Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Among the first casualties the bearers brought back was medic Mark Dodsworth, one of their own. He had been going forward to the wounded when rifle fire caught him in the pelvis and legs. He was dragged in on a poncho. ‘He was conscious and talking to us,’ Burgess recalled.6 He was given pain relief, put on a drip and then taken in the Snowcat to the helicopter landing site to be evacuated. He didn’t make it. His death was a hideous initiation for the medical teams, a clear indication of the dangers each and every one of them faced.

  They were also becoming acutely aware of how under-equipped they were. In the tab to the mountain, arms and ammunition had been the priority, and only the simplest and lightest of medical supplies had been brought – dressings, drips, painkillers, antibiotics, bandages and the like. ‘We were short of supplies,’ Faulkner admitted. They would just have to cope with the little they had. But conditions were against them, and even some of the limited medical supplies they had were proving useless. ‘I was about to put a saline drip into a severely wounded lad when I realized the fluid was ice-cold and would go through his heart and kill him. So we couldn’t give them any drips.’ Then a sniper got a bead on the aid post, ‘and began picking us off. It was bloody frightening because we had nowhere to hide, but thank God he was taken out.’

  Yard by painful yard, the Paras were progressing up Longdon, slowly getting on top of a determined enemy, whose unexpected bravery and defiance they were the first to acknowledge. But the cost was huge. Half of one platoon was down, five men dead and eight wounded. A corporal was hit and lay out in the open while a sniper took pot shots at various parts of his body. As each bullet thudded in, to his thigh, his arm and his head, he kept up a running commentary. His mates could hear him dying but were pinned down and could not get to him. Finally, one could stand his friend’s agony no more and – as the sniper had wanted – dashed out to try to rescue him. Three bullets in the chest killed him instantly.

  Faulkner moved forward from the aid post, finding scores of casualties, a personal tragedy at every turn. ‘The bastards have blown my leg off,’ screamed one soldier in anger and pain after stepping on a mine. ‘I’m only twenty-one, and the bastards have blown my leg off !’ The heroism was immense. A lance corporal was shot in the head while carrying a wounded comrade off the field but refused to stop for treatment. ‘He wrapped a field dressing round his head and carried on,’ said Faulkner. ‘He stayed on that dirty, treacherous hill and kept on going up and down with the wounded, non-stop.’

  As well as those brought in on stretchers, walking wounded struggled to the aid post under their own steam. They stumbled in, arms wrapped around each other, bandaged and bloody, like the wounded returning from no-man’s land on the Somme. It was a hazardous journey. At least one casualty and the man supporting him were killed on the way down. Those who made it often had injuries so severe they would have left most other men helpless and beyond hope. A corporal arrived with half his intestines hanging out. With typical Para black humour even at times like this, he was instantly nicknamed ‘No Guts’.

  Once they had reached the aid post, however, casualties were far from being out of danger and able to relax. The position was under constant artillery fire. Wounded men had lain out on the mountain fighting to stay alive for hours, then made it to what should have been a safe haven for treatment, only to find that the war they had been rescued from was still pursuing them. Howitzer shells hit the rocks around the aid post and sent shards of shrapnel in all directions. Having been hit once was no guarantee of not being hit again. Lightning did indeed strike twice. Faulkner was up on a rock at the edge of the RAP directing the stretcher-bearers, pointing to where they should go next, when a shell landed a dozen yards away. ‘It completely blew me away, and I was out cold for about fifteen minutes.’ It was hours before he was on his feet and back in action. He had been careless to get caught like this but, by this stage of the battle, as he admitted later, he was so drained he was beyond caring. ‘I must have come pretty close to death at that point. Another time, a hot splinter from a shell curled round the back of my neck before landing in the soft peat nearby.’

  To Captain Burgess fell the critical decisions of who should be evacuated first, and how. The only helicopters that could get in were tiny Scouts and Gazelles, which could take just two casualties at a time, one lying on a stretcher, the other sitting. For the rest, there was a six-hour journey over rough terrain to the nearest surgical field hospital. Like other battlefield doctors before him, Burgess sometimes had to make the difficult diagnosis that a man’s condition was so bad and his prospect of survival so slim that he was put at the back of the queue rather than the front so priority could be given to those with a chance of recovery. Just yards from where the living were being treated, the dead were stacking up, wrapped in groundsheets, their smocks pulled over their heads. Faulkner worried about the effect this sight might have on the morale of the wounded, but there was nothing he could do. The body count that night and day of 11 and 12 June was ticking up like points on a rugby score board. By the end it would be twenty-three, making Longdon the bloodiest single fight of the entire campaign.

