Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  But it was difficult to disguise the agitation of the young soldiers who were clustered round the wounded lance corporal, shocked by what they were witnessing. For some, it was the first time they had seen a casualty close up. One of them had the presence of mind to stem the bleeding by tying on a tourniquet improvised from a piece of cloth. Then ‘Tug’ Hartley arrived with Mark Wright and the rescue team from Athens, and took over, instantly shouldering the heavy burden of responsibility, seeing the relief in the other men’s faces that a medic had arrived and hoping he could conjure up the magic to justify their almost childlike faith in his healing powers. His presence reassured Hale too. ‘I was very relieved to see him. I remember him talking to me and putting me at ease.’ Exuding confidence was a large part of the medic’s armoury – acting swiftly, not panicking.

  Hartley took a Combat Application Tourniquet from his pack, wound the band round Hale’s leg, above the makeshift bandage already on it, then ratcheted the self-tightening windlass until the flow of blood stopped. Thank heavens for these latest tourniquets, which could be put on with just one hand. He inserted a cannula in Hale’s arm and began an intravenous drip of saline solution. The leg was shredded from the knee downwards, the ligaments and tendons dangling like so much offal on a butcher’s slab. ‘I could see his kneecap and into his thigh. The little finger on his right hand had also been hit by the blast and was partially missing.’ Hale was quiet – ‘chilled out’ – partly from the shock of his catastrophic injury, partly from the ampoule of morphine jabbed into him. The crisis seemed to have passed. Down there in the dust of that dried-up stream, two soldiers held Hale’s crumpled leg stable to ease the pain of the fracture, and slightly raised to stop the blood flowing down. Others put their ponchos above his head to shade him from the merciless midday sun.

  By now, ‘Tug’ had some professional help alongside him: his mate and fellow medic, Lance Corporal Alex Craig. Craig had been given a lift up to the top of Normandy by an American soldier in a four-wheel-drive jeep and then come hotfoot down the other side and straight into the minefield to where everyone was gathered around Hale. He knew the risk he was taking. ‘I tried to make sure I stood on firm rocks, but in the end you just have to get on with it.’4 ‘Tug’ was glad to see him. The last time they’d been together they had been chatting about home and friends, and licking their lips at the prospect of a beer or two together in a good old English pub. Now they were side by side, with a man’s life depending on their courage and skill. ‘With two of us there, it was better. We helped each other out, bounced ideas off each other, worked methodically as a team. He was my “wing-man” and I was his. And, apart from Stu losing his leg, there was no particular drama at this point, other than to get him out as quickly as possible and to an operating theatre to be sewn up.’

  To effect this, the rest of the rescue team were now busily at work plotting a route out of this deadly terrain, to safe and solid ground a dozen or so yards away, to where a helicopter could then be summoned to take Hale away. They picked out the route at great personal risk. With no specialist detection equipment and no time to wait for any to be brought, they lay flat on their belt buckles and inched their way forward, prodding the ground gingerly ahead of them and marking the way with tape and small flags. Fortunately, they were close to the edge of the minefield – or so they thought – and it didn’t take them long to mark out a safe exit line. Hale was lifted on to a stretcher and, with four softly treading bearers at each corner, and Hartley at the rear holding aloft the bag of IV fluid attached to his arm, he was ferried along this flag-lined corridor to be settled in comfort to wait for the helicopter. Once they reached this objective, Wright directed the rest of the platoon to follow behind, to withdraw from the riverbed and make their way back up the hill, as far away from this buried barbarism as possible.

