Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Just to the side of the aid post, the padre had begun the sad task of searching through the body bags for the personal effects of the dead.

  Onions watched. ‘He had done two bags and was physically shaking and crying. I asked if he wanted a hand. I needed to be doing something rather than sitting and thinking about all that had happened. Together, we opened the rest of the bags, and they were not pretty sights. A lot of the bodies were mushed up pretty bad. Some had lost heads, lost limbs, bodies blown apart. In one was a young lad I knew, but what I saw was just a waxy white body. There was nothing left of the person. It wasn’t him any more.’

  Brian Faulkner came to help out too. ‘You look at them,’ he recalled of this thankless duty, ‘and think, oh God, there’s soand-so, I know his wife, I know his family, his children go to school with my children. You take their wedding rings, watches, photographs, everything. Here is the sad reality of war, thrust right in your face.’ Just as with Tom Onions, the images of Mount Longdon would never leave the colour sergeant’s mind. ‘I still see dead eyes looking at me.’ But they don’t haunt him – they make him proud. ‘It was a tough battle, but we won. Our guys got in there with fist and bayonet, sometimes two lads taking on eight Argentinians. I was proud of them.’

  *

  The taking of Mount Longdon was the beginning of the end for the Argentinian garrison on the Falklands. The other strategic ridges around Port Stanley were conquered at the same time or over the next three days, and names such as Mount Harriet and Wireless Ridge were added to the battle honours of the Royal Marines, the Scots Guards, the Gurkhas and the Paras. Hundreds of Argentinian soldiers surrendered without a fight, but others resisted to the end. The victory was not easily won.

  On Tumbledown, the stretcher-bearers excelled themselves, to the surprise – and then the admiration – of Scots Guard company commander Major John Kiszely. He had, he admitted, gone into the battle with a low opinion of the gaggle of mess barmen and quartermaster’s clerks attached to his elite company. A middle-aged lance corporal in the stores attracted his particular fury: the man was certain to be a hindrance rather than a help. ‘Then I saw him going forward to pick up casualties. He was standing right out in the open and people were screaming at him to get down. But there was a sergeant he knew out there dying, and nothing was going to stop him getting to him. When I saw how brave he was I felt ashamed. He was a quiet, self-effacing man. He earned his Mention in Dispatches many times over.’10 More than that, this stretcher-bearer was an inspiration to others. ‘Fear is infectious. When the bullets are flying around and everybody is looking to see what the next bloke is doing, if people are hiding or running then that becomes the thing to do. But courage is also infectious. Someone you might have expected to be lying behind the rocks was seen to be doing his duty, and others followed his lead. His bravery was catching.’

  Among the most courageous were the helicopter crews who coaxed their machines into the tightest spots to bring out wounded soldiers. Captain Sam Drennan was an Army Air Corps pilot who, along with his co-pilot, Corporal Jay Rigg, had been on plenty of supply and scouting missions around the island but hadn’t been near the front line. At their base at Fitzroy, they were now briefed to fly to Tumbledown to pick up casualties. They could see the fireworks erupting on the mountain fifteen miles away. They weren’t ordered in. Nothing so uncouth. ‘The squadron commander simply said that things were not terribly healthy up there,’ Drennan recalled, ‘the baddies were resisting fiercely, but would we like to give it a go? He was wearing his worried face!’11 It was pitch black, with no moon, and they weren’t equipped with night-sights. As they stepped out to their Scout, Drennan thought, ‘This is going to be an interesting night!’

  Their objective was Goat Ridge, where a Gurkha mortar platoon was dug in. A navy helicopter had already tried to get in, come under fire and retreated. The much smaller Scout would have a better chance going into this cauldron, though it would mean getting further forward on Tumbledown than any helicopter had been so far. As if to underline the point, a missile hurtled past their tail. Drennan skirted down a rocky slope at a snail’s pace of 50mph, searching the ground for the casualty they had come to collect. He had it in his mind that he would drop the chopper on to the hillside if another missile locked on to them. ‘I’d decided I’d rather break the aircraft by dumping it than have the missile impact blow us to a thousand bits.’ He closed his mind to the near-miss shells bursting all around.