  *

  The principal hero of the battle of Mount Longdon was Sergeant Ian McKay, who was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for single-handedly clearing an Argentinian machine-gun position that was holding up the advance. Faulkner had spoken to him just a few hours earlier, as they approached the mountain. ‘I’ll see you in Stanley,’ McKay had said, but he never would. Phil Probert, now just twenty yards behind the slowly advancing front line, found the sergeant’s body and verified that he was dead. ‘He’d been shot in the head, and part of his face had gone.’ Others were dead too, men he knew, had spent nights in the pub with. But this was no time to linger or lament over losses. The area was littered with casualties who could yet be saved. Probert set up his own temporary aid post among some rocks, out of sight of the snipers, he hoped. Then he crawled on his belt out into the open to get to the fallen and drag them to cover. He had ten of them lying around him at one point, all needing to be stabilized before the stretcher-bearers arrived to carry them away.

  The teenage Mark Eyles-Thomas was in McKay’s platoon and had seen his sergeant go up the hill and not come back. He was ordered forward. Around him were Scrivs, Jas and Grose, his three best mates, lads of the same age who’d joined as boy soldiers at sixteen – ‘crows’ in Para-speak – and, less than two years later, before they were old enough to vote or drink a beer in a pub, were putting their lives on the line for their country. He charged ahead, firing as he went, hearing rounds pinging into the rocks around him and catching in his nostrils the sharp smell of metal on flint. He went to ground just in front of an enemy trench. Through the darkness, he called out for his friends, and heard Ian ‘Scrivs’ Scrivens reply: ‘I’m over here… I’m with [Neil] Grose, but he’s been shot. He’s in a bad way.’7 There was no word from Jas, and Eyles-Thomas crawled back to look for him. ‘I spotted him lying face down, and I called to him but he didn”t answer. Grabbing his smock, I turned him over. His body slumped towards me. A round from a .50 cal machine-gun had penetrated his head and killed him instantly.’ He was beyond needing the dose of morphine he had selflessly given to Corporal Milne in the first moments of the battle.

  The shocked Eyles-Thomas went looking for Grose next, and found him lying on his back with Scrivs examining him, probing his chest for an exit wound but not finding it. Bad news – it meant the bullet must still be in him. Grose was in terrible pain and struggling to breathe. They tried to turn him on his side to stop his lungs filling with blood and, as they were holding him, a shot rang out. ‘Scrivs fell across my lap,’ Eyles-Thomas recalled, ‘and fluid splattered on my face. He lay motionless in a limp, crumpled heap. He was dead. I sat there not believing what had happened. One minute I was talking to him, with my hand on his shoulder, the next, zap, he was gone. A shudder went up my spine. Everywhere I looked, soldiers lay wounded, murmuring, some screaming. Grose
groaned. “You’ll be all right, mate. I’ll look after you, I won’t leave you,” I said. “Where’s my helicopter?” he asked. “They promised us, if we were wounded, we’d be on the hospital ship in twenty minutes.” “It’s coming, Grose,” I lied. “It’s coming. Just stay with me.” ’

  Eyles-Thomas knew that, if he didn’t move Grose to cover, the sniper who had dropped Scrivs would get them too. It was only a matter of time. It was a struggle to get the wounded young soldier over the rocks to Phil Probert’s makeshift aid post, a distance of just fifty yards but a marathon effort under the mercilessly accurate sniper fire. Another soldier collapsed, shot. Cries of distress could be heard everywhere. They struggled on and, when they finally made it to the aid post, Eyles-Thomas lay down beside his friend, whispering encouragement. ‘He knew his condition was deteriorating but fought against it all the time. I checked and rechecked his dressing so he could feel my touch and know I was constantly with him.’ They talked about their families. ‘I never allowed him to doubt that he would see his again.’ In the bleak mid-hours of the early morning, when the body is at its lowest ebb, Grose began to slip into unconsciousness. ‘He said he wanted to sleep. I told him if he did he’d miss the chopper. He looked at me and said, “It’s all right, I know the helicopters aren’t coming.” I looked into his eyes and could see that he had resigned himself to not getting off the mountain. He wanted an end to his pain.’