  But minefields tend not to reveal all their deadly secrets quite so readily. Corporal Stuart Pearson had started out towards the hill, carefully following the footsteps of the stretcher party, when a loud explosion lifted him clean off his feet and sent his body ripping though the air. He sat where he fell, his left leg simply gone. ‘Oh shit, not me!’ he remembered thinking. ‘Why me?’5 ‘Tug’ Hartley heard the bang and felt the blast, looked up from the stretcher where he was treating Hale and saw Pearson thirty feet away on the ground, screaming in the agony of what medics would characterize in the dry language of their calling as ‘a traumatic amputation’. As Pearson gave vent to unimaginable pain, the rest of the platoon froze in their tracks. They had believed they were on the edge of the minefield but, clearly, they were still in the thick of it. The miracle was that more mines had not been triggered. The bigger miracle would be if they emerged with no more casualties. As it was, they felt as if they were in some sort of horror film, where no one was safe, where one by one they would fall to the mad axe-man.

  Craig was already at Pearson’s side, and Hartley stood up to go forward and help him. A shout stopped him. ‘Don’t fucking move,’ Craig called out. Hartley did as he was told. The realization hit him that he had, just seconds before, walked along that very stretch of ground while supervising Hale’s stretcher party. How had he missed the mine? How had it missed him? Perhaps he had trodden on it but it had not triggered, not then, waiting for the next man, for Stu Pearson. Were there more? Most certainly. Was anywhere safe? Not that he could see – not even the spot where he was standing. The same thought must have struck one of the soldiers in the party, because he began to scream, to panic. It looked as if he was about to run. Hartley barked an order, told him to stop, to sit down, to face the hill, away from the minefield and the terror gripping those men still stuck in it.

  Craig was leaning over Pearson and could see straightaway that his right leg had been blasted off below the knee. There were multiple wounds on his body, including to the groin, which seemed to cause the groaning Pearson most distress. ‘Typical bloke!’ Craig muttered to himself. He worked fast to put a tourniquet on the leg, then assessed the situation. ‘So that was two mines that had gone off, but we were coping. We just needed to get these guys out of here as quickly as possible.’ While Craig did what he could for the badly wounded Pearson, Wright made his way across the minefield with more morphine. With Pearson down, he assumed command and was directing operations. ‘He was so calm,’ one soldier recalled, ‘like he was on an exercise, as if it was just a drill.’6

  The reality was that all he or anyone could do was sit tight and wait for the helicopter to come and haul them out. The minutes dragged by, an eternity of tension and a growing sense of isolation. Ears strained for the Chinook, but the best part of an hour passed before they heard the sound of its engines echoing through the mountains. And there it was, hovering noisily overhead, and at last those on the ground dared to think the incident was about to end.

  Hartley looked up, saw the loadmaster’s thumbs-up from the door and waited for the cable to drop down so he could hook on his casualties and have them winched up to safety. No cable came. Instead, the Chinook picked up speed, flew past and then turned for a second approach, coming lower and lower, trying, the startled men below suddenly realized, to land. It was madness! In a minefield! Hartley was furious. ‘We’d radioed requesting a small helicopter with a winch, and they sent a huge Chinook without one.’ Wright was going ballistic, frantically trying to wave the helicopter away, shouting and swearing into his radio to those back at base to get the effing thing out of there. It was too late. As if in slow motion in some terrible car-crash movie, the helicopter came relentlessly on, the down-draught kicking up dust and sand, disturbing the top soil, threatening to pile pressure on those hair-trigger metal plates, to complete a circuit that would cost more limbs, or even lives.

  As its wheels touched the ground, the ramp came down at the back and the loadmaster was there again, waving at Hartley, a hundred yards away, to get his stretcher over there and on board. ‘I signalled, “No,” and then gave him the letters ATO for “Ammunition Technical Off
icer”, a mine-clearance team. I was holding my hands up above my head in the shape of an A and a T and an O, just like some idiot dancing along to the YMCA song.’

  Whether the loadmaster cottoned on, or whether Wright’s frantic radio calls had finally got the message through to base is unclear but, either way, those on board changed tack. The Chinook suddenly lifted off, prompting another huge surge of air on the fragile ground below. The platoon huddled against the blanket of dust that now enveloped them. Wright and Craig crouched down over Stu Pearson to shelter him from the wind. There was a bright flash. The intense downwash had churned up the ground, hurling stones into the air, and one had come down and detonated a mine.7 It exploded against Mark Wright’s body, shattering his right arm and peppering his chest and neck with shrapnel.

