Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  The next person he came across was Argentinian too, a youngster shot through the leg and in deep shock. ‘I approached him cautiously and as he made no aggressive gestures I was not aggressive either. The better side of me, or my training, took over. I hoisted him up over my shoulder in a classical fireman’s lift and carried him back to our own lines.’ Only later did he stop to consider the danger he had put himself in. ‘Dangling over my back, that young soldier would have been looking straight at my bayonet, still bloody from the comrade of his I had just killed. It would have been simple for him to reach down, draw it and stab me.’

  Amid this slaughter, it was heartening for Hughes that the lessons he had drummed into the troops on the ship coming south were proving their worth. He was as reassuring a presence now as he had been then, with his frankness about what to expect if they were wounded and how they would be treated. On the ship, he had regaled them with one story about an elderly man in his care in a civilian hospital in Ely whose stitches had burst after major abdominal surgery, spilling his intestines into his lap. ‘There was no great drama,’ he’d told them. ‘We wrapped his gut in sterile towels, took him to theatre and shoved it all back in again, and he was up and eating breakfast the next morning.’ Now a young soldier was sitting in the RAP in a similar predicament, clutching folds of his small bowel to him after being shot in the stomach. ‘He was horrified and very frightened but I was able to remind him of that story. You’re like that old boy, and you’ll be fine too.’

  As Hughes had also stressed to them, the most important factor was getting the wounded off the battlefield as quickly as possible. As he predicted, this was proving a slow process, and he cheered ‘the magnificent sight’ of the first helicopters, four of them, chopping their way through the pall of smoke to ‘casevac’ the casualties away. It was his decision who to send. He pointed at the urgent cases, gave his orders, and there was a rush as two or three stretchers were bundled across to the landing site and their occupants stashed unceremoniously on board.

  The crews didn’t hang around. It wasn’t just that they wanted to be out of mortar and missile range as soon as possible. They also knew that speed was of the essence for their beaten-up passengers. As they lifted off, the pilots barely glanced at the blood and gore accumulating in the cabin behind them and concentrated on the ten-minute hop back to Ajax Bay. Then they would unload, refuel and be back for more. Whenever helicopters came in to the aid post, they became a specific target for the Argentinian gunners – and a legitimate one. The helicopters had a dual purpose. They came to evacuate the wounded but brought ammunition and supplies with them. The stretchers on which casualties were carried to the helicopter were then loaded with ammo boxes to go back to the fighting men. These were circumstances in which the distinction between medical and military activities blurred.

  Then, over the radio, came a message that stunned everyone. The Boss – codename ‘Sunray’ – was down. The impetuous and impatient Lieutenant Colonel ‘H’ Jones, the 2 Para CO, with a tight schedule to keep to, had left his command post and come to the front of the action to try to break the deadlock. He had led a charge up the hill and was cut down, along with his adjutant, David Wood, and another officer, Chris Dent. Hughes was devastated by the deaths and had to stop himself from crying out in anger, fear and frustration. These losses were personal. ‘David was a real friend who’d helped me a great deal since I joined the battalion. He was my mentor. I felt as if I’d been hit by a truck – first, sudden numbing shock and then sadness. I wanted to stop and grieve for three of my friends, but I knew I didn’t have that luxury. The medics were looking at me hard, seeing how I would take it, and I realized that if I went to pieces, there was a likelihood we’d all go to pieces. This is the burden of leadership. I made a conscious decision to block out my emotions.’ It was the right thing to do at the time, but later in his life he would pay psychologically for the coldness he adopted that day. ‘It was a turning point for me.’

  He was not the only one whose emotions needed to be controlled. Bentley remembered vividly how bad things looked at this stage of the battle. ‘The row of dead bodies was growing, and when they brought in the remains of another good friend of mine, I confess that I broke down and cried. We were all exhausted and hungry and resorting to eating biscuits from the pockets of the dead, friend and foe alike. The ammunition was running out, we were not getting any useful medical re-supplies, their artillery had us pinpointed, the colonel was dead. Things were looking pretty desperate.’