  Eyles-Thomas looked around for a medic and saw Probets, head in hands, totally exhausted. ‘I could see he was mentally and physically shattered. In those last few hours his eyes had seen so much pain, grief and mutilation. Everyone around him wanted and expected him to perform miracles – myself included. “I’ve got nothing left,” he said. “No bandages, no drips, no morphine. Nothing. Everything has gone!” ’ The medic ran his eye over Grose, cleared blood from his mouth, but indicated there was nothing more he could do for him. ‘For that single moment, and incorrectly,’ Eyles-Thomas wrote later, ‘I hated him more than I hated the enemy.’ The seventeen-year-old sat by his friend’s side. ‘I cradled him for a moment like a brother. “Don’t leave me, Grose,” I whispered. He fidgeted in a last desperate attempt to fight against his injury before releasing his final breath.’ It was Grose’s eighteenth birthday that very day. He had come of age just in time to die.

  Eyles-Thomas wept uncontrollably. ‘I cried for him, I cried for his family, I cried that he was too nice a lad to have died in such a way, and I cried for not being able to save him. Then I pulled his head to mine, kissed my friend on the cheek and said goodbye.’ Probets was devastated too. ‘I felt so helpless. He was drowning in his own blood, and we hadn’t been issued with chest drains. His injuries, the length of time of his injury and my lack of equipment meant there was nothing I could do for him. He was asking where the chopper was – he was asking for his mum – then he slipped away.’

  *

  As day began to break on Longdon, 3 Para had made it on to the last ridge. The enemy, having fought hard and well, withdrew. The intense hand-to-hand scrapping stopped, though the long-distance shelling from Argentinian artillery went on, as did rifle fire from a few bedded-in snipers. For the British medics, the lull was a chance to scour the battlefield for casualties who had been missed. Tom Onions was in a stretcher party lugging a corporal with a leg badly busted by gunshot down the mountainside. It was hard work over the rocks and across the steep gullies. Tony,8 a medic friend of his, a popular figure in the battalion, was with them, and they stopped in a narrow gully between the crags for him to treat the casualty. There, Phil Probets, who had left the aid post and was also coming down the mountain, ran into them. It was one of those post-battle reunions of old friends, grateful to have survived and know their mates had too. ‘It was good to see him again, and we had a bit of the usual banter,’ Probets recalled. ‘He asked me to pass him a dressing for the casualty he was treating, I bent down to get one out of my Bergen, and there was a massive blast and explosion as a shell crashed in a few yards away.’ Onions had heard the whoosh of the shell coming through the air a split second earlier, and hurled himself on top of the casualty on the stretcher to shield him. The explosion threw up stones and dirt that then came raining back down on everyone. Through the falling debris, Onions caught sight of his friend, slumped on the other side of the stretcher. ‘I shook him, but he didn’t move. I undid the chin strap of his helmet, and the top of his head came off. Blood and brains were dripping down his cheeks. It was obvious there was nothing we could do for him. He was dead.’

  Onions was mortified. ‘He was a really nice bloke. He wasn’t as standoffish to a cook like me as some Paras were. We used to chat a lot.’ Probets was devastated too. The blast of the shell had blown him down into a dip and, though concussed, he managed to haul himself back up, to see Tony lying on his back, ‘steam coming out from under his helmet’.

  Back in the aid post after delivering the casualty he had been carrying to the doctor, Onions sat back against a rock and began to cry. Faulkner saw him and was about to order him, none too politely, to get back up the hill to pick up more casualties, when he was told what had happened. The colour sergeant was shocked. The dead man had been his friend too. ‘He’d been one of my corporals in Germany and in Northern Ireland. Just an hour earlier we’d been chatting about how to evacuate casualties from the battlefield. Now he’d been brought back dead. It hit me very hard. He was only twenty-four. What a waste.’ All he could do now was help the living, and the one most in need at that moment was the distraught Tom Onions.

