Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  But she would have to do. She jumped across a ditch and ran to the Land Rover, where the casualties lay covered in blood and with flies already collecting on them. One of them, a corporal, had managed to stagger out on his own, but the other, Sergeant John ‘Jonah’ Jones, had had to be pulled from the wreckage. Holly knelt beside the corporal. ‘I could see that one arm was completely off and the other one was at an unnatural angle. It had been bandaged with field dressings, and whoever did it had done a good job, because the bleeding seemed to be under control.’ He was awake and alert and making his feelings evident. As Si ran over to Jones, he accidentally kicked the corporal. ‘Watch my fucking arms, you fucking clown!’ the wounded man yelled, his annoyance a positive sign. The sergeant, on the other hand, was as quiet and still as the grave. He had a faint pulse but was not breathing. Si slipped an OPA (oral pharyngeal airway) plastic tube into his throat and began resuscitation.

  As Si fought to save the sergeant’s life, Holly focussed on the corporal with an intensity that astonished her. ‘I remember the adrenalin pumping through me, but I also felt numb and distant, as if someone else was doing all this, not me.’ A stretcher was brought, the casualty was lifted on, and Holly and three soldiers took a corner each to walk him to the ambulance, clambering up and down the ditch as they went and trying not to drop him. ‘We put him into the back of the ambulance, taking care not to bump his arms.’ Sergeant Jones was slid in next to him, and Holly, on her knees in the narrow aisle between them, quickly fitted an instrument to measure his oxygen intake. Time, she knew, was running out. By now his pulse had disappeared, and she gripped his wrist and probed under his chin, trying, hoping, to find it. There was nothing, just a massive shrapnel wound in his neck.

  As the clumsy, top-heavy ambulance lumbered over cracks and pot holes and cranked up to full speed, she looked up from the stretcher where Jones lay and saw that the other man’s stump had started to bleed again. This was every medic’s big fear – two casualties at the same time, both needing urgent and exclusive attention. She called for help, and Si, who was in the front seat, clambered back through the hatch, both of them now working frantically away in a tiny space that rolled and rocked constantly as the vehicle lurched along the desert road. Their medical Bergens had upended as they grabbed for equipment, and the contents were strewn over the floor.

  The mayhem in the cramped back of the ambulance was a memory that would always stay with her. ‘There were two of us with two Priority 1s [with urgent life-threatening injuries], and as we were being tossed about we kept knocking into the remains of the corporal’s arm hanging limply down by his side.’ But the bigger problem was the sergeant, whose mouth was filled with blood. Every time Si suctioned it out with a handheld vacuum pump, it just filled again. All efforts to ventilate the dying man simply produced more blood; his chest sank lower and lower as his lungs refused to fill. Si shouted at him to try and jolt him and bring him back, but he seemed beyond help by now, in another place. The medic kept trying nonetheless, hoping beyond hope.

  All of a sudden the ambulance braked hard and swerved, throwing Holly over Si’s back and on to the head of one of the patients. Outside, an Iraqi car had tried to cut up the ambulance. Other locals were hurling rocks at it and, in the driving seat, Jay was crashing the wheel from side to side to avoid them. ‘We had Warriors escorting us in the front and back,’ Holly recalled, ‘but it was a pretty hostile situation. In the back we were being thrown around, slipping on blood, clinging on as best we could while still trying to treat our patients.’

  She tried to get another tourniquet on the corporal to stop the bleeding from the stump of his arm. ‘He screamed out in agony and asked me for something for the pain.’ He had already had a morphine jab, so she reached for the Entonox gas-and-air machine and handed him the mask to put over his face. She wasn’t thinking straight. Both his arms were out of action, and he couldn’t take it from her. She had to hold it in place for him. He spat it away, complaining that nothing was coming through the tube. She soothed him, telling him the cylinder was cold and the gas would soon kick in as it warmed up. In truth, she knew his wounds were so severe that Entonox was unlikely to make much difference. She rolled him on to his side to ease his pain and stop him screaming. ‘There wasn’t anything more I could do for him.’