  *

  At the hospital in the old lamb-packing warehouse at Ajax Bay, as the helicopters poured in and dropped off their human cargoes, Rick Jolly and the Red and Green Life Machine were mired in blood, bullet holes and blast injuries. An image was seared on Jolly’s memory of lines of pale, silent paratroopers in blood-soaked and torn combat clothing. Their faces were grimed with dirt, and there was a bluish tinge to their lips and fingernails from shock and loss of blood. As he took up his scalpel, making snap decisions and working fast, he felt a connection to a tradition of field surgery going back to the Second World War, to Korea and to Vietnam. In his gore-stained apron, he could easily have been a below-decks surgeon in Nelson’s navy or a bone-cutter in a tent at Balaclava.

  Each casualty seemed to spawn another. An unarmed Scout helicopter sent to pick up the wounded ‘H’ was set on by a pair of Pucara attack aircraft, whose cannon shells ripped through its fuselage. The crewman, Bill Belcher, preparing to take in casualties, was kneeling in the back rather than strapped in the front. He looked down at the remains of his right leg – ‘a soggy end with a few bits holding my foot on’.3 He was ripping open the first-aid kit to try to treat himself when the Pucara banked and, under-wing machine guns blazing, came back for the kill. The helicopter bounced, turned over and then hit the ground. Belcher, who would have been killed for sure if he had been wearing his seat belt, was thrown clear of the wreck. A ‘terrible, bloodied mess’, he was now back in Ajax Bay after being rescued by another helicopter. The surgeons got to work, amputating his right leg mid-thigh.

  Out on the hillside, the wounded were accumulating in the effort, redoubled by the colonel’s death, to take out the enemy positions stopping the advance. Hughes knelt over the rapidly cooling body of a soldier with multiple cannon fragments in his side and neck, and air leaking through punctures in his throat. The remnants of his shredded battle dress were like blotting paper, soaking up his own blood. The aid post was overflowing, and deciding priorities was becoming dangerously difficult. Every case was urgent. One soldier was on his side with a gunshot wound in his back, another, a platoon medic, was half hidden under a sheet of corrugated metal with part of his brain hanging out. He was still conscious and, surprisingly, the least of Hughes’s worries. This one could wait. ‘He’d been there a while already and, if he’d survived this long, I knew he wasn’t in any immediate danger. I also knew there wasn’t a brain specialist at Ajax Bay, and the surgeons there would be better operating on someone with, say, a stomach wound.’ The doctor’s reasoning was sound, but some of his medics misunderstood. Bentley, for one, had caught sight of the exposed brain, ‘like toothpaste squeezed out of a tube’, thought there was no chance and concluded that the doctor had put the soldier to one side to die. A medic was preparing to fill him up with morphine to kill him off when Hughes intervened. Eventually, the man got his place on a helicopter. He survived.

  Not everyone even made it to the aid post for Hughes and his medics to work on. Some of the wounded lay out in the open for hours on end with only the basic skills of their mates keeping them alive. Private Nick Taylor was flat on his stomach about to fire a Milan missile at enemy positions in the distance when an artillery shell struck. He blacked out and awoke in searing pain as his mates were gripping his wrists and dragging him into cover. They reassured him he was all right. His balls were still there, they told him, which was what really mattered, and the pain in his leg was the muscles cramping with shock. He believed the
m, though later he was to discover they were ‘lying through their teeth’ – he had thirteen pieces of shrapnel in his arm, back and legs. Shots of morphine helped to ease his panic a little but didn’t do a lot for the pain. ‘It hurt like hell, and I couldn’t feel my hands. I kept asking my mate Blackie to squeeze them and, because I couldn’t feel him, I kept asking him if he was doing it. I kept blacking out, and he was slapping my face and telling me not to fall asleep, that the helicopter would be here soon.’

  It was a long time coming. There was no quick ambulance ride to Casualty for him. He and several others lay in a shell-scrape for twenty-six hours until a rescue party could get to them. ‘I felt very helpless, vulnerable and scared, and the time dragged very slowly. The bloke opposite me had his jaw all shot away, and I kept looking at him and thinking, he’s worse off than me. There were several dead Argies across the way too, and I kept looking at them as well. There were times I thought I’d never get out of there.’4 It would be the next morning before a helicopter could get to him and fly him out. His leg wounds were so severe it would be a year before he could run again.

