On a wing & a prayer - U.S. Army "Dustoff" Medevac Crews risk it all to save their battle buddies

US ARMY DUSTOFF MEDEVAC Flight saves a wounded Marine in Sangin....The pictures show Lance Cpl. Blas Trevino from 1st Battalion, 5th Marines whose ordeal is detailed below.

These men & women are the heroes who fly into a hail of bullets, risking all to save a wounded battle buddy in Afghanistan's most dangerous places. No words can praise them well enough.

Bravo Zulu !!

Lucky Charms and Bullet Holes -- Flying Medevac
June 17, 2011
Associated Press by Anja Niedringhaus

"We got another mission," the message from U.S. Army medic Sgt. Josef Campbell read.

I jotted back: "Where?"

"Sangin, hot landing zone, Marines under fire, one is injured."

Southern Afghanistan remains a stronghold of the Taliban, and Sangin is a hotly contested district. The spring fighting season is now under way. That means more soldiers wounded by gunfire and bombings. And more work for the medics of the "Dustoff" helicopters.

As we approached Sangin, I saw an Afghan woman hanging her laundry inside the yard of her house. The tranquility of the scene helped me relax.

That sense of calm lasted just a few moments.

Dust, mud and grass churned up in front of us as the Black Hawk landed.

Campbell, 35, of Juniper, Idaho, reached out to open the door. Then gunfire erupted.

I heard a metallic sound and realized the helicopter had been hit. The pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Fink, quickly pulled the helicopter's nose toward the sky. All I could see in front of us were trees and power lines.

"If we are going to crash. I don't want to see it," I thought. My eyes shut, I held onto my seat belt.

I opened my eyes. We hadn't crashed. Slowly, the helicopter gained altitude and rose to safety.

We cruised slowly as Fink, 40, of Spring Hills, Kansas, and another pilot, Chief Warrant Office 2 Niel Steward, 34, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, checked the helicopter to make sure it could still maneuver. It could.

Only one thing rushed through my mind: "Please, please, just let us get out of here until that firefight down on the ground ends." But of course I didn't say that out loud.

After 15 minutes, I realized we would return to the same spot. As I looked at Campbell, I noticed his extraordinary level of concentration. He adjusted his gloves, reached for his assault rifle and then peered out of his open window.

I kept trying to find my lucky charms in my pockets.

The helicopter touched down right where we took fire only minutes earlier. The big side door slid open. I reached for my camera, feeling better because I could concentrate on something else.

Campbell jumped out first. He looked around. Neither of us could see the Marines. Suddenly, a Marine jumped up from a ditch nearby, one hand on his stomach and the other holding rosary beads.

The Marine sprinted toward us, turning around to wave to the others that he could make it to the helicopter. Another Marine tried to catch up to help him, but the injured Marine, Lance Cpl. Blas Trevino from 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, ran so fast he made it to the helicopter first.

Trevino latched onto Campbell in a desperate hug.

"You have made it! You have made it!" Campbell shouted over the whine of the idling helicopter.

Trevino collapsed on a stretcher, exhausted. He lifted his head to scream: "Yes, I have made it!"

As the helicopter lifted off again, the medics began treating Trevino for a gunshot wound to his stomach. During the 10-minute flight, Trevino kept praying while clutching his rosary beads. He gave us thumbs-up signal. He would survive the wound.

We landed at Forward Operating Base Edi outside Sangin but still in Helmand province. Medics carried Trevino into a hospital tent.

Meanwhile, Fink and Stewart walked around the helicopter, looking for damage.

Gunfire had struck five times in the tail. One bullet passed barely a third of an inch (1 centimeter) from the hydraulic system powering the huge helicopter. Another went through the metal near the fuel tank.

The two men took off their bulletproof vests.

"That was pretty close," they agreed.

Nineteen soldiers make up the U.S. Army "Dustoff" unit. The unit, based out of Landstuhl, Germany, operates from a gravel runway in Helmand province. The soldiers use plastic bags for toilets.

Most of their supplies, like food and water bottles, is dropped by parachute every other day from a plane. Marines run out of the camp to collect them, taking care not to step on land mines.

After a year in Afghanistan, members of the unit will head home with their memories. Spc. Jenny Martinez's voice grew soft as she recounted treating a Marine who stepped on an explosive and lost both of his legs.

She held his hand all the way to the field hospital.

