no movement, Katie raised the man’s chin gently with one hand while pushing down on the forehead with the other to tilt the head back. She pinched the man’s nose shut using her thumb and forefinger, the heel of her hand on the forehead maintaining the head tilt with her other hand remaining under the chin. Again, she watched to see if the opening of the airway would initiate breathing and whimpered quietly when the marine’s chest remained still.
Inhaling normally she immediately gave two full rescue breaths while maintaining an airtight seal with her mouth against
the man’s mouth. Each of the two breaths lasted for one second in duration and she kept a sideways glance on the chest to see if her efforts were encouraging it to rise. Thereafter, she immediately started chest compressions, not bothering to take the time to check for a pulse or for signs of blood circulation.
Kneeling at the man’s side near his chest, with the middle and forefingers of her hand nearest the legs, Katie located the notch where the bottom rims of the rib cage met in the middle of the chest. Placing the heel of her hand on the sternum next to the notch, she placed her other hand on the top of the one that was in position and keeping her fingers up off the chest wall, she interlocked her fingers. She brought her shoulders directly over the man’s sternum and pressed downward, hard and fast, keeping her arms straight. After each push, she relaxed the pressure, allowing the chest to return to its normal position.
While doing CPR, Katie’s mind closed itself off from the noise of her surroundings. The heat from the sun covered her in a heavy, all-enveloping humid blanket, sweat trickled down her face, her shoulders and arms ached from the chest compressions, and the hard ground stung her knees. Worst of all was the coppery smell of blood stinging her nostrils and the vise-like grip that her emotions had around her heart.
Desperate to initiate some sign of life into her patient, all thoughts and sensory perceptions in her mind dwindled down to a tunnel where she was completely focused on resuscitating the man—to get his heart beating, enabling the life sustaining blood to flow through his veins long enough for the CTT coming in on the medevac helicopter to get to work on him.
She was barely aware of two jets screaming in at low level overhead or the harsh crump of exploding missiles in the tree line where the enemy lay hidden. She neither heard the subdued cheers coming from the marines lining the perimeter wall at the sight of the thick black smoke curling up from the enemy hotspot nor of the sound of boots as some of the marines came back into the compound and immediately joined the silent group around the dead marine. She remained intent on the task at hand until suddenly someone placed their hands on her shoulders.
“Corporal Anderson.”
Shrugging off the offending hands and ignoring the voice, Katie kept up the CPR.
“Corporal Anderson. Katie.”
The voice seemed loud in the silence that reigned now that the jet engines had dwindled into the distance, their task completed, and the gunfire having ceased now that the enemy had been destroyed, but the hands were stronger, trying to pull her away from her job, distracting her and preventing her from trying to save this precious life.
Eventually the hands tugged hard enough that Katie toppled backward onto her backside. Immediately she sprang to her feet, fury boiling up inside her. She spun round to confront the man who had torn her away from her responsibility and commitment to the casualty and came face-to-face with Dan Reed.
“How dare you…” she began angrily.
Reed backed away and said gently, “Katie, he’s gone. Leave him be.”
Silenced, shocked out of her tirade, Katie turned to look down at the injured man and shook her head in denial.
“But…he can’t…” she began.
Grief and guilt welled up inside her and conscious of the surrounding marines staring at her, possibly condemning her and blaming her for their friend’s death, she turned on her heel and strode away from an atmosphere that was now heavy with death and sorrow.
Chapter Twelve
Entering the courtyard carrying Katie’s weapon, Joe immediately saw her hurrying down the courtyard, heading toward the far corner away from the group of marines surrounding the casualty on the ground. He noticed her bowed head and slumped shoulders and immediately guessed the reason.
He strode across to his men and questioned one of his more senior marines. The man confirmed what Joe had thought and after ordering the dead man’s face covered with the casualty blanket and advising that the medevac would arrive in a few minutes, he picked up Katie’s rucksack and began to head in the direction she had disappeared in.
After a few paces, he stopped and crouching down undid the fastenings and withdrew two bottles of water, a towel and a spare T-shirt. As he withdrew the last item, two glossy photo-sized pieces of paper came fluttering out. He grabbed for them and froze.
The first one was of him and Katie on the night of the Marine ball a few months previously. It was the picture that his mother had taken while they were standing on the landing of his parents’ house.
Joe gazed with fascination at the way Katie, clad in the clinging dark green lace dress, was gazing up at him, a brilliant smile on her face and at himself, in formal marine dress, looking down at her, a small smile on his face and his hands on her hips. With a jolt, he remembered that it was the night he had left her, Josie and his parents. The guilt at his duplicity and the remembered pain at leaving his family surged up through his stomach and into his heart.
