FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

NEW YORK - MEDIC ON A MISSION

Greg Papadatos is a paramedic and native New Yorker who signed up for the National Guard with the sole intention of treating wounded soldiers. I know we've pitched stuff at you before under the rubric "M*A*S*H but real," but in this case we really, really mean it. The guy even got in a fight with his superiors over carrying a rifle because he believes medics shouldn't be involved in combat. And he won. Anyway, we got him to tell us a little about what it's like trying to put people back together in the middle of hell on earth…

Advertisement

The 1,000th soldier was killed in combat about a month before I crossed the border of Iraq as a field medic in the National Guard. Most of my 11 months there were spent in Baghdad. I was born in the Bronx and worked as a paramedic in NYC before heading to the Middle East. My prior experience as an infantryman in the Army helped me relate to ground troops better than most medics.

I dealt with a lot of minor medical problems. People didn't want to go to the aid station and through the ritual of sick hall just to get some Imodium for their diarrhea when they could just knock on my door. The most frequent ailment was stress. I made it clear to my unit that my door was always open if they needed to talk.

Bombs and rockets were responsible for the worst injuries. I never really liked the phrase "improvised explosive device." It's just a bomb to me. An IED on the side of a road is a roadside bomb. An IED below the ground is a mine. VBIED—vehicle-born IED? No, it's a car bomb.

One guy had a bomb explode directly under his vehicle. He was ejected, his upper and lower legs were broken in more than one place; the bones pierced through his thighs. I remember thinking that I was probably going to have to put tourniquets on both legs to keep him from bleeding to death. When I got closer I realized that he was beyond my help. It occurred to me later that there wasn't much blood on his legs. I didn't pick up the cue—his legs weren't bleeding because the force of the blast immediately stopped his heart.

Advertisement

Heat injuries were another thing I dealt with on occasion. It's hard to get an accurate reading of the temperature there because of the extreme humidity. Someone told me that when Saddam was in power there was a labor law that let people working outdoors leave for the afternoon if the temperature climbed above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. It gets well above that all the time, but what happened was that government workers were getting all this time off and slowing things down. For a while, it never got above 120 degrees in the official weather reports. Weathermen would report the next day's temperature being just below the threshold all over Iraq. The heat was like standing in the middle of 40 hair dryers on full blast. Imagine that wearing a full set of armor and gear.

They tinkered with our supplies constantly, adding things, dropping things, and changing brands. The National Guard doesn't get the best medical gear. The first aid bags they initially gave us were literally Vietnam surplus. We would sometimes buy things on the civilian market at a huge markup if our supplies weren't adequate. I had some special types of equipment sent from home.

I refused to carry a rifle—it would have just bogged me down. The medic is a non-combatant. The medic is not supposed to shoot unless he is defending his patient, himself, or his unit. Even as recently as Vietnam, medics weren't issued weapons. In pre-deployment training they told medics that we would be getting rifles. I told my superiors that if I ever really needed a rifle, there would be plenty around me on the ground. There was some resistance, and I was like, "What are you going to do? Send me to a combat zone? I'm already going!" I ended up carrying a pistol in a holster. This allowed me to do things with two hands.

Advertisement

During the latter half of my deployment, my unit patrolled a major highway in Baghdad in armored Humvees. We even had "Baghdad Highway Patrol" patches made. We were assigned the neighborhoods adjacent to the road and would find injured people, wrecked cars, and other types of trouble all the time. Sometimes we would have to leave our vehicle to look at situations. A bodyguard had to watch over me whenever I went outside. I would just hope someone with a gun didn't have a good bead on me while I was doing my thing. We confronted a group of armed contractors—what I call mercenaries—at gunpoint because they were shooting wildly at some civilians near the road, for what appeared to be no good reason, and almost hit us. We were ready to kill them. I was completely ready. I treated a civilian whom they hit in both knees. He wasn't even complaining about the pain. He spoke some English and just kept asking, "Why'd they shoot me?"

Another time, a machine gunner fired two shots at a motorcycle coming at us in a way that was potentially dangerous. They were supposed to be warning shots fired into the ground—this was a tactic we used in rural areas with dirt roads. The highway, however, was made of asphalt and concrete. Chunks of shrapnel sprayed the passengers. They turned out to be a father and his 4-year-old daughter. The bullets didn't hit them, but the father looked like he had been shot about 20 times in the legs with a small caliber pistol. The girl was lucky. She only had minor injuries. Both of them were crying, the father from his pain and the daughter because it was probably the first time she ever saw her dad cry. It was very embarrassing.

One of the worst things I ever saw was the aftermath of a double-suicide bombing; the Sunnis were attacking the Shiites at a mosque in our patrol zone. It was the eve of a big Shiite holiday. People watched as two Sunnis pulled up in car and went in opposite directions toward the crowd who were making a fuss over their parking job. One guy immediately blew himself up, injuring and killing a lot of people. Everyone started pointing at the other man, yelling, "Him, him, he was with the bomber." Security guards assigned to the mosque opened fire, and he exploded himself in another part of the crowd. A blaze of bullets erupted as other random people started shooting out of fear, not knowing what was going on.

I don't know how many were killed… dozens. There was a breakdown in communication, even among the troops. I dressed the wounds of an Iraqi teenager who was shot three times. I knew enough Arabic to tell his relatives to put him in a car and go to the hospital. After the bombing there were unidentifiable pieces of flesh and other body parts all over the place. Most of the adults didn't want to deal with picking it up. So they had their children do it. It was nasty. The whole ordeal was a horrendous, chaotic mess. Just like the whole business of war itself.

GREG PAPADATOS