Nov 5, 2008 10:40 pm US/Pacific
Midnight Mission: To Afghanistan
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE (CBS13) ―
Every day injured U.S. troops are pulled from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of them are missing limbs, others barely cling to life.
Those troops are rescued by a system put into place by necessity -- medical machinery that saves the lives of people who may have perished in years past. These wounded men and women are rescued every day and Travis Air Force Base plays a big role.
Every Tuesday at least one six-person team at Travis packs for a week-long trip to evacuate those wounded soldiers. This mission: To fly into Afghanistan on a C-17 cargo plane and fly wounded troops out.
"We're there to give them whatever support they need," says Chuck Cummings, one of the two load masters on our C-17. Chuck and his colleague, Jenn Lepore, are in charge of everything and everyone loaded on and off the aircraft -- including the patients and medical equipment.
"The load master does the weight and balance of the aircraft," says Chuck, "to make sure it flies within limits. We make sure everything is tied down safely. We ensure the safety of the passengers that we carry on the airplane." Put simply, Chuck says "we load cargo and we tie it down."
From Travis, we fly to Andrews Air Force Base in Virginia. Without clearance, photography and videography are forbidden. This base is home base for much of the Air Force's missions.
As we land, you can see housed in hangars and on the tarmac multiple versions of the president's Air Force One. Security is tight here, yet it's only a stopover for our next destination.
From Andrews we fly to Europe, landing in Ramstein, Germany. That's where an entire medical team boards. The team quickly transforms this C-17 from a cargo plane into a hospital, constructing enough beds to transport wounded troops out of the war zone.
"They'll take them off the sidewalls of the airplane," says Chuck, describing the L-shaped aluminum racks attached to the hull of the plane just above eye level. "They connect them into these holes [on the floor] in the airplane."
Once the medical crew has finished converting the plane, the C-17 crew preps to fly into Afghanistan. At night. Gordon Rowan from Fairfield is one of the three pilots on this mission.
"The night vision goggles just help us keep covert going into airfields, and helps us be sneaky. Stealthy," say Gordon explaining how they fly with almost no light. "Every time we go in there it's not always a standard arrival."
Most would consider nothing about this flight standard. Everything on the plane is prepped including our CBS13 crew. As a precaution both Brandi Hitt and producer/photographer Dave Manoucheri had to wear flack jackets and Kevlar helmets. They're heavy, about twenty pounds.
That's just for us; consider the soldiers themselves, wearing this body armor, weapons, and the packs that they carry that weigh anywhere from thirty to fifty pounds as part of their daily regimen if things are hostile.
Windows on a C-17 are a circular, almost porthole type of spyglass that looks out from the inside of the cargo area. As a result, circular shields with handles on them are fitted into the portholes to make sure no light escapes.
We are not allowed to shoot from the cockpit so as to not give away any details of our flight path into Bagram.
The plane comes in fast, taking corkscrew turns and heading into the air base on a path so steep we notice an American flag that is attached at the top of a box of medical equipment is now flying almost horizontal, as if a stiff breeze is pushing through the cabin. In reality, it's the G-forces pulling on everything and everyone on the plane.
Yet nothing in the plane moves.
The loadmasters have weighed, balanced, and secured the gear to the point that nothing shifts, and it's clear why one mistake could result in either breakage or injury of someone on board the aircraft.
Unlike a commercial flight where the plane would circle and taxi for fifteen or twenty minutes, we're on the ground in Afghanistan in minutes. The back compartment of the plane opens and we're on the ground at Bagram Air Base.
It's midnight.
The crew, including Chuck Cummings and Jen Lepore, are armed. The first order of business is to offload all the equipment shipped from Germany for the Aeromedical Evacuation unit based here in Afghanistan. Until that's finished, no patients will be allowed on the plane.
Within just a few minutes what looks like a convoy of school buses is waved in. There are no seats inside these buses, however. Inside these buses are individual racks, anywhere from four to eight a bus. Almost like bunk beds the soldiers are in two rows on each side of the bus. The bottom row is anchored to the floor, the top row has metal hangars with eyelets on the bottom, made specifically to hold the wooden posts of gurneys so the men are able to ride fluidly in the bus.
Soldiers volunteer for the privilege to walk these wounded men into the plane. Air Force personnel, four to a side, grab hold of the gurney as it is passed from man to man to the back of the bus. One by one, the wounded are lowered and walked onto the plane.
"Prepare on the shoulders," is the call from each movement: bus to plane, plane to bed. "Prepare to rack . . . rack!" It's a mantra shouted by thirty-five-year old Kristen Zebrowski with the Air Evacuation Medical Team.
"Are you having any pain or discomfort," Kristen asks each of the soldiers in turn.
Kristen says it's an honor to be a part of this mission. People like her save hundred hurt in action, but she says it's not easy.
"I find the hardest thing is the kids are so young," said Kristen speaking between patients. "I mean, they look like they're in high school and a lot of them have traumatic injuries."
