Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Such incidents would become the norm for Steer when he transferred from Shaiba, going up country and up tempo, to a base in the middle of the desert thirty miles to the south of Baghdad. Camp Dogwood was a sprawling complex that housed all the logistical and support services for the US forces in Iraq. It was a target of constant attacks in an area dubbed, with good reason, the Triangle of Death. But the core of its fighting force had been shipped out to join a major anti-insurgency drive in the key rebellious city of Fallujah, forty miles away. On the instructions of then prime minister Tony Blair and defence secretary Geoff Hoon, a battalion of the Black Watch was sent to man Dogwood while they were away. They were short of medics for this potentially dangerous work, and Steer volunteered to leave behind the relative comfort of Shaiba and go. ‘It sounded exciting. I wanted to be out there, doing the job I was trained for.’

  Donning full body armour and getting on board a Chinook for the hop from Baghdad airport to Dogwood brought home to him that he was about to get all the excitement he could ever want. ‘A Navy Seal, a US special forces guy, briefed us that we were flying into a hot landing zone at two o’clock in the morning and not to be surprised if bullets were flying. What he said really put the wind up me. To be honest, I was shit scared.’ In place of Shaiba’s extensive facilities and hundred-strong staff, he found himself one of just a dozen medics setting up a temporary regimental aid post in the rubble of an old, run-down Iraqi warehouse. The ten-bed unit was enclosed in a large tent they erected inside the building, while Steer’s sleeping quarters, which he shared with three other sergeants, were in a disused toilet, ‘and the hole was under my bed’.

  Dogwood was soon under attack, regularly hit by mortars and rockets fired from villages out in the desert at any time of the day or night. ‘Because it was so quiet out there, you could actually hear the mortars leaving the tube, and then there was an awful gap while you waited for the impact.’ He went through hell inside his head at these times, thinking death – his death – was just seconds away. That almost every shot missed did little to ease the anxiety. The fact that he was in the middle of an increasingly nasty cat-and-mouse war was inescapable.

  Not long after their arrival at Dogwood, the Black Watch mounted an operation to root out those mortar-bombers and to block off possible supply and escape routes for the insurgents battling with American forces at Fallujah. Two Warrior troop carriers headed out of the camp and on to a long, dusty road leading to a village where the insurgents were believed to be hiding. Without warning, a roadside bomb detonated beside the lead Warrior, ripping off its front four wheels. When the second vehicle moved in to help, it too came under mortar attack and careered off the road. Eight men were down and under fire – but they were not the real target. They were the bait. Other vehicles raced out from Dogwood to the rescue, and one, with three soldiers and a local interpreter inside, set up a perimeter roadblock nearby to control access. A suicide bomber – the first time the British contingent had ever encountered one and a frightening development in the enemy’s armoury – blew it up, killing all four occupants.

  The bodies were brought to Steer’s aid post. ‘They came in the back of a Warrior, and they were a mess, blood everywhere, body parts missing. Then the insurgents mortared us, so it was complete bedlam for a while. There was nothing we could do for these guys apart from treating them with the respect they deserved. I was very conscious that this was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother. The images are still with me.’

  A week later, another Black Watch soldier died when his Warrior went over a mine. ‘He was killed instantly,’ Steer recalled, ‘but his mates couldn’t get the body out. They needed to get out of the area quickly, so they put chains around the Warrior and dragged it back to camp.’ The medic went inside the hatch to get him out.

  At first he looked all right, with just a bit of blood on his face. But then I saw that his whole bottom half had virtually gone. It was a shock. Dealing with the dead is the worst part about being a medic. Saving lives makes you feel good. You get a buzz when somebody comes off the table alive and you know that you’ve helped save them. That’s what you are trained to do and what you want to do. But the converse is when you are dealing with the dead, and you know that somebody’s going to have to take the awful message to his loved ones.

