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More flight medics filling Army combat role

Flying in a helicopter at night through an Afghanistan valley, taking fire, isn’t where you’d expect to find an Air Force flight medic.

The enlisted flight medic’s traditional role is working in the back of large transport planes, caring for patients while flying to hospitals far from the combat zone.

But in Afghanistan today, flight medics are filling in for Army airborne combat medics — a role more like that of an Air Force pararescueman. Like other “in lieu of” assignments, the requirement is expected to continue at least until next year.

When Master Sgt. Mike Baker of the 43rd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron at Pope Air Force Base, N.C., heard the Air Force was looking for experienced flight medics to volunteer for the duty in 2006, he didn’t hesitate.

“I jumped on board right away,” said Baker, now a veteran of two four-month deployments to Afghanistan.

For Baker, the new role was an obvious extension of the skills he’s learned during 16 years as a flight medic caring for trauma patients. “Working in emergency rooms is kind of my forte,” he said.

Tech. Sgt. Thomas Grantland, also of the 43rd, spent four months during the spring and summer of 2007 flying Afghanistan missions. He’s on tap for a second deployment.

After caring for hundreds of injured servicemen and women on long flights to hospitals, Grantland’s focus shifted to safely moving them off the battlefield. “I just wanted to go and help the people,” Grantland said.

The frontline duty is one more element of the Air Force’s role in filling gaps where the overstretched Army lacks manpower or equipment. To help with the medical evacuation mission, the Air Force began in 2006 assigning combat search-and-rescue aircrews and a handful of HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters to Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan.

Because pararescuemen were already stretched thin across a wide set of missions, the Air Force turned to flight medics with a 7-level skill rating to provide medical care on the Pave Hawks. Grantland and Baker spent several weeks upgrading their skills. The training included advanced survival and evasion techniques at Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., the Army’s combat medic advanced skills training course, and four weeks working with civilian emergency medical teams in Baltimore under the auspices of the University or Maryland.

Once deployed, the airmen were assigned to Kandahar Air Base. Located at the edge of a desert, the base is an operations and transportation hub for U.S. and NATO missions throughout southern and central Afghanistan.

Air Force combat search-and-rescue teams have been deployed to the region since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, said Lt. Col. Chris Hannon, a Pave Hawk pilot and commander of the Air Force Reserve’s 301st Rescue Squadron at Patrick Air Force Base, Fla. The CSAR teams often fly night or high-altitude medical evacuation missions too difficult for the Army’s less-capable MH-60 Black Hawks. “Every time we got involved with the Army, it was high-risk,” Hannon said.

The in-lieu-of tasking called for Air Force aircrews to adopt Army practices, said Maj. Dave Anderson, an HH-60G pilot with the 301st. Anderson flew the medevac missions during the fall and winter of 2006 while assigned to the active-duty 41st Rescue Squadron from Moody Air Force Base, Ga.

Although Pave Hawk aircrews were used to working as two-aircraft teams on CSAR missions, they would often be flying solo for the Army mission.

And no PJs, qualified to fight on the ground as well as care for patients in the back of the helicopter, would be onboard— just the lone medic.

Hannon worried that in a worst-case scenario, the medic could find himself in a ground firefight while the helicopter had to take off to target the attackers with its machine guns.

There was no time for the medics and aircrews to train for this stateside before deploying.

“We met for the first time in country,” Anderson recalled of the medics he flew with.

Baker said that on his first rotation in the summer of 2006, the medics had a short time to learn from the teams they were replacing and meet the aircrews.

“In one week, we got spun up on our mission,” the medic said. They gained more knowledge from on-the-job experience.

During one of Grantland’s initial sorties, he spent about 10 minutes on the ground preparing a patient, the medic recalled. That made the pilots uncomfortable as they worried about possible enemy fire. On later flights, Grantland made it a point to speed up the process.

Although the Air Force teams were based at Kandahar, they frequently deployed to forward operating bases, Grantland said. “You could go out for a day. You could be out for a month,” he said.

Typically, missions were flown at night, when it was safer, because the Pave Hawk’s night-time capabilities are more advanced than the Black Hawk’s. The flights included ferrying stabilized patients from FOBs to hospitals and picking up still-bleeding soldiers and civilians from frontline landing zones, Anderson said.

On the most intense missions, Baker found his attention focused on simple goals: “Keep a heartbeat going. Stop the bleeding.”

“Everyone who got on the aircraft, I took it personally,” he said. “I’d go back to the hospital and check up on the patients.”

Although they took fire several times while in flight, they weren’t caught in any ground fights, Grantland and Baker said.

When he rotated home after four months, Baker said it was hard to adjust to the less frantic pace and squadron-sized operations.

“You are a one-man show out there,” he said. “That immediate care you give so somebody [will live]. ... There is no repeating the sense of satisfaction.”