  Faulkner ordered a brew-up for everyone, and they sat and drank, chewed on hard-tack biscuits and shared their thoughts, all the while with shells still falling around them. Then he gently sent the stretcher team up the hill again to search for more casualties. Onions appreciated this. ‘If he’d screamed at me to get up there, I don’t think I’d have gone, but because of the caring way he did it I just jumped up as if nothing had happened. We had a job to do and we carried on with it.’ It was a while before that job was done, and then Onions and the other bearers were able, at last, to sleep. They had no sleeping bags and so, to keep warm, wrapped themselves in the blankets from their stretchers, ignoring the blood, skin and brains that clung to them.

  The aid post sprang to life. Over the radio net, Faulkner heard that a force of enemy helicopters had been spotted coming round the mountain in their direction. Was this a counter-attack getting underway? A cry of ‘Argentinians! Take cover!’ went up. The colour sergeant stood his ground. ‘That was it for me. I’d had enough, I’d seen enough and wasn’t going to take any more. They weren’t going to kill or maim any more of my blokes.’ If the enemy wanted to overrun his aid post, they would have to go through him first. Angry now, he yelled out his orders, forming the medics and stretcher-bearers into a defensive perimeter, circled like a wagon train protecting those on it from Indians.

  ‘I armed everyone from the heap of weapons taken off the dead and wounded, and gave them all their positions and their arcs of fire. I picked up a rifle for myself, though I hadn’t fired one in anger in all my eighteen years in the army. After all we’d been through, I felt a sense of satisfaction at the thought of fighting. It was the part of a medic’s job we usually didn’t do.’ He took up a position on a ridge of rocks and saw a platoon of twenty or thirty Argentinians heading towards him, firing as they came. A nervous Onions lay beside him, the stock of a Sterling sub-machine gun rammed into his armpit. He felt exposed and underpowered against the advancing enemy. ‘I can probably spit further than this gun I’m pointing,’ he thought to himself. But then Faulkner gave the order to open fire, and the band of medical brothers let loose with everything they had. To Onions, it was a matter of survival – kill or be killed – and he was on to his third magazine before the sergeant told them to cease. Faulkner never discovered how many of the Argentinians died, ‘but none of them were left standing when we’d finished’. Then, as if to underline the ambiguity of the situation every med
ic found himself in, he returned to the aid post and resumed work with the casualties under his care, calmly organizing their evacuation to the field hospitals at Teal Inlet and Ajax Bay.

  For Onions, still reeling from the death of Tony as well as his role of machine-gunner in defending the aid post, there was one more hardship to bear. It would be the worst imaginable for him, the most devastating of his whole war.

  His closest mate in the Falklands was Steve,9 an engineer attached to 3 Para. They had spent a lot of time together on the Canberra on the journey down but hadn’t seen each other since the landings three weeks earlier. Steve came through the aid post, helicoptered in from headquarters and on his way to fix a broken mortar stand in the front line. They had no time to catch up properly. Swapping experiences would have to wait. ‘Pop in for a brew when you come back down,’ Onions called out as his friend headed up the hill. ‘A few moments later I heard a shell hit, followed by screams and a shout for stretcher-bearers. When I got there I found Steve sitting in a crevice in the rock. He’d been hit by shrapnel in the thigh, his artery was split open and blood was pissing out.’

  Reliving this moment twenty-five years later, Onions was in despair still, incredulous at the loss, still hurting in places that no living soul could reach. ‘He died on my lap,’ he kept repeating, the horror of it spooling through his mind again like a film in which he was once again the callow nineteen-year-old he had been in 1982.

  I had my knees and thighs under his head. He was screaming and I gave him morphine, but it was pumping straight out through his leg. He was looking up at me, straight into my eyes. I was telling him, ‘You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, we’ll get through this,’ but he was just screaming. And then he calmed down, I stroked his forehead, and he tried to say something, which I couldn’t make out. Then, looking to the skies, eyes wide open… he just died on my lap. I still think about it. I still see it. The images never leave me. It was the fact that we were friends, the fact that I picked him up and the fact that I couldn’t stop the bleeding.