The children had now been in the water for nearly an hour and a half, and after a brief surge of hope upon seeing the Coast Guard boat, Gudrun felt the grip on her emotions slipping. She began to whisper her daughter’s name. “Diane… Diane… oh, my golden girl.” To Gudrun it seemed that Diane, at the threshold of so many wonders, had earned a chance at life. To be cheated of it now was an unbelievable injustice.
After a brief surge of hope upon seeing the Coast Guard boat, Gudrun felt the grip on her emotions slipping.
Stanley Kramek also began to feel despair. Diane was a strong swimmer, and he knew that if she had only herself to care for she might eventually get back to shore. But how could she save both herself and Matthew? He knew she would not abandon the boy.
Fog began to crowd northward over the island, heavy and fastmoving. Cow Cove was taking on a pale, pearly opaqueness. Conley exchanged significant glances with his men. If the Coast Guard did not find the children in the next ten minutes, the boat might as well just head back to its base.
* * *
Running southeast at half speed, the boat, under the command of Robert Widerman, came slowly about. From the shore, she seemed to pause for a minute, rocking slowly on the swells, then abruptly head northwest to a point about 600 yards offshore. There she cut her engines and put her bow into the wind.
Sure that something had been found in the water, the crowd on shore pressed around the Rescue Squad ambulance to hear the radio. A voice came through with a metallic boom that was broken by static. “Coast Guard… retrieved… person… headed Old Harbor.”
As the voice ended, the boat could be seen heading south at full speed. The ambulance started off for Old Harbor, four miles away. Gudrun and Stanley Kramek followed, saying little, searching the dispatcher’s words for a meaning. Does one “rescue” a living person but “retrieve” a dead one? And had the dispatcher said “person” or “persons”?
When they arrived at the harbor the Coast Guard boat was already there. Stanley ran to the dock, battling his way through the crowd. “Please,” he called out, “let me through!” On the boat’s deck he found two small figures wrapped in blankets. They were sitting up, they were alive! They smiled at him and laughed and wept all at once. And so did he.
The Rescue Squad nurse checked the children’s blood pressure and pulse, gave them some oxygen and pronounced them fit to leave the boat. When the family stepped ashore, a burst of applause came from the crowd. There were tears in many eyes, and hands reached out to touch them as they passed. “We prayed for you,” a few said.
Safely back at their cottage, the Krameks laughed, talked, touched each other, intoxicated with the knowledge that the family was whole. Diane, with her mother’s candid gray eyes and self-possession, with her father’s determination to face up to a job, with her own sweet gentleness—her parents looked on her with a new awareness.
“Each time a swell lifted us up I prayed I’d be able to see the lighthouse.”
“I knew Stephen had got help,” Diane told them, “because I could see all the men at Sandy Point and I told Matt that pretty soon a boat would come for us. I kept Matt on my back while I swam the breast stroke most of the time, but when he’d get cold I had him swim by himself a while to get his circulation going. He was very good and did exactly what I told him to do and never once complained.”
Matthew, his face flushed by the excitement of an adventure safely concluded, said “We talked and Diane told me jokes and asked me if I knew the song ‘True Grit’ but I didn’t. She called me ‘Matt, Matt, the water rat,’ and I pretended to get angry. Sometimes she’d turn over and swim on her back while I rested on her stomach and held her around the waist. I’d kick my own feet real hard to help keep us afloat.”
“The fog worried me,” Diane admitted. “Each time a swell lifted us up I prayed I’d be able to see the lighthouse. I always could, but it got dimmer and dimmer. When we saw the Coast Guard boat, Matt and I waved our arms and screamed, but they went on by without seeing us. That was the worst moment of all. But then they saw us.”
* * *
About dusk that evening Kramek left the cottage, announcing he was going to take a walk. A quarter of a mile away he came to the Town Hall, a small frame building where the regular meeting of the Town Council was being held. Kramek entered the crowded room and took a seat at the back. He felt like an intruder, but he had come to make a short speech and he asked for the floor. When it was given him, he could only express his thoughts in the bluntest words.
