Dustoff

3 September 2009

In the field of medicine, being a surgeon is pretty much the coolest thing going. Now, I am obviously a bit biased, but objectively speaking, the job rocks. You get to take care of profound problems in a systematic way, in a finite time period, and you get immediate feedback. You get to control your little fiefdom (the operating room), and people generally listen to you. And the cool thing is, most non-surgeons in medicine are a little afraid of you, because you can’t be quite right in the head to have survived a surgical residency. Here in Afghanistan, though, the surgeons aren’t the biggest heroes. The real rock stars out here are the guys on the Medevac team. The Army calls it “dustoff” because of the image of helicopters filled with injured soldiers taking off rapidly from a hot landing zone in a cloud of dust. In fact, the Army really invented the whole helicopter “lifeflight” concept in Korea and honed it during the Vietnam War. Here in Afghanistan, the dustoff team has taken things to an entirely new level and they are amazing. They often pick up critically injured soldiers, Marines, and civilians directly from the battlefied, often under fire, and transport them safely to our health care teams. They also transport unbelievably sick and injured patients from our forward medical sites to our bigger hospitals for complex surgery. They do this at well over 10,000 feet, at altitudes and temperatures that are supposed to be incompatible with helicopter flight. Their office is cold, jolting around at 200 knots, generally completely dark, and did I mention that they’re often being shot at?

The current Medevac team is a national guard unit from California and they are absolutely the best. They are all paramedics, as opposed to just emergency medical technicians, which is the Army standard. They do procedures every day in an environment that would make nearly any surgical intern squirm. I would credit these guys for saving more lives than just about any facet of our trauma care system. Here at Bagram, Dustoff is pretty much the coolest thing going.