  Alex Craig collapsed too, choking and spluttering, blood draining from deep chest wounds. ‘Mark took most of the impact,’ he recalled.

  It just blew him away. But I was right next to him, and the blast caught me too. It ripped the shirt off my back. The noise and the dust were incredible, and the heat! My right side felt as if it was on fire. I realized immediately from my breathing that one of my lungs had collapsed and was filling with blood. I’d seen this happen to other people and I knew I was in a bad way. But I didn’t think I was going to die. I remember lying back and looking at everything unfolding around me and thinking, yeah, that’s now the third mine that’s gone off. It seemed pretty damn unreal… a very unlikely thing to be happening, to be honest.

  *

  As the dust cloud cleared and the Chinook disappeared out of sight, ‘Tug’ Hartley could hardly believe what he was seeing. Thirty feet away, Wright was slumped on the ground in a sitting position. And the sound that filled the air now empty of the screech of the helicopter was his scream of agony.

  Now there were four casualties, all with devastating injuries. And three of them were still lying where they had fallen, even deeper inside the minefield than he was.

  That’s when I made my mind up that I had to go across and treat them. There was no one else. I couldn’t see Alex – he had just disappeared before my eyes – and I knew it was down to me to do something. But I really didn’t want to cross that minefield, and for a split second I thought of picking up a rifle and shooting them, putting them out of their misery. It sounds mad, but I was desperate. I was thinking what would happen if I was the next one to tread on a mine. Then there would be no one to help them at all. Putting the lads, my mates, out of their pain seemed the only solution.

  The thought was no sooner in his head than discarded – though the memory of it, of what he contemplated doing, still haunts him. But his mind pulled itself back from the unthinkable. It was a good job it did. Alex Craig had come to and, though by rights he should have stayed where he was, he was being helped out of the riverbed and up the hill by another soldier. Mark Wright, his life-blood oozing away into the dust, was screaming for help, and the soldier nearest to him, Fusilier Andy Barlow, a machine-gunner attached to 3 Para, was trying to give him first aid, although the injuries were beyond anything a bandage could achieve. Hartley shouted out instructions to strap up what remained of the corporal’s arm, to try to staunch the loss of blood, but could get little sense out of the confused and shocked trooper. The medic stood there, frustrated amid the chaos, the yelling and the screaming, until he could hold back no longer, however crazy it was to walk into a death trap. ‘I thought, “Shit, I’m going to have to go over there.” I was the medic, I was the one expected to do something. In my head, I’d expect any soldier, whether a medic or not, to have done the same for me. It was a very conscious decision. They are British soldiers and they are part of my family. I was aware of the danger but I had to do it.’

  He stripped off his T-shirt – it was needed to make tourniquets – and picked up his medical Bergen. It had been under Hale’s legs, propping them up, but he had a more pressing use for it now. He slung it a yard into the minefield. Then, when it didn’t go bang, he jumped on to it, picked it up from under his feet, threw it another yard, jumped again, and so on. ‘In retrospect, it wasn’t a very safe method of clearing mines! There wasn’t much left in the Bergen, and it probably wasn’t heavy enough on its own to set off a mine anyway.’ But it was effective. He was halfway across to Wright, ‘when I looked back to where I’d come from and where I was going, and I realized it was my son’s first birthday tomorrow. What was I doing here?! I wanted to go back – but sod’s law says, if you try and go back, that’s when you’re going to get it, so I kept going forward.’ He had come ten yards and had another couple to go to reach the corporal when there was another loud explosion. Fusilier Andy Barlow had reached down to pick up a bottle of water, shifted his weight, boom! A mine went off beneath him. The already wounded Wright and Pearson were caught in the blast. Another soldier, Dave Prosser, nearby, and cutting up shirts to make tourniquets, was struck in the chest by metal shrapnel and stones. So too was Hartley, perched on his backpack.