He turned to the second photograph and this time a small groan escaped him. It was a picture of his daughter. He drank in the frilly pink dress, the little white socks, pink shoes and the tiny pink bow in her hair and felt the grief beginning to strangle him.
His mind going blank, he thrust the photographs back inside, replaced the bottles of water and other items he had extracted and turned again in the direction in which Katie had gone. He slowly began to walk across the courtyard to find her.
He immediately became aware of a familiar figure in front of him, heading in the same direction, and his body tensed with the now-familiar anger.
“Corporal Reed,” he called.
Dan Reed turned. “Staff Sergeant?”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Joe asked, trying to keep control of his voice.
“I thought that Corporal Anderson—” Dan replied but Joe quickly interrupted him.
“I don’t think so,” he exclaimed. “Get out to the perimeter wall and relieve one of the guys out there.”
“Staff Sergeant, I really think that Katie—Corporal Anderson—needs some assistance,” Dan continued.
Joe saw the stubborn expression appear on the corporal’s face and held the young man’s gaze with his own.
“That’s an order, Marine, not an invitation. Stand down.”
Corporal Reed still hesitated, then nodded and said, “Yes, Staff Sergeant,” and moved off toward the gap in the wall.
Joe stared after him, his body relaxing slightly, fully aware that he himself had overstepped the mark by giving the young marine an order purely for personal reasons.
Shrugging, accepting that the incident had now passed and that he could not rectify it, he continued on across the compound toward its corner where he had seen Katie disappear. As he approached where he thought she was, he saw her, almost concealed by a brick wall jutting out from a building.
She was sitting on the ground against the wall of a building, knees bent, elbows resting on them, hands dangling loosely between her legs, head lowered.
He slowed his pace, hesitant to disturb her with his presence. Completely withdrawn into herself, he reached her side before she became aware that he was there. At last, as if sensing him, Katie glanced up and his heart ached for her when he saw the grief-stricken expression on her face.
Her hair was wet, sweat plastering curls to her head, her face covered in dust and dirt. There was a smear of blood on her chin, bloodstains on her combat shirt and body armor and congealed crimson liquid sheathing her hands as though she were wearing gloves.
Joe dropped her rucksack to the ground, leaned her weapon against the wall and crouched down beside her.
“Hey,” he said softly, “how’re you doing?”
Katie tried to smile at him but a soft sob escaped from her instead.
“I’ve been better,” she answered and Joe heard such a forlorn tone in her voice that he wanted to take her in his arms.
“I’ve brought your gear. I thought you might want to clean up,” he explained quietly.
Katie nodde
d, glanced down at the ground then back at him.
“I couldn’t save him, Joe,” she murmured. “I tried, but I couldn’t save him.”
Seeing a single tear trickle down her face, Joe responded gently, “Oh, honey. You did everything you could and more.”
“I wish I could believe that,” Katie said. “I bet his family and friends won’t think so.”
Her tone was so wistful and sad that Joe stretched out a hand and touched her arm, rubbing the material of her combat shirt gently and tenderly.
“Listen to me, Katie. You risked your life to stabilize the guy and you got him back in one piece. You did all that you could. His injuries were just too bad. Nobody is going to hang you out to dry for that. It’s tough and at the moment it hurts. Believe me, I know. It will pass and you’ll learn to accept that you can only do so much. You have to know your limitations, sweetheart.”
He continued to stroke her arm in an attempt to reassure and comfort her.
Katie glanced down at his hand then looked back at him.
“Really?” she asked.
Joe nodded, seeing a faint look of hope on her pale face.
“Really,” he confirmed, “Now, the medevac will be here in a few minutes. Do you feel up to getting yourself cleaned up and speaking to the CTT when they get here? They’ll need a report from you.”
Katie glanced at her bloodied hands. “I guess I look a fright,” she said.
“No,” Joe answered briefly, “not to me, you don’t.” He straightened up. “I’ll leave you alone for a bit. Come over when you’re ready, okay?”
Katie raised her head for a moment. She and Joe stared at each other in silence then he smiled gently at her. “I’ll see you in a minute,” he repeated and, turning, walked away, leaving her alone.
Striding along with his head down, thinking deep thoughts about his wife, Joe was unaware of his surroundings until Louis Eastman’s voice interrupted his reverie.
“How is she, Joe?”
A Fallen Hero Page 11