"He didn't want to let me go," said Martinez, 24, of Colorado Springs, Colorado. But "I had to leave because we had another mission

US medics brave fire to save lives in Afghanistan

On this holiday weekend, while all at home worry about traffic, bad weather, gas prices, the 2012 elections, etc., a few brave medics look after those at "The Tip Of The Spear "

The MEDIC is the one the Warriors count on and they respond to the tough places where men & women in uniform need help as minutes mean saved lives...and because of their actions, there is one less family that needs to hear bad news today.



US medics brave fire to save lives in Afghan war
AP By KEVIN FRAYER, Associated Press

FORWARD OPERATING BASE EDINBURGH, Afghanistan – U.S. Army medic Sgt. Jaime Adame hauled open the door and lunged from the helicopter into a cloud of dirt and confusion.

He could hear bursts of incoming fire above the thumping rotor blades. Somewhere in the billowing red smoke that marked the landing zone and the choking dust whipped up by the medevac chopper was a cluster of Marines pinned down by heavy fire, and one of them was bleeding badly.

The problem for Adame was that he did not know where.

Adame had dropped into "hot L-Zs" before but this one was especially thick with commotion. Every second of indecision mattered, so he just ran, knowing any direction was dangerous. Only then did the cloud clear enough to bring into view the blurred outline of several Marines' boots peeking out of the vehicle they were taking cover under.

"The fear I have never lost," said Adame, who's from Los Angeles. "It's absolutely risky ... and it will definitely get a lot more dangerous."

With the spring fighting season under way in Helmand province in Afghanistan's volatile south, the medics, crew chiefs and pilots with the U.S. Army's "Dustoff" medevac unit expect a rising number of casualties. Coalition troops are seeing stepped-up attacks, the use of complex weapons systems like multiple-grenade launchers and the continuing plague of improvised explosive devices on the battlefield.

By the war's blunt calculation, the worsening hostilities on the ground mean more medevac flights to ferry the wounded. For an emboldened insurgency, that equals opportunity. Increasingly they are targeting the medevac choppers as they swoop in for a rescue.

"It is kinda the wild, wild West," said pilot Lt. Terry Hill of Kellyville, Oklahoma, the senior officer at Forward Operating Base Edi. "In the back of your mind as a pilot you know that you will most likely be shot at or hit."

The Black Hawk helicopters Hill and other medevac pilots fly are unarmed, though they are always accompanied by at least one other aircraft that is. The "Dustoff" helicopters are distinguished with the emblem of the Red Cross and under international law are supposed to be off-limits to enemy fire.

Afghanistan's insurgents make no distinction.

On one recent medevac run, as the helicopter navigated a firefight to set down in a small courtyard, a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a compound exploded in the air just behind the helicopter. The pilot quickly aborted the approach. Ground units called in air support, and attack helicopters riddled insurgent positions with heavy caliber machine gun fire.

Within minutes, the medevac chopper made a second attempt at landing to rescue a critically wounded Marine who had sustained a gunshot wound near his spine.

On another mission, insurgents fired several rounds from an assault rifle into the belly of the helicopter and its rotor blades.

"They seem to want us to get killed, which is surprising because we rescue everybody, including them.," said Chief Warrant Officer Michael Otto of Irvine, California.

The medevac doesn't discriminate between the war's wounded. Beyond coalition and Afghan soldiers, helicopters and medics also pick up injured Afghans, especially children. They often act as an ambulance service ferrying ill and injured Afghans from remote villages to coalition medical facilities. Enemy fighters are evacuated from the battlefield and treated as well.

With the sound of explosions shaking the air, Adame raced to find the wounded Marine. His comrades carried him on a stretcher from the dusty chaos to the chopper and Adame and his crew chief swiftly set to work.

Cpl. Andrew Smith was suffering a life-threatening arterial bleed from a shrapnel wound. His boots were sliced from his feet with a seat belt cutter. He was losing blood at an alarming rate. The medics focused only on stabilizing the young corporal; there was no time to think about the danger they had just faced.

"If one of those grenades hit us as we're taking off or coming in to land that's close to 17,000 pounds of steel, and hydraulic fluid, and flammables," Adame said. "Falling out of the sky in one of those things isn't going to be pretty no matter how you look at it."

Smith remarkably survived and is recovering at a military hospital in Maryland.

It's those successes that give the "Dustoff" crews motivation to plunge back onto the battlefield.

"It's all about saving a human life," said Chief Warrant Officer Joe Rogers of Russellville, Kentucky, the pilot of the helicopter that was hit by assault rifle fire. "And it's definitely worth the risk."