  ‘The explosion lifted me off the ground and dumped me back down on my arse. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear. All I could see was a cloud of dust, and I couldn’t force any breath into my lungs. I believed I was dead. I was bleeding from my shoulder, and I remember thinking very clearly, “This is what it’s like to be dead.” But, if I was dead, then why did it hurt so much when I tried to breathe? I was thinking to myself, if I can stand up, I’ll know I’m not dead, I’m alive.’ Hartley pushed himself to his feet and surveyed the scene from hell emerging out of the dust settling around him.

  There was all this screaming and shouting going on, and people with limbs blown off. ‘Fuck me,’ I thought to myself. ‘How bad’s it going to get?’ And then, though I knew I hadn’t died, I was sure I was going to, that we all were. None of us were coming back from this, and all I could do was make everyone as comfortable as possible. So I just walked the last few steps to Mark, thinking whatever’s going to happen is going to happen and I can’t do anything to stop it. I was thinking about my family, but the immediate thing was to see what I could do for the lads in their last minutes, because they’re your family too. Thinking I was going to die was calming. It chilled me out, took away all the fear, because I knew it was going to happen.

  That peace of mind enabled Hartley to get on with his job, to complete what he firmly believed would be his final mission. He squatted down on the ground to examine Mark Wright’s injuries and strapped a CAT tourniquet round the stump of his arm. The left side of his chest was a mess and all he could do was pack it with some bandage. He could see the corporal’s knee was shattered too. He then drew his three casualties together into a triangle around him, their heads and feet touching each other. That way he could treat them without moving himself and avoid the risk of detonating another mine. He dosed Barlow and Pearson with morphine and showed them how to keep each other topped up. ‘That also helped me check their responsiveness.’ As time moved on, this became an increasing worry. He could see the light draining out of their eyes. He chatted away to them, trying to keep them alert – ‘I was just being their mum really’ – but in his own heart he believed he was doing little more than delaying the inevitable. There was no way they were coming out of that riverbed alive, and there was nothing anybody could do to change that.

  He tried to soothe an increasingly distraught Andy Barlow, now in great pain. The morphine wasn’t working (it later transpired he had an unusually high resistance to the drug and was virtually immune to it). The more agitated he became, the faster his heart beat, and the more he bled. Hartley had to shout over the soldier’s screams to explain to him why he needed to stay in control. Meanwhile, Pearson was slipping in and out of consciousness, and had to be kept from falling into a sleep that could all too soon be permanent. ‘I told him everything was going to be all right, but I didn’t really believe it myself.’

  Wright, more grievously wounded than any of them, with half his face blown away as well as all his other injuries, nonethe
less managed to keep himself going with a stream of wisecracks and conversation, telling ‘Tug’ how he was about to get married but that the wedding might have to be postponed for now. He joked about the insurance money they would all be able to get their hands on. The medic could see the gaping hole in the corporal’s neck. ‘He was thirsty and kept asking for something to drink, and I was pouring water into his mouth and watching it gush out of the side of his neck.’ They stayed in their tight huddle, the medic and his trio of casualties, in the middle of that minefield, as if in their own private prison.

  On the edge and up the hill, a growing line of would-be rescuers watched, unable to move forward to help for fear of more explosions and more mayhem. A helicopter with a winch was apparently on its way. Fifteen minutes, Hartley was told. When he asked again, it was still another fifteen minutes, and then another after that. ‘Tell the pilot to look out for a fat bloke in blue shorts,’ Hartley joked to the soldiers outside the minefield. ‘That’ll be me!’ They couldn’t miss him, either, because his exposed torso was going a bright and dangerous shade of red in the sun.

  Still there was no sound of engines approaching in the sky, and after a while Hartley stopped believing the chopper was ever going to come. That was when he too felt himself slipping away, the pain of his heat-seared lung, sunstroke, dehydration and sheer exhaustion all combining to tell his body to seek release in sleep. Time lost any meaning. He would look at his watch, thinking an eternity had passed, to find that only two minutes had elapsed. He would look again and see that a whole hour had gone by.