Lest We Forget

  Lest We Forget:

  A Ranger Medic’s Story

  Leo “Doc” Jenkins

  Copyright © 2013 Leo Jenkins

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0991286502

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9912865-0-8

  Dedication

  To the men of the 75th Ranger Regiment. This is for you. This is my story but it is all of our stories. My sincerest hope is that even if we have never met that you can relate to the words that follow. This was written for you, my brothers, in an effort that those outside of our fraternity may better understand our unique and valuable personalities. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have done as my mentors, as my friends, as my brothers.

  “From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered-

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother:”

  ~William Shakespeare

  Foreword

  In late 2007 I attempted to work through issues that I was having related to my assimilation from the military to the college lifestyle by writing a book. This book was never finished due to my hard drive crashing. This time I have decided to compose my thoughts on a blog so that in the event that my archaic computer decides once again to commit cyber suicide, I will not be forced into another three day "coping" binder.

  The transition from the military to college was a difficult era. At that particular time in my life I felt a great deal of cognitive dissonance for having left the military to join the very social environment which we spoke of with disdain in our un-air conditioned tents in Iraq. I felt like I had betrayed my brothers, abandoned them in their time of need. Telling the true stories of my experiences as a Ranger medic in Iraq and Afghanistan absolutely helped me to process and cope with what had taken place. It was also a very emotionally draining process. The feeling of writing just a couple of pages was analogous to running a marathon. This was a big reason why I decided to not rewrite that book. It has been over five years and I finally feel emotionally strong enough to rewrite some of those events. However, the purpose of this project is not dedicated to the assimilation process from special operations to the civilian world.

  My hopes here are multifaceted. It is very important that the stories of the brave men with whom I served be told. The greatest disrespect that we can show our nations warriors is to forget their sacrifices. Throughout the course of these factual, real life stories, I hope to shed light on the mistakes that have been made, the lessons learned and the projection of the world through the eyes of a warrior that no longer has a war to fight. It is important to know that the men of special operations are not superhuman, unfeeling robots. They are young men with a spectacular job. A great deal is asked of them but at the end of the day they breathe the same air as everyone else. There will be foul language and obscure references. There will be stories that involve drinking, fighting, nudity, and other crimes that I was fortunate enough to not be charged with. Enjoy.

  ……

  Chapter 1- Cuts Marked in the March of Men

  The sticky fluid I felt between my thumb and forefinger meant that I had found the vein. Blood has a much more viscous texture than sweat. With the moon providing almost zero illumination tonight, the subtle tackiness on the fingers of my ungloved hand was the only indicator that I had found my target. He didn’t flinch when I perforated his left arm despite hitting him with the biggest needle in my bag, one that is typically reserved for relieving the thoracic pressure built up by a punctured lung. This thing had the girth of a McDonald’s straw. Later I would explain to my superior medical officer that the near pitch-black environment was the reason why Greg received a lawn dart in his antecubital fossa but really it was because he was always a dick to me.

  Less than an hour ago we were sitting packed into the fuselage of a C130 cargo plane. What a spectacular sight it must have been from the ground to see the silhouettes of hundreds of Army Rangers descending from the heavens and landing on that airfield. With very little visibility and even less control of those old parachutes, accidents in the air are bound to happen. As we plummeted to earth I found myself literally running on top of another Ranger’s parachute in an event known as “sky sharking.” I’m not entirely sure of the physics behind the reaction but two parachutes cannot stay inflated atop one another. I watched in helpless terror as his shoot collapsed sending him directly to the earth like a shot put. There was nothing that I could do. When I landed I quickly collected my parachute and removed my rifle from the scabbard that was affixed to my left hip during the jump. The aid bag that sat nestled at my thighs during that long flight was unhooked and on my back in a matter of seconds. As quickly as I hit the ground I was moving. I had to link up with the rest of my platoon. The airborne infiltration was just the ride to the office, now it was time to go to work.

  En route to the objective rally point I found a young private kneeled over another man whose parachute was still attached to his motionless body. As I moved closer I heard the eerie sounds of the unconscious Ranger’s agonal breathing pattern. His respirations were a mix of gasping and snoring. As I took a knee by his side I realized this must have been the guy that I sky sharked. Fuck. Instructing the young private who was already there to hold his head in an effort to keep his neck from moving, I began my assessment. I didn’t feel any bones out of place or any bleeding. Just as fast as he impacted the ground he awoke. “What the fuck, Doc?” He yelled as his eyelids shot open.

  A tsunami size wave of relief crashed over me. I kept him talking to me as I called for additional assistance. I hate the radio. I never know how to talk on that damn thing. Spending my youth watching shows like GI Joe have clearly taught me bad habits and I have a tendency to use terms like “Copy” and “Over” when they are not at all appropriate. Despite my inept military vernacular I managed to get the senior company medic to my location within a matter of minutes. I give him the patient’s details and inform him that I need to rally with my platoon; we have been tasked with assaulting a primary target building. He tells me that he can take control of the patient and for me to get to where my guys were now.

