Glory1974 words

‘Is there any oxygen in air this cold? What will they do if our feet freeze to the ground?’ These and other random thoughts flitted through my brain as I stood in formation and waited for what would come next. I pictured the whole CSH (Combat Support Hospital) of 350 soldiers fused into the frozen arctic landscape of Fort McCoy, Wisconsin until spring.

“Hey Franny,” Major Lyle Wernimont, a friend from my Desert Storm days, interrupted my contemplation of our frigid state.

He slid into the back of formation so quietly that the soldier to the right or to the left were never quite sure when he appeared or how long he had been there. It was a good thing his last name didn’t begin with an A. Any place at the front of the formation wouldn’t have fit with his unobtrusive nature. The only thing he ever wanted to be noticed for was hard work.

“I hear we’re going to Afghanistan.” His voice was so cheerful you would have thought he was saying, “Let’s go down to the Officer’s Club for a beer.”

We weren’t at attention, still as statues, so I looked at Lyle’s face for clues on whether this information was rumor or fact. He wore his characteristic smile. One side of his mouth turned up in a cheerful grin. The other side tapered to a slight droop. He looked like a man who, despite some enthusiasm, wasn’t quite ready to commit.  His eyes were unreadable.

Lyle was tall, thin and walked with a slightly stooped posture from years spent leaning over an operating table giving anesthesia. His form, walking down the sidewalks of Fort McCoy in his woodland green camouflage uniform, caused my grandson to call him Lyle the crocodile. Lyle loved the name and he loved children. When my grandson came to hang out with us at the fort Lyle played basketball with him or took him to a training area. They practiced buddy aid, stretcher carries and the obstacle course. My grandson basked in the attention at being treated like one of the guys.

The Afghanistan deployment was real. Lyle and I idled along at the back of the pack with the rest of the W’s, enduring the usual rounds of briefings, predeployment physicals, and vaccinations. That was where my war started. For a small number of troops, the combination of vaccinations, including smallpox and anthrax, was deadly. I was more fortunate, but I developed a constant suffocating pressure in my chest, like the throbbing of a hand forced to stay in a too tight glove. Medications the sick call nurse practitioner gave me helped a little, but I was having trouble keeping up.

The only person who knew I was sick was Lyle. I loved to run and normally kept pace with the head of the pack. When Lyle saw me falling back on every morning run, he said, “What’s up Franny? Trying to make sure the rest of us slackers don’t look so bad?”

His tone was more concerned than joking, so I told him what was going on. He didn’t say much but I could tell he was watching from a respectful distance, just far enough to acknowledge my need to be a strong asset to my team, but close enough for me to know he had my back.

We left for Afghanistan in the middle of some vaguely remembered night about a week later. We had a blur of a stopover in Germany for refueling and then we were in Afghanistan. There was no intermediate step in Kuwait for additional training like troops got who were headed to Iraq. We were just there; walking out of the belly of a plane into a blinding sun and heat so forceful it seemed to compress your body.

Within hours we had taken over operation of the hospital from the outgoing CSH and were receiving patients. By the third day, life back in our civilian hospitals was only a hazy dream.

Early one morning, while the sun was only a hint of orange over the Hindu Kush Mountains, I went to the operating room to take over for Lyle who had been on night call. He was stooped over a toddler who was swaddled in blankets on the operating room table.

I pulled my fleece tight around me and zipped it up to my chin. The operating room module for this kind of Army tent hospital was basically just a large tin can with doors bolted onto each side. We baked through Afghanistan’s scorching days and shivered through the bitter nights.

“I couldn’t wake him up Franny, and now everything’s going to shit.”

The hint of panic in Lyle’s voice didn’t alarm me as much as the fact that Lyle swore, something I never heard him do.

“I had to give him a little blood, but no blood warmer and now…I didn’t want to wake you up…”

Even though Lyle anesthetized hundreds of kids a month at home at his small rural hospital he was convinced he couldn’t do pediatric combat trauma.

“Hey, have someone come and get me anytime, you know, sometimes it takes two.”

I pulled a fleece cap out of my pocket and popped it on the little boy.

“Plump, well-nourished child I see,” I said as I wound the blanket back around his head.

Lyle made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a groan. The boy was malnourished, almost emaciated, like most of the children we saw during the beginning of 2003. No body fat meant no insulation. Under anesthesia they got cold fast.

“A cold child is a dead child.” I said, “Just like at home but without the blanket warmers and blood warmers.”

I peeked under the lower half of the blanket to see what we were dealing with.

“Caught in the crossfire?”