  After what seemed like hours but in reality was minutes, they arrived at the Shatt al-Arab Hotel, and medics were tugging at the doors to get at the casualties. Sergeant Jones’s stretcher was hauled out first, Si still at his side, leaning over and trying to respirate him. A doctor examined him for vital signs. There were none. After a few minutes, he called it – dead on arrival. The priority shifted to the corporal, who was very much alive, alert and chatty, though incoherent from the amount of pain relief he had had. With his arms a complete mess, a line was put into a vein in his foot, and Holly held up the bag as life-saving fluid drained into him. Another medic finally fixed on the tourniquet she had been unable to manage in the ambulance. The wounded soldier huddled under a blanket, but Holly could tell he would make it.

  Next to him, though, lay the lifeless body of his platoon commander. The sergeant’s mouth was open after all the work that had been done on his airways, but his eyes were closed. Holly watched as his dog tags were removed from around his neck. ‘I was in a state of shock, numbed,’ she remembered. She looked at him, registering his face in full for the first time. He had been a keen amateur boxer, an Aston Villa supporter, father of a five-year-old boy he had hoped one day to take to see his favourite football team play. He was funny, energetic and liked and respected by his colleagues. Holly discovered all this about him later. He was unforgettable to her in a different way. ‘In my mind I can still see him. I’d seen dead people before, a mate who was killed in a car crash, but this was different. It was a sad image – the reality of death, I suppose. Here was someone who’d been full of life, but now the life had gone. That’s what I saw in his face. The reality of what we were doing struck home. I felt a huge sadness, and a let-down at losing him after everything we had been through.’

  The loss was intensely personal to her, her feelings towards this dead man she had never known strangely possessive. She was changing, taking off her bloodstained trousers and body armour, which would be kept as forensic evidence of what had happened, and stowing them in a plastic bag, when she saw some soldiers sauntering past the resuscitation room where his body lay beneath a blanket. They glanced in, and she quickly jumped up and shut the door to protect his privacy.

  Later that evening, a helicopter came to ferry the body to Shaiba, and the men of his regiment lined up for that sad – and increasingly frequent – ceremony of escorting the fallen to the landing site. Jonah Jones was the ninety-eighth British soldier to die in the Iraq conflict in the two and a half years since the invasion of March 2003. The toll would climb into three figures soon enough. The padre walked ahead of the ambulance, the sergeant’s comrades at his side. ‘They were all friends of his, and I could see the pain on their faces,’ Holly recalled. ‘It was awful.’ A piper stood by, but his last lament was lost, drowned out by the noise of the helicopter, its motors kept running for fear of attack. It was paramount that one death should not be the cause of more slaughter.

  For weeks afterwards, the events of that traumatic day would run through Holly’s head when she tried to sleep. Her troubled thoughts would not leave her alone, until she took the padre’s advice and wrote them down in meticulous detail. This laid the ghost, and she began sleeping again, her mind at rest. But the events were never forgotten. She had, as she later acknowledged, grown up that day. ‘I took my job as medic and soldier a lot more seriously afterwards.’

  *

  A little over six months later, nineteen-year-old Michelle Norris, a private in the RAMC, did her growing up in the back of a Warrior armoured vehicle in the town of Al-Amarah as British forces in Iraq engaged in a rare pitched battle. A night-time operation to seek out and destroy stockpiles of weapons
turned into a full-on confrontation with the Mahdi army, as hundreds of fighters surrounded the patrol. It was more than enough action even for a rugby-playing tomboy who had always been mad about the military. ‘I remember sitting on my dad’s knee watching old war films. We’d have Battle of Britain on and knew it so well we’d say the words before the actors did. And the next morning I would wake up thinking, “I want to be a soldier, I want to do all that.” ’ She had first planned to join the Royal Artillery but, with both parents working in a hospital and her brother in the St John Ambulance, she had a natural interest in medical matters. ‘I suppose it was inevitable that I’d choose the RAMC,’ she said.3 She volunteered for Iraq as soon as she could. ‘I joined the army to see and do things I wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to experience for myself.’