  I’ve always been a decent runner, however, running along side an airfield in the middle of the night wearing night vision goggles and about 60 pounds of medical equipment and ammunition tends to affect even the most proficient athletes. The fact that I wasn’t entirely sure where I had landed in relation to my platoon’s rally point also made things difficult. The cold damp air seized my lungs as my effort increased. The hot breath escaping from my chest was fogging my single green eye-piece. It didn’t seem to be helping anyway. Without providing the advantage of depth perception, that night vision device acted more like a luminous green kaleidoscope as it jumped up and down with every impact of my foot to the ground.

  As I reach my platoon I am told that a man is down. The Platoon Sergeant tells me that he has sustained a gunshot wound and points to the Ranger lying on his back near a junction box outside of our target building. Seeing a fellow Ranger lying wounded is never an easy thing to take in. This isn't my first experience with it and in the years to come it will become all too familiar. It’s not my first time in this scenario but my heart still finds a way to elevate it’s already increased tempo after that run. My body feels heavy with the increase of adrenaline and I can feel my limbs become cold as my sympathetic nervous system pulls blood from my extremities. I feel the cold wet grass soak through my pants and kiss my knee immediately as it hits the ground next to Greg. He is alert and answers all of my questions as I sweep his body for holes. He already has a trauma dressing on the wound. I double-check it and a very brief moment of pride sweeps over me because the Ranger
I’d taught how to perform immediate tactical combat casualty care did so flawlessly.

  Within minutes my Platoon Sergeant is asking me what Greg’s status is. My heart rate had found itself in a normal rhythm by this point and I let him know that the patient was stable. I got an ‘atta boy’ from both Greg and the Sergeant First Class that was standing over me. I’m not sure if it was because I managed to place that massive catheter in his arm in the pitch-black in a matter of seconds or the fact that Greg now realized that the medic has a great deal of autonomy when it comes to dishing out and taking away pain on the battlefield but, he was always a lot nicer to me after that night.

  We are given the direction to hit the target building that is a few hundred feet away. I place myself in my Platoon Sergeant’s back pocket as we make our way to the entrance. The sharp pop of a flash bang stings my ears as we flow into the poorly lit building. The smell of gunpowder hangs in my nostrils as we move fluidly from room to room. In the darkness of this warehouse gunshots are popping off in controlled pairs from my left and right. No movement requires thinking; everything is instinctual. He goes left. I go right. He moves toward a door. I go through it. We clear the entire warehouse in a matter of minutes. Before I know it we are back outside in the crisp winter air and the sweat that has collected on my cloths creates an inclement environment. We sat like vigilant statues in the darkness. Minutes seemed like hours pulling security on one knee over the building we’d just cleared. Joints become stiff and as the silence played an eerie contrast to the calamity and violence that we had all just experienced. Then that one beautiful word travels through my radio and into my eardrum, “INDEX!”

  That means that we are done. This training mission is over. We would conduct a similar training mission each night that week in an effort to ensure that our entire Battalion is prepared for a mass attack on any airport in the world at a moments notice. Sleep would be limited to 3-4 hours per night and the conditions made as close to the real world as possible. The lessons learned from this and the literally hundreds of other training missions that we conducted would be invaluable throughout the course of my time as a Ranger medic fighting in the Global War on Terrorism.

  ……

  Chapter 2 - The Hard Sell

  John Stuart Mill said, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

  I discovered that gem after I left the military but somehow it captures the precise emotion that I felt prior to joining the United States Army. I was 20 years old at the time and had been a firefighter for a small department in central Arizona for a little while. I loved my job; it was all I ever wanted to do since I was six years old and saw my father pull up in front of our house in Glendale riding in the back of a giant shiny fire engine. I was beyond lucky to have been hired at such a young age. I graduated high school early so I could attend an EMT course at Glendale Community College. I missed walking at my graduation ceremony because I was helping pull glass out of a man's arm at Thunderbird hospital as a part of my final training to become an emergency medical technician. I was accepted into the fire academy at 18 years old and was one of, if not the youngest member of my class. I loved the academy; it was my first time being a part of a paramilitary organization. The group physical training (PT) was something that I enjoyed very much. There was also a deep sense of teamwork and camaraderie that I reveled in. My single father essentially raised me in a fire station. He worked two jobs to keep my two sisters and myself in decent living conditions. That man set a shining example of what a parent should be, what a man should be taking on the responsibility of both parents and shouldering more than his share of the task. Watching him absorb such a burden to ensure that my siblings and I were always taken care of taught me a lesson about responsibility that resonates to this day. I saw all firefighters that way, benevolent and strong, capable of taking care of their own and putting others needs before their own.