The boy’s stomach and leg bandages were beginning to show a faint pink tinge. Blood still oozed from the wounds.

Lyle nodded. “Human shields.”

We occasionally heard from the medics who brought civilians in that women and children were being used as human shields. Even if this wasn’t the case the small children were often victims. They hadn’t yet learned to get out of the way in a firefight.

“I’ll be right back,” I said as I walked out the door leading to the operating room control station tent.

We might not have had warming blankets, but we did have hot water. I pumped out a large metal bowl of almost scalding water from our limited supply. I carried it back to the room, wound a long portion of the IV into a spiral and immersed it in the water.

“Poor man’s blood warmer.” I said.

For the first week he called me for advice on every patient, then only for children. Within two weeks we shared successes and challenges equally, pooling our collective knowledge and experience with the other anesthetists. It was all a matter of exposure.

Lyle had so many strengths. He was quick to smile; he had a heart of gold and a give you the shirt off my back attitude.

No matter what my complaint was he’d say,

“Well look at it this way,” and find a way to approach the situation that always left the glass half full.

He only had one weakness that I ever noticed. He hated talking about anything that had to do with feelings. He could tell stories for hours, talk about our deployments to Germany for Desert Storm, to Afghanistan, or about world affairs, but any whiff of emotion and he’d get quiet and eventually slip off.

One day I noticed Lyle at the Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) tent sitting at one of the computers which were generously donated by groups back home. His eyebrows came together, and his face sagged down.

“Trouble at home Lyle?” I asked, “Everything ok?”

“Oh,” he said, “My wife wants me to write to her and I don’t know what to say.”

I searched my mind to think of anything that would be helpful. It was true, we couldn’t really write about our days filled with shredded limbs and burned bodies.

“Just tell her you love her Lyle, and you can’t wait to see her again.” It seemed like a sure bet.

“Nuts.” Lyle said in a cheerful tone, “Satellite’s out of range, it’ll have to wait.

I looked at the frozen screen and laughed.

“Lucky for you Lyle.” I said and let it go at that.

“Let’s go over to the veranda and wait for a medivac.” Lyle changed the subject.

“Did you hear of anything coming in?” I hadn’t.

“Isn’t there always something coming in?” He smiled and nodded in the direction of our makeshift veranda which was located down by the flight line. It was crafted by our orthopedic surgeons out of packing crates and camouflage netting.

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes.  Then faintly, from the other side of the long flat plain, which was home to the Bagram Airbase, we heard the heavy mechanical purr, metal on air, of a medivac helicopter.

I stood up but Lyle put up his hand, gesturing for me to hold off for a minute.

Within seconds the back door of the hospital opened, and Sargent Bloom stepped out.

“Major Wernimont, Major Wiedenhoeft, we need you.” He called out in all directions across the hospital compound.

After several more heartbeats Lyle stood up and headed toward the helipad. I headed the opposite way back up across the rocky path to the hospital.

“There’s a mission, you’re up!” the commander rushed past as I walked into the operating room control station, “Hurry up, get your gear.”

I hesitated for the briefest moment, digging deep to push past the wearying pain in my chest. My heart hadn’t quite recovered from the reaction to the vaccinations.

“Get going! You’re up.” The commander gave me a hard look to see if I was trying to evade my duties.

“Yes sir.” I turned to collect my gear. As the only woman I cautious never to show pain or fear. The combined weight of the web gear, weapon and ammunition, body armor, Kevlar helmet, thirty-to-fifty-pound anesthesia field pack and extra water sometimes came close to outweighing me. I felt like an ant.

The “missions”, going to the edge of a firefight to treat the wounded while under enemy fire, were a dreaded but necessary part of anesthesia’s role in Afghanistan. We all shared the job equally. Like Russian roulette, we each took our turn at danger.

Before I got as far as the anesthesia storage locker Lyle came out of nowhere with the field pack in the same way he always managed to slip into formation right at the perfect time.

“I’m up sir, it was my turn.”

I watched Lyle jog out the door after the medivac crew, shouting over his shoulder to me,

“They need you more back here.” He was gone before I could contradict him.

In that selfless act I knew that Lyle was one of those people who would take a bullet for me or dive on a grenade to save his team. He was the kind of person I always wondered and doubted that I could be.

I tried to tell Lyle how grateful I felt to him for braving bullet and RPG to give me a break for my heart to heal.

Lyle laughed it off and said, “You know Franny, I never really thought about it.”

I never mentioned it again but instead I held my gratitude in my heart. Lyle had his own quiet fearlessness, his own brand of glory.

In Memory of LTC Lyle Wernimont 1950-2011