  They found their landing site, dropped in, and Gurkhas came forward under the rotor blade to put their wounded colleague into the pod on the side. Rigg went outside to supervise the loading. Drennan sat at his controls, fascinated by the puffs of exploding shells getting closer and closer. They lifted off and headed for a nearby ridge, where an injured Scots Guardsman was waiting to be picked up too. Rigg crouched out on the skid as they made the hop through the air, poised to jump off and haul the man aboard the moment they touched down. His life was in the balance. They were dropping into mines and, if they landed on one, then Drennan, the pilot, with armour plating between him and the blast, had a chance, but his co-pilot, out on a limb, would be a dead man. They were lucky, picked up their man, Drennan piled on the power and they scooted for home at top speed. ‘As we zoomed over the crest of the mountain, we both gave out a great cheer because we were safe! It was our first time under fire and we were elated: we had broken the duck, lost our virginity! We’d managed to get in and get out again without getting killed.’

  And then they turned round after dropping their casualties and went back for more. They felt they had no choice. ‘Suppose it was us out there,’ Rigg said, ‘bleeding to a death on a mountainside, and people were saying they wouldn’t come and get us. No, that wouldn’t do.’ Drennan agreed. ‘Some had been lying wounded out there for hours. Some had died, some were dying. What moral alternative did we have? These soldiers, and their families, were relying on us.’ He had an extra reason. He was a former Guardsman, and it was his old regiment, the Scots Guards, who were out there on Tumbledown taking a pasting.

  Soon the two airmen were back in where the fighting was toughest, on the topmost ridge, with the enemy waiting on the other side. From the ground came warnings to stay away, which they ignored. ‘We landed, and Jay jumped off, doing his Audie Murphy bit. We were both high on adrenalin by then. The wounded were being carried to us by big hairy soldiers whose tenderness in looking after their comrades brought a lump to my throat. All the time the bullets were cracking over the top.’

  Among those they rescued was Lieutenant Bob Lawrence, who had been felled by a bullet to the head. His medical orderly had wrapped him in bandages to staunch the massive loss of blood and lain on top of him to keep him warm in the bitter cold of that midwinter night. They knew if he drifted into a coma he would probably never wake. He had been waiting for more than two hours to be evacuated and had thought the helicopter would never come. It only did so, he later guessed, ‘because Sam Drennan disobeyed orders. He used to be a colour sergeant in the Scots Guards and he’d heard that a number of us had been wounded and that an officer was dying.’

  The eight-minute flight to the aid post in the community hall at Fitzroy was a nightmare for the lieutenant. In the hurry to get him on the Scout, he was placed awkwardly in the cabin and, as they took off, his wounded head was exposed to the cold air. Rigg put his own furry hat on him, but it blew away. If he wasn’t to freeze to death, they had to move fast. ‘We didn’t bother with stealth,’ Drennan recalled. ‘We dived over the side and sank down the mountain as fast as the Scout would go.’ They handed Lawrence over and then returned in the Scout to the mountain, nipping from spot to spot between the rocks, picking up whatever casualties they could find. It was, in Drennan’s phrase, ‘a “bring out your dead” situation, except that our Tumbledown tumbril was for those still living’.

  One man had been lost on the mountain for hours and was almost on his last gasp.

  We got him on board, and he was
just lying there, like a rag doll covered in gore, looking up at Jay with big, frightened, staring eyes. He was in a terrible state. Although it was freezing cold, Jay took off his gloves and held his hand really tight. This poor lad was really holding on – as if he was clinging on to his life. I kept looking back at him and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ – I hope he makes it!’ Then his eyes went into a look of death, and I thought we’d lose him. But I took a short cut and the Scout flew faster than she’d ever done before. When a man’s life is ebbing out of him, every second is vital until the doctors get a needle into him. That probably saved his life.

  But willpower played a part too. Indelibly printed on Drennan’s mind was the image of his co-pilot holding this dying lad’s hand. ‘He was willing his strength to go from him into the other guy.’ Rigg was twenty-one, the same age as the soldier. ‘He had so much life left in him,’ the airman explained, ‘I couldn’t let him die.’ And he didn’t. He survived. There was never a better explanation for the bravery of all those involved in saving lives in that conflict in the South Atlantic.