  I woke up on my 19th birthday and went for a run before heading off to my academy class. There was nothing else to eat in my house so I sat down to a tuna fish sandwich for breakfast, turned on the TV as I ate and searched for my boots. I looked up at the TV just in time to see the second plane strike the World Trade Center. At the time, the gravity of what happened hadn't sunk in. It was just another event thousands of miles away being reported on the news. It didn’t seem to have an immediate impact on what I was doing so I pressed on. I finished my sandwich and headed off to class. By the time that I arrived the reports of firefighters being trapped in the buildings were already coming in. The word somber does nothing to describe the mood at the academy that morning. It was as if every man in that room lost a brother. They had. I remembered years earlier when a news report came on TV about a Phoenix firefighter that had been trapped in a building and lost his life. Even at a young age I saw how much it impacted my father. The loss of a single fellow firefighter was devastating, whether you were on the same crew or not. Now we are getting reports of hundreds being killed. We were let go for the day to be with our families. The tone was no less melancholy when I got to my father’s home.

  It wasn't until months later that the greatest impact of this event hit me. I had the job that I dreamed of since I was playing with matchbox cars in the sand box behind my house but it didn't feel right. I saw video images of American's my age preparing to go overseas every day. These teenagers were getting ready to go to a foreign land to protect my American dream and me. They didn't know my family or me but they were preparing to place themselves in harms way so that I could continue my version of the American dream. I stood by everything I loved but this was still incredibly unsettling to me. It is a difficult feeling to put into words but I guess you could say that I felt like a hypocrite. Why should I get to sit back for the next 20 years wrapped in a cape of freedom and security that has been provided to me by the exertions of better men than myself. The decision to join the military was an easy one for me at this point. The difficult part would be telling my father. I knew how proud he was of me that I was following in his footsteps. I know that he would be proud of me no matter what but I almost felt as if it was an insult to leave the very profession that had provided a home and food to me for my entire life. A part of me felt like I was turning my back on those guys that looked out for me on the job.

  When it came time to let my father know what I had decided he responded exactly like I figured that he would. He was concerned yet supportive. He has always had my back in everything that I have ever done. Everything. I know that he didn't want me to go into the military, especially since our country was going to be fighting a war on two different fronts. He put that aside and got me in touch with a former Air Force Special Operations Pararescuemen - PJ. At the time I was planning on going in as a combat medic. Bob, the PJ, told me, "there is only one place in the Army for a hard charging swinging dick like (me).... that's the Rangers." He said, "You can be a medic if you want, that's cool, but do it with the Rangers."

  I respected Bob; hell, I still respect him. He let me come to his home where he shared pictures and stories from his time in special operations. It made me incredibly excited for the challenge ahead. I owe a part of my success to the advice that Bob gave me during that time. Having a former member of special operations as a mentor was invaluable to my success. Pieces of advice like, “be the grey man” would echo through my thoughts throughout my training.

  ……

  Chapter 3 -FAR

  I can't feel my hands. Why the hell can't we put our hands in our pockets? What is the point of putting pockets in the uniform if it is against the rules to put your hands in them? It's late November 2003, the first day of Ranger Indoctrination Program or
RIP for short. Even the name suggests that we are all in for a near-death experience. I have already graduated from Army basic training, Army Combat medic school and Airborne school to get here.

  There are 150 of us standing in formation waiting for the madness to begin. There was close to 500 in our RIP-hold group. There were simply too many guys coming out of Airborne school and not enough equipment for them to start a class. Every month the top 150 physical agility scores got spots to the next RIP class, the rest would roll back into a holding pattern that some say is worse than RIP itself. The PT test is nothing special, it consists of 2 minutes of max effort push ups, 2 minutes of max effort sit ups and a 2 mile run.

  There really isn't an agenda so while waiting to get into the next class we would get tasked out to anyone on post that needed something done. We would pull weeds, get smoked, paint curbs, get smoked, move furniture, get smoked, change targets at shooting ranges, get smoked, stand around in formation for hours on end, and then you guessed it, get smoked. Getting smoked is an interesting occurrence. The first time it happens is very confusing. I recall being in a sort of holding barracks before starting basic training and some guy decided to take a nap. The drill Sergeant made the entire group do push ups. As soon as the majority of guys couldn’t do push ups anymore he had us roll to our backs and do flutter kicks until we failed at that. This went on for about 15 minutes or so. The entire time I couldn’t help but think, why the fuck am I getting punished because this asshole was on his neck in the middle of the day? I would come to learn that there were varying degrees of “getting smoked.” There was the quick, “we got shit to do but you were being dumb so do 25 push ups and get up” smoking. There was the, “I’m trying to teach you a lesson that will help you survive the rigors of combat” smoking. There was the, “I know I can make this kid quit if I make him do air squats until he pukes on himself” smoking. There was the “Fuck you I just got my Ranger tab or my promotion so I’m going to mess you up because I’ve been getting messed up every day for the last 2 years” smoking. And my personal favorite the, “I don’t even have a reason, I’m just fucking board and I out-rank you so start doing push ups” smoking.