  The most daring rescue, from right under the enemy’s nose, was that of Private Dave ‘Chopsey’ Gray, who was bleeding to death after a mortar shell landed beside him, tore off his right leg, shattered the other and filled him with shrapnel. Bob Cole, one of his mates, distraught and in tears, came to Hughes’s aid post to beg help for him. ‘The doc looked at me,’ medic Bill Bentley recalled, ‘and I heard myself saying, “No problem, I’ll go.” ’ He ducked down and followed Cole a hundred yards up the hill to a ridge and through a gap in a stone wall. ‘Bob opened fire on two enemy soldiers and I did the same. By the time I reached him he was thrusting his bayonet into one of them.’ They could now see Chopsey twenty-five yards away down the other side of the slope, lying in a shallow crater in a pool of his own blood and fully exposed to the enemy’s guns. Bentley crept down to him.

  Para legend has it that when Gray was hit, he shouted out, ‘I’ve lost me fucking leg!’, to which the cool reply came from one of his mates behind a nearby tussock of grass, ‘No you haven’t, Chopsey, it’s landed over here.’ In fact, it was still attached to the rest of him at this stage, though not by much. Arriving at his side, Bentley took in the desperateness of the situation, calling for desperate measures. ‘It was obvious I would not be able to deal with all his injuries on the spot, but I would have to amputate what was left of his right leg.’ He took out the Swiss Army knife he always carried, one blade of which he kept razor sharp for emergencies such as this. By now, the Argentinian defenders had spotted what was going on, and bullets began to thud into the soft ground around the medic as, lying flat, he sliced away the flesh and sinew, all that was keeping the leg on. Gray, he recalled, ‘just cringed’ at this amputation without anaesthetic; his state of shock must have gone some way to dulling the pain. The medic was putting a tourniquet on the stump when he saw a stretcher party heading across the open hillside towards them. The enemy fire intensified. More bullets peppered into the peat. ‘It felt like the whole Argentinian army was opening up at us. The hill seemed to be exploding.’

  The rescue team threw Gray on to a stretcher and, not forgetting the severed leg, which Bentley laid across the end, were quickly off back up the hill, chased by a line of bullets detonating in the dirt like crackerjacks. The medic lagged behind as he gathered up his kit, too precious to abandon. Machine guns pinned him down, and he flung himself into the shallow scrape that Gray had only just been taken from. He lay there, playing dead, until the incoming fire finally faded away, and he ran for it, back up the hill and down the other side to the aid post.

  There, Hughes was fighting desperately to save the wounded soldier, who had by now lost so much blood that the doctor could not find a vein in his deathly-white skin. He had to cut away with a scalpel to make an opening for fluids. Fortunately, Gray was too far gone to feel anything. At that moment a helicopter came in, and Hughes shoved the wounded man to the top of the queue for immediate evacuation, ‘but I didn’t hold out too much for his survival’.5 Bentley arrived back just in time to help lift the man he had risked his life to save into a casualty pod on the side of the chopper. The sawn-off remnant of his leg went too, as evidence of what, under fire and under duress, the medic had done and why. ‘I’d hacked a leg off, and that’s a pretty major thing for a medic to do.’ Once the heat of battle had cooled, he didn’t want some busybody to rule that he shouldn’t have done so. The sight of his own leg detached and lying beside him was a shock for Gray. ‘I don’t think it was until that moment that he realized exactly what had happened,’ Bentley said. ‘He just looked at it, and I hugged him and gave him a kiss, and said, you’ll be all right. Then I closed the top of the pod and they flew him out.’

  Gray was conscious when he was brought into casualty reception at Ajax Bay, breathing hard as if he had just run a marathon and talking nonsense at top speed between gulps of air. But he had no discernible pulse and no blood pressure. When the tourniquet was removed, the stump of his leg was dry, which was a bad sign. No blood was getting through. He needed an immediate transfusion. A medic grabbed some blood from the store – it was ‘refrigerated’ outside in the cold, wrapped in wet hessian– and warmed the bags under his armpits to take the chill off the blood before it was poured into veins that were already beginning to collapse and close up. Three litres later, on the sixth bag, the leg wound began to ooze blood again. There was colour in Chopsey’s cheeks, life back in him. He was going to make it.