  *

  The surrender of Port Stanley was a relief. As the Argentinian forces laid down their arms and white flags fluttered in the snow, the genuine fear by all concerned that there would be one last – and very bloody – battle for the town ended. Medic Mick Jennings heard the news while treating a casualty in the field hospital at Fitzroy. ‘I couldn’t help but cheer. Then I looked down at this guy who’d lost a leg to a mine and I thought, “You don’t feel like that though, do you?” I put my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “It’s because of you that we won this, well done.” But it was hardly much consolation to him.’

  Para medical officer Steven Hughes was on a ridge looking down on the Falklands capital when news came over the radio that it was all over. He walked away to be on his own and sobbed. ‘All the pent-up frustration and suppressed grief was uncapped.’12 Then a sense of elation took over, his tiredness was gone and he sauntered down the road and into the town, which was now British again.

  Then came the cleaning up – and the accounting. Rick Jolly packed up his equipment at Ajax Bay and took one last tour of the rickety old building where hundreds of lives had been saved. Stars shone through the ruined roof. The unexploded bomb that fell there on the third day of the landings – and could have wrecked the entire medical plan before it was even underway – was still in place, embedded in some old pipes. ‘The greenish cylinder still looked threatening and evil in the dim light of my torch beam.’

  The war to retake the islands cost the lives of 255 British servicemen; a further 777 had been wounded.13 The death toll could so easily have been many more if it had not been for the brilliant job done by the medics.

  The Task Force returned to a jubilant United Kingdom but, among the men who got down in the dirt and the gore to secure victory, there was a more sober and sombre sense of occasion. The horrors they had seen would haunt many of them for a long, long time. More than a quarter of a century later, there are, as medic Phil Probets put it, ‘some guys who are still on that mountain’. The war goes on still in the head of stretcher-bearer Tom Onions. ‘It’s very raw. I haven’t come to terms with it. I have nightmares and flashbacks. I cry if I see something about the Falklands and the names of guys I knew are mentioned.’ Nothing can wipe away these terrible memories. Whenever he took a bath, Bill Bentley would imagine he was back at Bluff Cove. ‘But instead of actually helping the guys who were brought off the Sir Galahad, there was a kind of smoke through which I couldn’t reach anyone. I was just standing there watching it, incapable of helping.’ It hadn’t been like that, but the unkind and unforgiving fog of war would cloud many minds in the years ahead.

  The medics had seen sights that were an affront to the senses. Andy Poole’s worst casualty was a soldier who had lost both his legs to a mine. ‘The rest of his body, basically just his torso, was a mess too. We really tried for him, but we lost him. The stretcher he came in on was so badly soaked in his blood that we had to burn it.’ Another death had a particularly scarring effect on Ajax Bay medical assistant Tom Howard.

  When he was brought in I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He was a handsome, fit young man, and both his legs had been blown off from above the knee joint. The tib and fib were completely stripped of flesh, and the bones splayed outwards. I held his hand, and the only thing I could think to say was, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to repair the damage, and then you’ll be going home.’ As we were wheeling him into theatre he called out, ‘I want my mother, get my mother.’ He was brought out a few minutes later, a blanket pulled over his face. His heart had arrested twice on the table, I was told, and twice he was brought back, but the third time it couldn’t be re-started. The doctors found a large fragment of metal that had gone up inside his groin and ripped through all his intestines, liver, and ruptured his right kidney. He was literally blown apart inside. I couldn’t believe that people could be so brutal as to have sat down and designed the mine that had done such a thing to this boy. I changed from the fully committed soldier I had been before that to someone who is anti-war. I will never serve again, not even in the reserve.14