  *

  By the time RAF casualty nurse Frank Mincher returned to Iraq in 2005, the political situation had worsened still further. His postings there before had been benign; almost nothing had happened. But now the country was a cauldron. This time he would earn his keep. ‘Al-Amarah in particular had turned into the OK Corral. One of my first jobs was to fly into the football stadium there to bring out two bodies with gunshot wounds.’

  The increasing problem was roadside bombs, which produced hideous wounds. Mincher was called to treat the victim of one, a civilian who was working in Iraq as a diplomatic bodyguard. His 4x4 was blown apart by a device made from three mines wired together on top of each other, which blasted the vehicle clean across the central reservation of the dual carriageway he was driving along and down a bank on the other side. Three other occupants, also bodyguards, were killed outright, but he was still alive and had been taken by ambulance to the British base at the Shatt al-Arab Hotel, where Mincher came by helicopter to collect him. ‘If I say he had two hundred wounds, that would be no exaggeration,’ the medic recalled. ‘Every part of his torso, body, legs and arms had shrapnel damage to it. He was bleeding out and was as white as a sheet.’

  On the way to Shaiba in the back of a Sea King, the casualty’s heart stopped beating because of that loss of blood, ‘and we were jumping around trying to resuscitate him’. Alongside Mincher that day was Territorial rifleman Private Chris Grant, a member of the armed protection squad that went with the medics on emergency calls. He watched in awe as they worked on the casualty in the narrow space in the back of the helicopter, crashing his chest heavily to try to keep his heart beating. Grant had never seen real-life drama like it. Thirty chest compressions… two deep breaths into the mouth. Voices counting out the process were lost in the din of the helicopter’s engines and the rush of the slipstream outside. Thirty more compressions… two breaths, and so on, again and again, never giving up. To the medics, it was a well-drilled routine. To Grant, it was heroic. ‘They were hitting his chest so hard I thought they would break his ribs, but I suppose that’s what you have to do if you’re going to save someone’s life. I was so impressed with the job they were doing.’

  They were just about keeping the wounded man alive as the helicopter wound down towards the hospital landing site, but then disaster struck. There was an ear-splitting bang as the eight-ton machine clipped the ground and lurched back into the air, its tail rotor a mangled mess. The helicopter went into a spin, bits of blade flying off in every direction, ‘and we’re trying to perform cardiac massage,’ Mincher said. The aircraft turned through several circles, hit the ground again, bounced up, and then crashed back drunkenly, nearly tipping on its side. ‘Get out!’ Mincher yelled, and they all piled off with the stretcher and began pounding the man’s chest on the ground. Even when he was on a trolley and being sprinted into the A&E room, they were still pumping away. ‘It impressed all of us,’ Grant said. ‘We had just crash-landed, and it was all the rest of us could do to stumble out of the helicopter. But the medics just kept on going with their treatment and hardly even seemed to blink.’ If the helicopter had toppled over, as it very nearly did on landing, there would have been many casualties. The young rifleman’s legs went to jelly beneath him as he realized what a close shave he had just had, but the medics, he recalled in admiration, never for one moment lost their composure. ‘Frank came out from A&E after a while, and he was as cool as a cucumber.’

  But Frank Mincher was not as sanguine as Grant imagined. He and his team had delivered their patient to the doctors still alive, but there was to be no good ending to this story. The civilian died, and Mincher followed that time-honoured but pointles
s medic’s tradition of beating himself up, of wondering if he had done enough. It was the flipside of being a life-saver. ‘You start to wonder if he’d have had a better chance if we’d got to him earlier or made different decisions. I felt disappointed and down.’