“My name is Stanley Kramek, and I’ve been bringing my family to your island for vacation for a couple of years. This afternoon my daughter and a young friend of my son were caught in the tide and taken out to sea. If it had not been for the prompt action of your Rescue Squad and the Coast Guard, I would have lost my daughter and the boy. What I want to say is… from the bottom of my heart…” His voice broke and his face flushed with the effort he made to continue. He cleared his throat and said, “From the bottom of my heart I thank you.” Then he quickly walked out of the building.
The people of the island often talk of Diane Kramek. Coast Guardsman Robert Widerman says, “When my boat got to her, she had supported that boy on her back for an hour and a half, but there was no panic. She had a big smile for us. I’ve rescued a number of people at sea but none quite like her.” Rescue Squad Captain Conley adds, “She is the gutsiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
It will be a long time before Block Island forgets Diane Kramek. And a long time before the Kramek family forgets the people of Block Island.
Originally published in the June 1970 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Diane Kramek, 68, lives in Little Falls, New Jersey. Matthew Hikel, 62, owns M&M Color Studios, a photography studio, in Hopatcong, New Jersey.
The Baby and the Battalion
by Kenneth Miller
Navy medic Chris Walsh heard a woman’s cry for help—then took on a risky new mission.
It started with a bomb.
The convoy was patrolling a rubble-strewn neighborhood of Fallujah, in Anbar Province, when the homemade mine detonated. The IED made a thunderous noise but succeeded only in cracking the windshield of one of the platoon’s Humvees. The Marines leaped from their vehicles and tore off after the suspected triggerman, who’d been watching through binocs from the roof of a mud-walled house.
The temperature that June 2006 morning hovered around 125 degrees, normal for late spring in central Iraq. The men pounded down the alleyways in their Kevlar body armor—70 pounds of gear apiece. One contingent spotted the suspect running south and gave chase. They were searching house to house, M-4 carbines ready, when a wizened woman emerged from a doorway, cradling an infant and repeating a plaintive phrase in Arabic.
A corporal translated: “Baby sick.” The soldiers shifted nervously, fearing a trap; even if the child was really ill, this delay would make the group a perfect target for a sniper. That’s when Chris Walsh appeared. He stowed his rifle and knelt to examine the patient. Her name was Mariam. She was nine months old, with curly black hair, brown eyes and a face twisted in misery. What Walsh saw when her grandmother removed the child’s diaper made him gasp, then reach for his digital camera.
Walsh, 30, had arrived in Iraq three months earlier as a Navy medic assigned to Weapons Company, First Battalion, 25th Marines. Before that, he was an EMT for the St. Louis Fire Department. He’d seen all the horrors that keep an ambulance crew busy, and men blown apart on the battlefield in Iraq. But he’d never seen a little girl turned inside out.
He snapped some photos as the corporal marked the house’s location on a GPS grid. Then everyone scrambled back to their Humvees, and the patrol moved on.
At base camp—a cluster of half-ruined buildings on the city’s eastern outskirts—Walsh showed his photos to Navy Capt. Sean Donovan, the battalion’s chief medical officer. Donovan recognized Mariam’s affliction: a rare condition called bladder exstrophy, in which the organ develops out
side the body. As a further complication, the end of Mariam’s large intestine protruded through the same opening and was severely inflamed. Without an operation, Donovan predicted, the child would soon die—and there wasn’t a surgeon in Iraq who could help her.
“Then we’ve got to get her out of here, sir,” Walsh said.
* * *
Chris Walsh didn’t want to be thought of as a softy. “He had a very gruff persona, even by Marine standards,” says Donovan. Tall and bony, with a glowering expression, Walsh could seem downright misanthropic. Fellow soldiers nicknamed him Doc Grumps.
