Attending the wounded in Afghanistan

US troops are in the second month of their push into southern Helmand Province in Afghanistan. The World’s Aaron Schachter is embedded with an army unit in southern Helmand and has the latest on the operation.

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark, this is The World. Taliban militants in Afghanistan issued a statement today, they threatened to disrupt crucial presidential elections scheduled for next month. The militants urged Afghans not to cast ballots in what the statement dismissed as an American process. The Taliban threat comes as US troops continue a major push into Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province. Meanwhile, the number of US and international casualties in Afghanistan has hit record highs in July. The World’s Aaron Schachter is embedded with an army unit in Helmand, whose job it is to get wounded troops out alive.

AARON SCHACHTER: Camp Dwyer is about as god-forsaken a place as most Americans would ever experience.  You can see nothing but flat desert for miles around, assuming you can see at all.  The talcum-powder-like dust sits on the ground in piles like slush after a snowstorm, and stepping in it produces the same slushy result. But as heavy as the dust is on the ground, even the slightest wind can create a blinding tan wall.

MATT PARTYKA: It’s been really hard on our equipment out here.

AARON SCHACHTER: Captain Matt Partyka is a platoon leader with the army’s Charley Company 5158.  He heads up a unit of helicopter-based medics that supports some 3 thousand Marines in the most dangerous region of Helmand Province. And he’s not happy about that dust.

MATT PARTYKA: It does cake everything, and it gets into some of the vital components on the aircraft that help keep it flying in the air.  So we’d have to swap aircraft pretty regularly out here so they can go back to get washed and maintenance.  It does greatly impact our mission here, the dust, by caking on the aircraft, caking on equipment, medical equipment in the aircraft and so on.

AARON SCHACHTER: It’s especially important these days that the equipment works.  July has been the deadliest month in Afghanistan since the coalition ousted the Taliban in late 2001.  And that’s meant things here have been busy.  Partyka’s crews have handled 13 patients in the past 48 hours.  He estimates his two four-man helicopters fly more missions weekly in southern Helmand Province than all the army’s Medevac units these days in Iraq.  Staff Sergeant Matthew Salak is with an Air Ambulance Company known as Dustoff, a moniker bestowed on air medics in Vietnam.

MATTHEW SALAK: One of the reasons I picked being a medical asset is because I think one of the most important things is, you know, protecting our forces and saving those forces that are injured.

AARON SCHACHTER: Salak has had a busy, and tragic, week. A few days ago he picked up a Marine and his translator.   The marine is recovering fro his wounds, but the translator died.  Today was bloody for him as well.  The casualties are hard on Salak, he says that during his year as a medic in Iraq, he didn’t lose a single patient.

MATTHEW SALAK: It’s hard. When you think, you know, a life could have been saved or a life is possibly lost, it’s hard on everybody on the crew, knowing that, you know, our job’s to save lives and it is detrimental to us when, you know, we can’t save that person.

AARON SCHACHTER: The only routine to a Medevac’s job is a complete absence of routine. The crews live and work next to the airfield, away from the main part of Camp Dwyer, in two tents. One is used for sleeping, the other as a command post. The living area is often kept dark all day, for soldiers to catch sleep whenever they can. The Command Center is a constant hub of activity and is staffed 24 hours by two soldiers who wait for the inevitable call to come in.

[SOUND CLIP]

AARON SCHACHTER: The alarm is something of a joke to help cope with the stress.  It signals any number of things, but what the Medevac crews wait for is called a nine-line. Nine lines of information signaling that their services are needed.  The alarm went off yesterday morning at 8:45, but it said to wait.  A Marine was shot in the back, pinned down by enemy fire.  Private Maria Martinez is an Aviation Operations Specialist on the overnight shift.  She reads the text of the alarm.

MARIA MARTINEZ: Medevac landing zone is untenable due to enemy fire.  Unit is returning fire and preparing to remove casualty to COP Sharp-Amir, which is another location.  We’re gonna have to move the patient somewhere else and go pick him up at that location.

AARON SCHACHTER: So we wait, while the crew continues to sleep.  Martinez doesn’t want to wake them until the last possible moment.  That moment comes half an hour later.  And in the parlance of the army’s Medevac, a nine-line is dropped.

[SOUND CLIP]

AARON SCHACHTER: The first crew up jumps out of bed. The four men whip on their gear while the rest sleep.  The helicopter is cranked up and ready to fly within ten minutes.  They take off for another flight into the unknown.  For The World, I’m Aaron Schachter with Task Force Talon at Camp Dwyer in Helmund Province, Afghanistan.

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