They've seen a lot of broken bones; blast wounds; head injuries. It's hard to imagine what these men and women have gone through. There is no differentiating rank, unit or even branch of the military on this plane. All are equal and the Air Force moves everyone that needs medical attention.
Jamie Binion, a thirty-five-year old soldier was one of those soldiers.
"There was no warning," says Jamie. "It was just boom." On his first tour, Jaime was hit with a rocket propelled grenade. Shrapnel blew through his leg.
"I crawled to the door and went to one of the vehicles we had parked outside to, you know, get better covered," he says. He was one of the few who made it out of the building. One of his friends wasn't so lucky.
"One of those people was my roommate," says Jaime about the casualties in this attack. "We became good friends. We had plans for when this was all over."
Gerry Patterson has a similar story. Just one month into his time in Afghanistan rockets were fired at his crew. They took shelter in a police chief's building.
"You know, as Americans we're invincible, right," he says. "Nobody can beat us. We were actually kind of joking about it, talking about why are they wasting all this money, they're never going to hit us. Usually they're not terribly accurate."
This time, however, the accuracy improved.
"There's a shell that fell short of where we're at," says Gerry. "The next one following that whizzed over our heads. The third one was a direct hit."
This was contrary to what several men had told when he arrived in Afghanistan. "Going back a couple days before, there were some infantry guys and they said if you can hear the rocket whistling you know you're safe because it flew overhead. That's not true. This one was coming in and I heard the whistle and I thought this one's gonna be close. Then it was like a loud pop, not so much an explosion."
That pop was because Gerry's eardrum had ruptured from the explosion. He says black smoke and dust were everywhere and he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. With his foot broken and blood pouring down his face, Gerry says two men across from him in the center of the room were killed instantly. Others lived but lost limbs.
But Gerry says he is not a hero. He says that term should be reserved for the medics and a man he met in basic training named Sergeant Slade because Slade save nine people that day. Gerry had met Slade weeks before they deployed to the Middle East.
"I joined up late with this outfit to come out here," says Gerry. "When I met my team in Ft. Lewis when were getting ready. Sgt. Slade, he's a big old farm boy, and I told him, 'Good, you're the man that's going to be carrying me off the battlefield."
This ex-marine, current reservist breaks down at this point because Slade did carry him off the battlefield.
"No more prophecies," says Gerry with tears streaming down his face.
Gerry, Jaime and the rest of the patients we picked up in Afghanistan endure the seven hour flight back to Germany. We spent just under two hours on the ground before heading back out, in the dark, to Landstuhl. There, the patients were placed on an exact copy of the buses we say at Bagram and bussed to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center for immediate treatment.
But this mission is far from over. The next day a larger number of injured troops board the C-17, bound for the U.S.
Jen Lepore quizzes the medical crew in Germany: "Are there twenty-six patients or twenty-five?" The numbers are important because critical care patients are making this trip. In fact, five of those twenty-five patients are in such critical condition they have special doctors, nurses and even respiratory technicians to make sure they make it on this leg of our journey - nine hours flying back to the United States.
"We have small portable modular equipment that's very similar to what's in an intensive care unit," says Colonel Christopher Dunn, a surgeon with the 349th Air Mobility Wing. "It's just that it's much smaller and can operate off batteries for a period of time if it needs to." Dunn says if they didn't have this there would be no way these patients would make it across the water.
Throughout the flight these five patients are surrounded by personnel because some are missing limbs, one even missing a part of his skull. In fact this particular patient had so much swelling in his brain that doctors had to remove a portion of his skull to reduce the pressure on his brain.
They sewed that piece of bone into his stomach cavity to keep the cells alive so it could be replaced when he gets back to the United States. Like the other four he's heavily sedated and won't remember any of this.
The crew and pilots of this full C-17 consider these men and women their most delicate cargo.
"Very delicate," says Gordon Roman, one of our pilots. "We try to make light landings into the airfield, we try to make it as smooth of a flight as possible."
Doing that requires following the latest flight data on a laptop computer carried in the cockpit of the aircraft -- on extremely long flights they even refuel in mid-air. Today, checking data from the Weather Service, they skirt a thunderstorm in the flight path back to Virginia.
From the cockpit you can see the growing anvil-shaped clouds and the black storm brewing underneath. It is a minor change in flight plan, but they go around the storm to reduce any possibility of turbulence for the patients in the belly of the plane below.
Finally, seven hours after takeoff, the plane touches down at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.
"We're bringing injured soldiers," says Chuck Cummings, our loadmaster. "It's very rewarding. It's an honorable mission that we get to take part in."
Once back on U.S. soil each patient is loaded onto yet another bus bound for another hospital and more treatment. Only this time, they're home.
"It's an honor just to see them going back to their families," says Gordon Roman. "After what they did just defending our nation and being on the ground out there and going through all the hardships seeing what they see out there."
The crew makes one last trip, this one back to Travis. It's Monday, and after six grueling days this mission is over. But tomorrow, another local team will volunteer: doctors; teachers; your neighbors; your friends will board another C-17. The faces will change, but the mission remains the same. They'll go to the same destinations: Iraq or Afghanistan, and help save more lives.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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