Mayday, Mayday!
Heroes Remember
Mayday, Mayday!
That tour was fabulous. In Afghanistan
I was there as a nurse in the Roto 3
Military Medical Unit, MMU,
Roto 3 hospital sorry, and I worked in the
trauma base and I worked on the general
ward because I am a generalist.
And then a couple months in the medic
that was flying medivac with the Dust-off
which is the American Black Hawk squadron,
he left theatre. And so they didn’t have
anyone else to translate the medical report
and I was the trained flight nurse so
I went and got seconded off to work with
Dust-off for the remainder of my tour.
So I flew with the Black Hawk squadron
to sight of injury. We had a lot of fantastic
days, I remember one day we were
training the Afghan flight medic,
how to be a flight medic,
and we were aboard and that was fantastic.
Unfortunately we had an adverse event
that day. We took a small arms fire took
out our rotor. We had a “mayday, mayday,
mayday!” and landed in Taliban territory.
So we were with our aircraft downed for,
well first off we transferred the patient
that was with us. He was an alpha patient
which means absolute critical,
must get to care.
So we had to chase Black Hawk with us
so we put him on that bird and off they
went to the hospital.
But we were then left with no gun shift,
with no support in the middle of the
Taliban territory. We were there about an
hour and a half before the quick reaction
force showed up and the quick reaction
force was fantastic. They showed up,
thank goodness they had water because
we only had so much water with us.
I got to tell you we flew with more water
from then on.
You just didn’t think about it right?
And I will say that my time with the
infantry came back to me while we were
on the ground because we had to do a
perimeter and maintain and all those skills,
yes we learned a little bit of that in basic
training as officers but not as much.
But we trained it all the time in the reserves
when I was with the infantry and exactly,
the Americans did it exactly the
same we did. When they called the order
it was the same order.
We were to do the same thing.
We were to do the same left and right ark,
it was fantastic to see actually when
you look back at it. It was really neat.
So then we got flown out of there
finally we got out of there and I remember
when they brought us back to another
camp where we waited for transport
back to Kandahar. And when I finally got to
Kandahar I will never forget that my best
friend, like my best friend on tour who was
my friend at the time she was waiting on
the airfield crying her eyes out when we
landed but the funny thing is nobody else
knew or seemed to care and to this day
nobody knows or seems to care.
My best friend Laura has tried I don’t’ know
how many times to try and get some sort
of notice that this actually happened and
it’s like, no, nobody. It’s almost like nobody
wants to admit it happened. I don’t know why,
it’s just or maybe it’s just not significant
enough to other people but it was to me.
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