They also saw right through him. “He had a heart of gold,” says John Garran, senior Navy medic for the weapons company. Older than many of his comrades by a decade, Walsh looked after their health like a stern big brother. And he tended to the locals when he could. “We’d go in a house, there’d be someone with a broken leg and he’d say, ‘I’m on it,’ ” recalls S.Sgt. Ed Ewing, the platoon’s second in command. “He didn’t care if you were American or Iraqi.”
Growing up in eastern Kansas, the eldest of five siblings, Walsh was a popular boy with a habit of befriending outcasts. “He felt a need to protect them,” recalls his mother, Maureen, a research lab coordinator. In first grade he declared that he intended to be an EMT when he grew up. After getting his paramedic’s license at age 22, he set about ministering to the wounded in St. Louis’s toughest neighborhoods.
Chris Walsh
Walsh’s brother Patrick joined the Marines after 9/11 and wound up in Iraq. Their father, a Defense Department computer analyst who’d served as a Marine in Vietnam, died of leukemia soon after Patrick enlisted. Walsh grew convinced that he had no right to stay out of the line of fire. “He didn’t have a wife or family,” says his mother. “He thought he could help somebody over there.” He enlisted in the Navy Reserves, allowing him to alternate stints as a medic with his civilian vocation.
Walsh was attached to the 25th Marines, and his unit landed in Fallujah in March 2006. Saving Mariam went beyond his job description, and that of his platoon mates. Nonetheless, when he asked one evening over chow for volunteers to join the effort, hands shot up around the mess hall.
* * *
It would be a two-pronged operation: one side geared toward arranging Mariam’s treatment overseas, the other toward keeping her alive long enough to make it there.
Navy Capt. Sean Donovan (back row, third from left, with his team of medics) oversaw Mariam’s care in Iraq as well as efforts to get her treated in the U.S.
But first, the Marine Corps brass would have to agree that the mission was worth undertaking. Donovan—a radiologist with a practice in Mequon, Wisconsin, and five kids of his own—argued that it could provide the battalion a “tactical advantage,” by winning a few Iraqi hearts and minds. He also promised that all patrols to Mariam’s home would be done on the soldiers’ own time.
It didn’t take much to convince the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chris Landro, whose wife had just given birth to a son. “I kept thinking, What would any of us do if this was our child?” he says. But carrying out the rescue would be a complex and risky proposition.
The greatest danger was, in fact, to Mariam’s family. Any Iraqi seen as collaborating with the Americans would be marked for murder by the insurgents. When the Marines came to fetch the baby for an examination at the base, her grandfather suggested they lead him out in handcuffs, as if taking him in for questioning. Mariam came along in an equipment bag.
All subsequent visits to the family’s home took place between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. A mile from Mariam’s house, four or five Humvees parked in hidden locations, and 20 Marines equipped with night-vision goggles stole through the darkness. Several soldiers stood watch in posts outside the family compound, while a handful of men entered its courtyard. Chris Walsh was always among them.
Mariam’s grandfather was always the one to open the inner door. Though he was just 39, he looked two decades older—worn down, like his wife, by privation and worry. Islamic custom dictated that Mariam’s mother, in her early teens, remain in seclusion; the father, a day laborer, never made an appearance. In a tiny vestibule lit by a gas lamp, the medics examined the baby. They made sure her pelvic area was clean and free of infection. Through an interpreter, they advised her grandfather on the fine points of her care. They delivered medications, sterile gauze, bottles and formula. Then they disappeared into the night.
Only a few surgeons in the world specialize in bladder exstrophies. Donovan learned that one, Rafael Pieretti, MD, practiced at Massachusetts General Hospital. He readily agreed to help baby Mariam.
But that hardly solved the child’s problems. The Iraqi Health Ministry was flooded with requests from citizens who needed medical treatment abroad. And though cultural taboos prevented Mariam’s female relatives from traveling without a male family member, U.S. officials were hesitant to issue visas to Iraqi men. Then there was the question of payment—the hospital bills would exceed $250,000. Dr. Pieretti and his colleagues would work for free, but Massachusetts General needed help to defray other costs.