  His pacifism was an understandable reaction to such close-up exposure to war’s horrors. But it is only one side of the coin. The eternal enigma of armed conflict is that it brings out the worst in mankind, but also the best. The human spirit is indomitable, the will to live more powerful than the desire to kill, as survivors such as Bob Lawrence would testify. He was the Scots Guard lieutenant lifted off from Tumbledown dying from a bullet wound in his head. When Drennan and Rigg’s helicopter dropped him at the Fitzroy field hospital, he was not rushed into surgery. He was deemed not to be saveable, and others with a better chance were put ahead of him in the queue for treatment. ‘I was there, fully conscious, for three and a half hours,’ he remembered, ‘because they thought I was going to die and there was no point in working on me. I was awake for all of that. My brain was hanging out and I lost about five and a half pints of blood. I couldn’t believe the pain I was in. Had someone said, “If we cut off your arm, your head will stop hurting,” I would have let them. But I kept sitting up and talking. People say how brave I was, staying awake and enduring all that pain, but the fact is that I was more frightened of dying, and if I had gone to sleep, I probably would have died.’15 He did recover, and for that unexpected gift of life he was grateful. ‘I lost the use of my left arm, and my left leg is bad, but I’m able to get about. The brain surgery causes me periods of black depression. My biggest disappointment was that I was so badly hurt I would never be a soldier again. But at least I” m alive.’

  Such resolve and will to live put added responsibility on medics. In modern warfare, it was becoming less and less acceptable to give up on someone, to let a wounded man slip away, however bad his injuries. The Falklands War was pivotal in this change. The Second World War had been fought with conscript armies amid a consensus that the cause of victory was greater than the survival of any individual. Among the western Allies, human life was not considered as inhumanely cheap as in the Soviet Union’s Red Army, where 10 million were consumed on the battlefield, a staggering thirteen times as many as the combined losses of Britain and the USA. But, even so, for the western armies, that war was fought on the assumption of mass casualties. One man’s survival was important, but not the priority. By the 1980s, such thinking was no longer appropriate. The modern army was a tight band of professionals, not cannon fodder. Volunteers to a man, they would not fight without the assurance that they would be given every chance of getting home in one piece and, if wounded, every chance of making a recovery. The priority given to a well-trained, finely honed medical service was the emblem of that guarantee. The Falklands, those far-distant islands that few people in Britain had ever heard of, put medics firmly on the military map. Their vital role in the conflict gave them an esteem they had never been afforded before.

  But only those who fought in the Falklands and felt
on their faces the chill winds of its battlefields were truly aware of what a close call the conflict had been. It wasn’t a case of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat – nothing so simple or melodramatic. Rather, there was so little margin for error in such a long-distance war that defeat was always a distinct possibility, for all the outward bravado of Britain’s political and military leaders. As he journeyed home, 3 Para’s medical officer John Burgess was conscious that he had with him just half of the eight-man team of medics he had left the UK with. Four were wounded or dead. ‘But if circumstances had been slightly different, it could have been an awful lot worse,’ he conceded. When, years later, he looked back at the crude conditions they had endured, the war seemed to belong to a different era, one of ‘fixed bayonets and two aspirins and a shell dressing’. The replacement medical kit he expected never arrived, they ran out of food and almost out of ammunition. By the time they took Stanley, half the battalion was down with diarrhoea and vomiting.

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conflict, surgeon Jim Ryan was shocked to recall how austere and primitive the conditions under which he and all the other medics worked had been, not that different in essence and style, he reckoned, from the Boer War and the First World War. Equipment was limited – Burgess’s jest about two aspirins and a shell dressing was uncomfortably close to the truth. There wasn’t even an intensive-care unit. ‘This was the age before field ventilators and oxygen generators,’ Ryan recalled.16 ‘We used paper towels in the absence of any linen and worked with a bare minimum of instruments. The lighting over the operating tables was appalling, sometimes just bare bulbs.’ There was no imaging from X-ray machines and body scanners, and laboratory support was confined to typing blood groups. The majority of surgeons were, technically, trainees – not novices, by any means, but yet to complete the nine years of hospital work required in those days to qualify fully in the scalpel trade. Nor had they received much targeted instruction on the arcane requirements of war surgery, apart from the odd secondment to the military wing of Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast, where army casualties in Northern Ireland were sent. Ryan was not alone in stuffing a well-thumbed copy of Kirby and Blackburn’s Field Surgery Handbook – ‘the military surgeon’s bible’ – into his tunic pocket and referring to it for guidance when in doubt. Anaesthetists, trained by necessity in foolproof, safety-first procedures in civilian hospitals, had to learn quickly to be less cautious and more open to improvisation than they were used to.