  Night was now falling at the end of an epic, dreadful day and, out at Goose Green, the battle slowed and halted. But helicopters were still in the air carrying in casualties, being guided on to the hospital landing site by hand-held torches flashed from the ground, the only lights now visible on the pitch-black island. With no landmarks to go by, the pilots needed all their skill and daring to find their bearings and home in on the thin shafts of torchlight. The last man they brought in was a 2 Para captain with a bullet hole in his side. He was shocked and shivering. His eyes were wide and staring. A transfusion technician was warming bags of blood with his body heat, just as he had done for Chopsey. Surgeon Bill McGregor cut into the abdomen, then probed inside with his fingers for the source of the severe haemorrhaging. He found a gouge in the liver from a bullet, and delicately sewed up the hole with catgut. But the bleeding didn’t stop. One wound was concealing another, and beneath the liver, a major artery had been nicked and was leaking. To fix this required advanced surgery, ‘major league stuff’, as Jolly put it. Feeling his way with hands as poised and precise as those of a pianist, McGregor slowly and painstakingly repaired this laceration too. When the stitching was done, the suture tied in a surgical knot and the stomach incision closed up, a sigh of relief and satisfaction went round the table.

  Jolly called for tots of rum all round, a naval expression of appreciation for an arduous job well done. He glanced around him at the lines of patients, the orderlies moving quietly from stretcher to stretcher in the dim light, checking on those sleeping, giving words of assurance to those awake. He tried not to think of the unexploded Argentinian bomb nestling behind sandbags in a wall just yards away. He had taken a chance that it would not explode. The number of casualties his team had treated was proof that he had been right not to try to evacuate the hospital. He totted up the figures – eighty men brought in, forty-seven operated on under general anaesthetic, and every one of them still alive. Now it was time for his medics to scrub out the two operating theatres, their last chore of the day, and then roll out their bedding around the tables. Sleep now, for tomorrow could be every bit as bad.

  Out on the darkened hillside, Hughes was doing his sums too. His records showed he had treated thirty-four Paras, plus dozens of Argentinian casualties. But stretched out in a gully behind a gorse bush were the dead, looking, he thought, like still-life dummies, except for the bullet hole in the middle of one forehead. ‘It felt unreal. A few hours ago I had spo
ken to these people, and now they were gone.’ Bentley was still out on the battlefield, searching for a friend he had heard was missing, presumed dead. ‘He had been a really funny guy and a great favourite of me and my mates. I dearly wanted to see him, one more time, even if it was just his body.’ Snow was falling heavily and the night was drawing in as he made his faltering way through the peat. It was a foolish thing to do, he knew. The area could well be mined, and in the darkness he would most probably walk past the body anyway and not see it. He found nothing and had to give up. Back at the aid post, he saw the dead laid out, wrapped in their ponchos, and he went down the row, pulling back the covers one by one and looking at their faces. ‘In the darkness and with their wounds, I could not identify my friend. So I gave each of them a kiss and a hug, wrapped them up again and went off to find a place to sleep.’

  Hughes was already tucked up beneath a plastic space blanket, trying to sleep but troubled by the pictures of the battle replaying in his mind, accompanied by a soundtrack of crackling gunfire and blazing gorse. ‘When I awoke, it was dawn. I was cold. I couldn’t feel my feet at first.’ The totally unexpected Argentine surrender warmed him up. Major Chris Keble, ‘H’ Jones’s number two, had taken command and, by a mixture of threats and inducements, persuaded the enemy, still holding the high ground and still with vastly superior numbers, that they were beaten. They came out with their hands in the air and laid down their weapons.

  With the Battle of Goose Green over, Hughes now did what he could for the Argentine wounded, moving along the lines of defeated men and examining their injuries, though the enemy soldiers were mystified by his compassion. ‘Why you treat me?’ one asked in faltering English as the doctor put him on a drip. ‘God knows what they’d been told about us,’ he thought. At close quarters, the enemy could be seen for what it was – a conscript army, bullied, starved and low on both skills and resolve. The medics dug into their pockets and handed over their rations of glucose sweets and biscuits. They felt sorry for the beaten soldiers. They pulled out all the stops to save the last Argentinian casualty found alive. He had lain out on the battlefield for a day and a half before he was discovered by chance, at the bottom of a pile of corpses in a water-logged trench. He had a bullet in one eye; one of his hands and a leg were broken. He was rigid with cold but also running a fever. He should have been dead, from the gangrene that was already eating into him if from nothing else. Except that, in some strange symbiosis of the sort that can never be predicted – serendipity, some would call it – the cold had paralysed the infection and the fever had kept him from freezing. With his body temperature a chilly 32C, he first had to be warmed up with hot-water bottles and then given fresh blood. In the operation to mend his wounds, the anaesthetist sitting by his head had to ventilate him by hand for two hours, squeezing the life back into him breath by breath. He survived and went home, though one-eyed and one-legged.