The battalion’s chaplain, Rev. Marc Bishop, began e-mailing his Bay State connections for help. “When a child is in danger,” he says, “we are required by our deepest selves to respond.” He received a response from Sen. Ted Kennedy, who said he’d try to break the visa deadlock. One of Bishop’s parishioners rallied 16 companies to cover the $16,000 needed for transport. A nonprofit medical-evacuation group called Project HOPE agreed to coordinate the flights.
Meanwhile, the fighting in Fallujah was growing more intense, forcing the Marines to cut back on their house calls. By the end of August, says Donovan, “the situation on the ground had become poisonous.”
* * *
Then came the second bomb. On September 4, Chris Walsh was riding in his Humvee with three members of the Mariam task force. LCpl. Cody Hill was driving; the other passengers were LCpl. Eric Valdepeñas, 21, from Seekonk, Massachusetts, and Cpl. Jared Shoemaker, 29, a former cop from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The convoy paused at an intersection where boys were playing soccer—normally a sign the insurgents were elsewhere.
The explosion caught the Humvee in its belly, lifting it off the ground and engulfing it in a massive fireball. Only Hill escaped, surviving with burns over half his body. Walsh and the other two servicemen died instantly.
The disaster came just a month before the battalion was to return home, and it was followed that night by an IED blast that cost two other members of Weapons Company their legs. “We were beat up pretty bad,” says Ewing. His platoon was ordered to take a few days off—to recover from the shock and discourage retaliation against civilians.
The group spent much of that time talking about the buddies they’d lost and how they would carry on. One thing was certain: They would not abandon the mission Walsh had started. “You don’t get too many positives out of Iraq,” Ewing says. “We were gonna freakin’ get it done.”
The visits to Mariam resumed, with Navy corpsman Edgar Gallego, a 26-year-old EMT from New York City, tending to the baby.
* * *
By the last week in September, Donovan was in despair. The battalion was packing to leave Fallujah, but Mariam was still stuck in her hovel, in pain. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he told Bishop. “We’re so close, but we’re a million miles away.”
Bishop responded with a question: “Have you prayed?”
“No,” Donovan admitted. Bishop sent him to the chapel with instructions to recite the Memorare—a prayer to Mary, which reads, in part, “Never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection… was left unaided.” Donovan, a Sunday churchgoer, knelt and did as he was told.
The next day, he received an e-mail: Mariam was cleared for departure.
Maureen, mother of Chris Walsh, meets Mariam in November 2006.
The team made their last nighttime trip to the compound. They snuck the baby and her grandparents into a Humvee, which took them to Cam
p Fallujah. A helicopter ferried them to Baghdad International Airport. They caught a plane to Jordan and another to Boston. On October 13, Mariam was wheeled into an operating room at Massachusetts General.
The surgery took nearly five hours. A normal bladder is shaped like a ball, but Mariam’s had never properly closed. Dr. Pieretti stitched the two hemispheres together, then tucked the organ inside her body. Other nearby organs were repositioned as well.
When it was over, Dr. Pieretti called Donovan at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where the battalion had been demobilized, and declared the operation a success. Donovan relayed the glad tidings to the men in the cavernous barracks. “The word went around like electricity,” he recalls. “There were waves of cheers. It was joy. Just joy.”
Maureen Walsh learned of her son’s death on Labor Day, when a pair of Naval officers drove to her house in Shawnee, Kansas, to deliver the news. (Patrick, who’d been stationed at a different base in Anbar Province, accompanied Chris’s body home.) The loss hit her like an asteroid.
“There were waves of cheers. It was joy. Just joy.”
In his letters from Iraq, Chris described the weather and landscape yet was mum on what he actually did there. But on October 4, the day before he would have turned 31, Maureen received a letter that clarified everything. It came from Donovan and told the story of Chris’s most important mission. “The hope for Mariam’s very tiny life,” Donovan wrote, “[arose] from the charity and gallantry of your son.”
The Best of Reader's Digest Page 8