  He found solace in his mates. The emergency medical response team he headed was a close-knit and sociable bunch who trained together in the gym and played volleyball when not working. Much of their time on duty was spent waiting around for a shout. One day, after word came in about an incident in Basra, they were on standby and in a high state of readiness. They often hung around like this, armed and in body armour, anxious for the command either to go or to stand down. Mincher was thinking about home. He had been on base for two months now and was rostered to begin a fortnight’s leave the next day. He was going home to see his wife and children back in England. But tomorrow was another day because, suddenly, it was a ‘go’, and there was work to do. A rescue beacon had gone off in the city. Two SAS troopers working undercover were missing, snatched from their car. No one was sure if the Iraqi police had arrested them, or if they had been kidnapped. Given the uncertain loyalties of the police, many of whom secretly (or sometimes openly) supported the Mahdi army, the difference might well be academic.

  The medical rescue team piled into the Sea King, which swooped backwards and forwards at low level over the city, beating out a systematic search pattern while eyes in the cockpit looked for any signs of the lost pair. In the back, Mincher and his team sat in silence. More waiting and worrying. Then a car was spotted below, abandoned, its doors wide open, and the helicopter dived in for a closer look. There was no sign of the missing men, and the search now shifted to an area around the Al Jameat police station and jail. The Sea King dropped down again, and this time landed. Mincher, a doctor and a medic exited behind their four-man close-support detail, their personal-protection unit. The blazing heat hit them as they stood on the street, watching the helicopter immediately lift off and disappear into the distance. The choppers never hung around. They were too tempting a target for insurgents. Sixty seconds, ninety at the most, was their preferred limit for being on the ground.

  A welcoming party of British soldiers, all on high alert, their eyes glancing in every direction for signs of trouble, hurried the medics along. ‘We sprinted through deserted backstreets,’ which, reflecting later, Mincher realized did not bode well. At the time, however, he was unconcerned by the absence of people. On the contrary, everything seemed fairly routine. They were embarked on a simple snatch-and-run operation, no more. No danger. But, outside the police station, an argument was going on between British troops and Iraqis, and a threatening crowd of locals had gathered and was swelling all the time. That’s where everyone had gone. A serious situation was developing on this baking Basra street.

  Major James Woodham, a cool and experienced officer of the Royal Anglian Regiment, was negotiating to get the SAS men back, but the temperature of the encounter was rising by the minute. There were machine guns pointing in his direction from the roof of the police station. Behind him, the troops had thrown up a cordon to stop the two captives being spirited away. More troops were on their way, more hostile Iraqi militia too, pitching up in pick-up trucks, bristling with machine guns, aimed in ever-increasing numbers at the British troops in their khaki desert fatigues. This was shaping up into a full-scale confrontation, one that could trigger the sort of violence which would destroy what little remained of the trust and goodwill the British forces had been trying to build in Basra.

  Mincher walked towards the front door of the police station, bold as brass. He had a job to do. There were men being held inside whose medical condition he needed to check. An Iraqi policeman stood in his way and pushed him back. The RAF nurse heard the unmistakable rapid rattle of weapons being cocked. ‘I looked up and saw the machine guns on the roof.’ He was tempted to push back, ‘being a stroppy Jock’, but this was a situation for discretion, not impetuous valour. He and his medical team pulled back, and took cover behind a line of yellow school buses. ‘But then the Iraqi policeman I’d already had my run-in with had the buses moved, and we were left once again exposed to the machine guns.’

  Mincher moved into cover once more, this time behind a Warrior armoured vehicle, and watched as the gunner lined up his sights on the more aggressive sections of the gathering crowd. ‘My heart was beating very fast,’ he remembered, and faster still when he turned and saw gangs of youths advancing across an open patch of waste ground behind him. ‘I started to get worried. We were being surrounded. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up, as they do if you walk into a pub back home on a Saturday night and see a big crowd of yobs hanging around and trying to intimidate everyone.’ He heard his protection team quietly talking to each other, assessing the situation and plotting escape routes in case things turned really nasty.