  She was a medic with C company of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment when they went into Al-Amarah on the night of 11 June 2006 in response to a spate of recent attacks. Sitting nervously inside a Warrior alongside the combat troops, all tooled up, fired up and waiting for the order to dismount, she could hear the reports flooding in over the radio net as contact after contact was joined in the town. The thought of what a rocket-propelled grenade or a bomb might do to them was difficult to get out of her mind as they kept watch through the long, dark night, ‘wondering when you’re going to get hit’. Outside, the guns of two hundred insurgents cracked non-stop. But then, just as it was getting light, they were ordered to go to the aid of another Warrior, which was bogged down in a ditch. A hostile crowd was surrounding it and edging closer every minute. As Michelle’s team arrived on the scene, they were hit by a stream of bullets. Rounds ‘pinged and dinged’ off the metal sides, and the turret was taking a pasting. Inside it, the vehicle commander, Sergeant Ian Page, very much Michelle’s mentor and a father figure she confided in, was hit in the face. He had been standing with his head out of the turret and his rifle up, scanning round for targets. An incoming bullet struck his rifle and ricocheted into his cheek.

  She shouted up to find out if he was OK, but there was no reply. She tried to get to him and tugged at the door of the internal cage that separates the cabin from the bottom of the turret and allows it to revolve freely. It wouldn’t open. She tried again, desperate now to get up to the wounded sergeant. But the door stayed jammed. ‘I realized the only way I could reach Ian was to get out of the vehicle and up on to the top of it.’ She yelled to the driver to stop, then pushed her way past the other soldiers inside the Warrior, opened the back door and jumped. ‘Be careful!’ a voice called out to her, but she was already gone, out into the heart of a raging battle, rockets and grenades exploding all around her. The enemy sniper who had picked off Page spotted her immediately, and she came under fire straight away. Others joined in, four more gunmen targeting the slight, girlish figure now clambering up the side of the Warrior and over its roof towards the commander’s hatch. She got to the top of the turret and peered down. ‘Pagey was looking up at me, with this massive hole in his face. There was blood everywhere, and he was in a lot of pain. I could see the fright in his eyes.’ What she couldn’t see was an exit wound for the bullet and, though it had in fact gone all the way through him and out the other side, she had to assume for now that it was still inside his head – ‘another complication’, as she put it mildly later. It might be in the back of his throat and obstructing his airway, or in his brain. ‘I just didn’t know.’

  She realized there was nothing much she could do from the top of the vehicle. She also realized, for the first time, that she herself was in mortal danger, that the bullets cracking around her head were meant for her. Time had stood still. She had been out in the open for three, maybe four, minutes, but to her it had seemed like seconds. Now, real time resumed with a jolt as a bullet smashed into the radio mounting a few inches from her. Then the gunner’s hand came out of the turret and dragged her inside, next to the bleeding Page. She remembered thinking, ‘What do I do now?’, and she must have said it out loud, because the sergeant, who had spoken not a word so far, mumbled through teeth gritted in pain, ‘Traverse the turret.’ The gunner swung the turret, which unjammed the cage door, and the soldiers in the back pulled them through into the rear cabin. Now she had a little bit of room to get to work.

