Battle Field Angels (32 page)

After spending about fifteen minutes with a wounded soldier, most experienced corpsmen knew whether or not he would survive. They called it “going intimate” with the wounded man, assessing and treating his most serious injuries, staying close to him, monitoring his condition, and watching for complications.

Doc Leo quickly learned that the most deadly enemy lay hidden under his feet: improvised explosive devices. Insurgents had looted the nation’s armories of an estimated 250,000 tons of weapons and supplies when the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. They tied two to five one-hundred-pound artillery shells together with a battery-powered detonator and buried these IEDs under unpaved roads. Sometimes they hid them under chunks of concrete or trash or inside the bellies of dead animals. They posted a lookout up to seventy-five yards away, and when a convoy of Marine Humvees passed over the IED, a garage door opener or cell phone triggered an explosion that shredded steel and bone. IEDs that included a gasoline-and-sugar mixture coated Marines with fuel that clung to their skin as it burned.

In past wars, artillery fired one or two ridges away from the target was not particularly precise. But in Iraq, artillery shells exploded directly underneath the Marines with deadly accuracy. More than seventy-five pounds of shrapnel in a hundred-pound shell the size of a small trash receptacle rocketed out of the ground at 23,000 feet per second. If two or three shells were wired together, the impact was far greater.

The Marines who had escaped sniper fire and IEDs on patrols returned to Camp Snake Pit drenched in sweat, their muscles burning with fatigue in the one-hundred-degree heat. But before they headed for a shower, dry clothes, a bottle of Gatorade, and something to eat, most stopped to clean, organize, and stow their equipment. “Weapon, gear, body—in that order,” their drill instructors had screamed at them.

Corpsmen monitored the soldiers’ health needs, distributing medication and treating heat rash inflicted by flak jackets. Constant quizzing between corpsmen about triage techniques and emergency care protocols often surprised the Marines who marveled at their corpsmen’s continued dedication in the field. That diligence also reassured the combat Marines whose survival might depend upon their corpsmen. Corpsmen maintained a subculture within the battalion that inspired heartfelt respect among the infantry who depended on them.

At 0300 hours on October 4, 2005, Lima Company received orders to mount a search patrol as part of a one-day neighborhood sweep codenamed Operation Bowie. Lima Company’s 4th platoon Marines assembled their gear at daybreak. As “go hour” approached, each soldier prepared for the mission in his own way. Leoncio became quiet. He checked his medical bag and then checked it again. Some Marines smoked cigarettes or packed a pinch of Copenhagen inside their lower lip. Others closed their eyes, unaware that they rocked slightly. Corporal Neil Frustaglio listened to Metallica on his headset.

“We’re clear. Roll,” said Quinn, commanding officer of Lima Company.
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As they headed for their Humvee, Lieutenant Matt Hendricks said to Leoncio, “You’re the angel on my shoulder.”

“Yeah, you’re mine, too, sir,” Leoncio replied.
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Lima Company rolled out of Camp Snake Pit at 0700 and headed south on Central Avenue toward Ramadi’s ramshackle Humara District. Through the night, advance patrols had destroyed seventeen IEDs along the four-lane boulevard, but once the 4th platoon reached the southern end of Central Avenue, they were on their own. Unsecured dirt roads, the lack of an American presence, and the absence of a functional Iraqi government structure made Humara an ideal staging area for insurgents intent on disrupting the national elections that were less than two weeks away.

Eleven Humvees in Lima Mobile One and ten Humvees in Lima Mobile Two encircled and slowly patrolled through a neighborhood looking for anything out of the ordinary: drums of flammable materials; a vehicle that seemed out of place; caches of ammunition, perhaps buried in open fields. It was an agonizingly slow and tedious patrol. The Marines knew that insurgents traced their movements by phoning each house on a street. When a home’s occupants didn’t answer, the insurgents knew the Marines were nearby.

Andrew Bedard, a young Marine from Montana, drove the lead Humvee of Mobile Two onto a dirt road that the Marines called Main Street. Matt Hendricks sat beside him, with Leoncio and Brad Watson, the executive officer of Lima Company, in the two back seats. Shawn Seeley was in the four-foot gun turret above them. Their Humvee had been reinforced with additional armor after the underbellies of earlier models had proven vulnerable to IEDs. Still, the five Marines knew that their Humvee was designed more for mobility than survivability or firepower.

Seconds later, the Humvee disappeared in a dusty white bloom of desert sand that instantly turned gray-black. The massive explosion was followed by another deafening detonation. The initial blast between the first and second Humvees left a sprawling roadbed crater. The second blew up under the lead Humvee, and launched the six-ton armored vehicle into a soaring back flip. Landing upside down in a five-foot-wide crater, the Humvee’s rooftop gun turret was buried in the sand.

As the Humvee’s cabin filled with smoke, dust, and heat, the Marines inside heard a loud ringing in their ears. Diesel fuel flowed into the compartment from a ruptured fuel tank.