  Woodham was now inside the police station, having persuaded the reluctant and volatile Iraqis to let him in, and he had confirmed that the two hostages were there and had even managed to see them. They had been beaten up and were sporting cuts and bruises, but were otherwise OK. Negotiations for their release were complicated, turning on legal niceties and clearly going to take a while. He was aware that time was running out – the scene outside was growing more aggressive and unpredictable by the minute. He knew full well the pressure on the soldiers trying to hold the line and keep their cool. ‘You’re young and perhaps on your first operational tour,’ he wrote later, ‘and you have a seething mass of people moving towards you, chanting in a language you can’t understand, waving their fists, looking very angry. At any moment, someone with an AK47 might appear from the crowd and fire at you. The noise is such that you can’t hear instructions on the radio. It’s very hot and your adrenalin is up. You’re nervous and probably frightened.’6

  Outside, Mincher was summoned from his safe haven behind a Warrior to treat a casualty. A British interpreter, a Navy man, had gone inside the police station with Woodham to help with the negotiations, but was overcome by heat exhaustion. He was in a bad way when he was brought out, needing urgently to be rehydrated on a drip and cooled down in an air-conditioned hospital ward. Immediate evacuation was imperative, or he could easily collapse and die. Mincher radioed for help, then put the sick man into the back of an army ambulance and drove to an open space, a waste tip a mile away just about big enough for one of the smaller army helicopters – a Lynx – to get in. The Lynx appeared overhead and touched down in a flurry of dirt and rubbish from the tip. It was not designed to carry casualties, but they loaded in the stretcher anyway, crossways, with the casualty’s head and feet sticking out of the sides. His condition had by now visibly worsened, and the doctor in Mincher’s team decided he must go with him.

  Around the impromptu landing site, another large crowd was gathering and, the moment the Lynx had gone, they hurled themselves at the soldiers, lobbing petrol bombs and stones. Bottles smashed in the dust and burst into flame. The startled British soldiers, caught on the back foot by this fierce onslaught, realized they were in real trouble. ‘Some Special Forces troops were with us, and they shot over the heads of the crowd to try and hold them back. It didn’t have much effect. As we climbed into the ambulance to escape, the crowd was already surging around us and we couldn’t get the doors closed.’

  The mob now numbered several hundred, all angry and shouting and throwing missiles. The same fate as the Red Caps suffered at Majar al-Kabir became a distinct and frightening possibility. Mincher had no doubt that his life and the lives of his team, bodyguards and all, were seriously at risk. As demonstrators lunged at the vehicle and tried to grab him, he pulled out his pistol, his last line of defence. His greatest fear was that they would be overpowered and kidnapped.

  Through his mind flashed pictures of a notorious incident in Northern Ireland in 1988 when two plain-clothes corporals on undercover duties fell into the hands of a mob in the Republican stronghold of Andersonstown and were lynched,
their capture and desperate efforts to escape caught on camera. It had been chilling to watch. Now, he was facing a similar ordeal, and he steeled himself to fight for his life in a way he, as a medic, could never have expected to do. The fact that he was supposed to be going on leave the next day somehow added to his consternation. Instead of embarking on a fortnight of rest and recreation back in Blighty, he thought to himself, he might be a prisoner or, worse still, dead. ‘I told myself that I wasn’t going down without a bloody fight. I wasn’t going to surrender meekly and let them take me away.’ His only concession was to take his air-crew helmet off, thinking it might be making him more of a target. But still stones and other missiles came hurtling through the ambulance doors at them, while in a ring outside, the protection force was on its knees in firing positions in a last-ditch bid to keep the crowd at bay. Petrol bombs shattered around them, and the hail of stones on their heads was non-stop.

  They were saved when more British troops rocked up and the ambulance took its place in a heavily armed convoy of Warriors, forcing its way through the narrow backstreets of Basra, heading for the dual carriageway that would take them to safety. But one armoured vehicle behind was in trouble, halted by a petrol bomb and on fire. A soldier popped out of the turret and was seized by the pursuing mob. Mincher’s ambulance halted too, and his protection team raced back into the crowd, rifles and machine guns blazing, to grab the captured soldier by the hair and drag him away. ‘He was unconscious from the beating he’d been given. We hauled him in and went to work on him.’