  The Warrior took off, aiming for the nearest helicopter landing site. Crouching in the back, Michelle applied a field dressing to Page to try to staunch the blood. ‘I knew I couldn’t give him morphine for the pain because it’s not allowed with a head wound. It affects breathing and blood pressure and can make things worse. So I checked his vital signs, his pulse, his respiration, his pupil dilation, the colour of his skin.’ This wasn’t easy. ‘There’s not a lot of light in the back of a Warrior. It’s usually pitch black, but some was coming in from one of the top-cover hatches. There was also a glow from a small red light.’ She peered at the patient, and he looked OK, ‘considering’. But it was hard for her to tell. He was her first real casualty, and her first gunshot wound, ‘so I had nothing to compare it with’. She talked to him to keep him awake and told him she needed to get fluids in him to make up for the loss of blood. ‘He pulled away and grimaced. He made it clear he didn’t fancy a line being put into him. But the important thing was that he’d understood me.’ His response convinced her that, if nothing else went wrong, he was going to make it.

  By now, they were at the landing site, and the evacuation helicopter was arriving. The sergeant was on a stretcher and away in minutes. Michelle briefed the medic taking over and stood back as the chopper lifted off. Then she climbed back into the Warrior and, as the citation for the Military Cross she was subsequently awarded put it, ‘immediately and without hesitation returned to the battle’. She remembered sitting in the back of the Warrior as it continued on its patrol through the streets of Al-Amarah and worrying if she could and should have done more. ‘I got myself quite worked up, with all sorts of stuff going through my head. What if he dies? What about his poor wife and parents?’

  This was still in her mind when the action finally wound down and she returned to camp. It was the medic’s job to wash out the blood and gore in the Warrior, but a kindly sergeant major, realizing what she had been through, stood her down. Some of the men were ordered to do it instead. But she insisted on doing her bit. ‘The lads tried to stop me, but I wanted to do it. I couldn’t just sit around. At that stage I didn’t know whether Pagey would survive, and I knew I’d just break down if I had nothing to do. So we cleaned it out.’ The citation for her award also recognized her mental toughness – something not always fully appreciated in medics – for carrying out ‘this psychologically difficult task, even on being told that someone else would do it’.

  It was a while before she heard that Page had come through an operation and was fine and making good progress. The doctor who brought her this news had no doubt that she had saved his life. ‘If it wasn’t for you getting to him when you did and doing what you did, he would have died,’ he told her. Michelle broke down and cried. To her embarrassment, she was the hero of the hour. ‘People kept coming up to me and shaking my hand. But I was only doing my job.’ She was a hero back home too, as the first woman ever to be awarded the MC, which was presented to her by the Queen. ‘Her total disregard for her own personal safety to save the life of a comrade showed incredible bravery, particularly for a soldier so young and inexperienced,’ read the citation. ‘The bravest girl in the army’ was how one newspaper described her.’ She was ‘gobsmacked’. ‘Lots of people did far braver things and didn’t get medals. Look at Pagey. He had exposed himself by standing up in his turret and letting them shoot at him. How brave is that?’

  The greater reward came when she returned from Iraq to Germany and was queuing at the barracks to hand back her body armour to the stores. ‘I heard someone say, “Cheers, Pagey,” and I realized he was working there in the Quartermaster’s office. I walked in, and he dropped his book and said, “Private Norris!”, and he walked over and gave
me a big hug and a kiss and said, “Thank you.” I had tears in my eyes.’

  *

  As the military demands in Iraq increased and the dangers grew, so more and more young people were rapidly trained up as combat medics. A few months behind Michelle Norris in the intensive pre-deployment course at the military medical training centre at Keogh Barracks in Hampshire was the vivacious Eleanor Dlugosz, a nineteen-year-old of unusual talents and high spirits. Known as Ella or ‘DZ’, she was a long-haired blonde who loved bubble baths and ball gowns – and action, plenty of it. As an energetic schoolgirl growing up in the English countryside, she rode horses, fished and went shooting. She was feisty and demanding – but not naughty enough to make the final selection for Brat Camp, the Channel 4 reality-TV programme that puts out-of-control kids through the rigours of wilderness training in America. She had applied because she wanted to be on the television, and begged her mother to exaggerate her faults – ‘I promise I’ll be good if you tell them I’m really really bad!’ – to give her a chance. She got as far as the final twenty.