We have got to get out of here before this starts to burn
, thought Brad Watson as he crouched, dazed, on the roof’s roll bar inside the upside down Humvee.
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As the dust cleared, he saw the passenger door, unmarked. It opened to his touch, as if nothing had happened.

Only twenty-four minutes into the mission and less than twenty yards from the secured asphalt boulevard, commanding officer Rory Quinn instinctively knew he had lost Marines. He didn’t know how many of his men had been injured or whether the enemy was about to ambush his crippled patrol.

“We have a KIA and need help,” squawked the radio in Quinn’s Humvee.
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Mobile Two Marines leaped out of their vehicles and raced toward the lead Humvee. Some swung their weapons at the cinderblock buildings along the dirt road, expecting to see snipers. The lead vehicle resembled a horribly gutted animal that had been left belly-up and half-buried in the desert sand. Fuel and oil pooled at the bottom of the crater and ran into the open turret that had been driven into the ground.

Neil Frustaglio spotted Brad Watson helping Matt Hendricks away from the lead vehicle. A chunk of muscle the size of a golf ball hung from Hendricks’s thigh. Watson struggled under the weight as he carried the injured man to a nearby Humvee. He made sure the pistol on his right leg was free in case he needed it, believing the enemy might open fire on the bloodied Marines.

Frustaglio ran to the other side of the mangled Humvee, looking for the other Marines. He ran headlong into a bloodied corpsman. The massive Humvee pinned Leoncio’s leg to the sand. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Shock gripped his ashen, dusty face.

“I can’t get you out, Doc!” Frustaglio yelled at Leoncio. “Look, I’m going to pull up and you gotta pull yourself out. Okay? Ready? Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”
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Frustaglio didn’t wait for an answer as he pulled up on the still-hot engine compartment. The burly Marine rocked the overturned Humvee a few inches to the side. Leoncio used his arms and elbows to pull himself out from under the armored vehicle.

“Oh, shit.” Frustaglio looked down at the few strings of tendons that kept Leoncio’s right foot attached to a shattered knee. Hot steel had peppered the corpsman’s face. His belly had taken the brunt of a devastating concussion and a fistful of shrapnel. A thigh bone was badly broken. While Marines circled the wreckage, scanned the desert, and set a perimeter defense, Frustaglio knelt next to Leoncio. Somehow the corpsman ignored his own pain and focused on triage for everyone who had been injured.

“Okay, Frag,” said Leoncio, calling him by his nickname. “Get out the tourniquet. That’s it. Now slide it up to about here,” said Leoncio, touching his grizzly thigh and gritting in pain. “That’s it. Good. Now twist. Tighter. Tighter! Cinch … okay that’s it. Now tie it off!”
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When Kurtis Bellmont—a Marine with emergency medical training as a combat lifesaver—arrived, Leoncio asked about the others in his vehicle. Bellmont knew the wounded corpsman would sacrifice his mangled leg trying to crawl to other wounded Marines to treat them if he knew any lay nearby.

“Right now, Doc, everybody’s gone [to another Humvee for evacuation]. We need to get you out of here,” said Bellmont.

“Am I going to be all right?” Leoncio asked.

“Yeah, but your foot’s gone.”

“Okay. I’m good to go.” Only then did Leoncio allow his fellow Marines to gently pick him up and carry him back to the Humvee medevac where Watson had brought Hendricks. A second later, another Marine delicately lifted the remainder of Leoncio’s leg into the Humvee.
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Meanwhile, Quinn had reached the lead vehicle within two minutes of the IED explosions. Where were the other Marines who had been inside? The driver, Andrew Bedard, lay in the desert about twenty feet away. He had been blown clear and killed instantly, the blast severing both feet. Blistering heat had cauterized the amputation wounds, leaving almost no trace of blood. Fine desert talc covered his strangely placid face. He looked asleep. The three-hundred-pound driver’s door rested a few feet away from Bedard.

Gunner Shawn Seeley was nowhere to be seen. But his strangled, muffled voice could be heard—barely—from the overturned Humvee. Seeley was crammed inside the half-buried turret. Somehow he had survived a 180-degree flip from a massive detonation while careening from one side of the steel turret to the other. Once the Marines located Seeley, hopes rose that maybe they hadn’t suffered a second death that morning.

Corpsmen on Iwo Jima treated badly wounded soldiers who suffered multiple injuries from enemy artillery that included flash burns, contact burns, and internal injuries caused by hot, penetrating shrapnel.
(USMC)

Trained flight nurses significantly improved the survival rate of severely wounded soldiers who were evacuated from remote Pacific islands aboard aircraft. Flight nurses not only received medical training, they also had to pass physical endurance tests.
(USMC)

Iwo Jima corpsman Francis Pierce had been a Grand Rapids police officer for three years when President Harry Truman presented him the Medal of Honor. Like most heroic corpsmen and medics, Pierce lived the remainder of his life largely in anonymity.
(U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine & Surgery Archives)