Copyright 2006 San Antonio Express-News
All Rights Reserved
By SIG CHRISTENSON
San Antonio Express-News (Texas)
His face darkened by camouflage green and black, Sgt. 1st Class Vern Campigoto high-crawls crablike up a rocky slope, then pauses — the sound of rifle fire coming from the left and then the right.
Pop pop pop.
He moves with the speed of a slug, arms and legs splayed out, advancing 3 feet in 45 seconds before rising, rolling to the ground and firing his M-16.
“Med-ic!” a voice cries.
There is a hint of the battlefield here, but on a hot, windless day, Campigoto isn’t quite feeling the adrenaline rush of a real firefight. To start with, he’s on a craggy hill at Camp Bullis, north of San Antonio. And the sound of gunfire would be far louder if this were real combat — so loud you can’t think.
Campigoto, 33, of Johnstown, Pa., is competing with 36 other soldiers for the right to become the Army’s top medic.
Two GIs have already fallen out of the 2006 Expert Field Medic Challenge, a contest among the best the Army has. It started here in 1994 and is back in San Antonio by popular demand after a seven-year hiatus.
The winner gets an Army Commendation Medal. Everyone scores points for promotion.
“It’s pretty much bragging rights for the winner,” said Staff Sgt. Juan Perez, a 37-year-old native of Corpus Christi.
Going the distance
The contest is a test of knowledge, skill and will. It began in the wee hours Wednesday with troops doing the Army physical training test — push-ups, sit-ups and a 2-mile run. They clambered over obstacles, threaded though a land navigation course, hit the rifle range and took a 100-question test.
Lights-out came at 1 a.m. and reveille followed too quickly, at 6. They ate battlefield rations and then hit the trail again, this time on Lane 3, where the medic wears a Kevlar vest, carries a 12-pound aid bag and is soldier, survivor and savior all rolled into one.
Treating injured soldiers in an urban battleground would come later in the day, when the mercury hit 94 degrees and the drained contestants had little left but heart.
Day 3 was to climax with a predawn, 12-mile march along the paved and caliche roads that cut through Bullis’ rolling hills.
“It’s a strenuous competition that will take a lot out of you,” said Campigoto, a 14-year Army veteran. “It shows where your breaking point is. It takes you to the brink of it.”
High and low crawls are exhausting, and at one point Campigoto seems to be on the verge of exhaustion, his progress measured in inches. But once he clears that part of the course, he faces a serious challenge. A soldier is on his back, not moving. Two other soldiers stand nearby.
“I can’t feel my hands,” the soldier says.
If this had been real, Campigoto would have had a life-altering injury on his hands. Every decision and action could have far-reaching consequences.
He knows clear thinking and precise directions are essential.
Leading the way
“Listen. You’re going to take all commands from me,” the winded Campigoto tells the two soldiers. “Listen to everything I say, do everything I do. Got it?”
Campigoto holds the moaning soldier as the other GIs work to slip a brace under his neck and then carefully place him on a flat, plastic spine board. They use cloth straps that double as tourniquets to strap him at the chest, waist and ankles. Then it’s time to move him to the litter.
“Ready?” Campigoto asks. “One! Two! Three!”
An evaluator, Staff Sgt. Irene Becker, takes notes in the sun as Campigoto’s helpers tie the board to the green cloth litter.
“On the litter! On the litter!” Campigoto barks. “Not on the edge of his leg!”
A break would have been in order once the straps were tied in the right places, but that wasn’t part of the program.
Five soldiers lay only 20 yards away — the triage part of the course. The medic evaluates five sets of injuries that can range from broken limbs and bullet wounds to burns.
The first thing is to be sure that the patient, if unconscious, is breathing. Medics put an ear near the person’s mouth and a free hand on the chest. It isn’t always easy to hear someone breathe, so you watch to see if the hand rises.
Then check the victim’s eyes. Do they respond to light — a sign of life?
The medic also feels under the patient’s head and body and then looks at the hands. If they’re bloody, the bleeding must stop. Minutes and seconds are critical; most battlefield casualties “bleed out.”
These are called the “ABCs” of battlefield medicine. They stand for airway, breathing and circulation. Every new medic at Fort Sam Houston’s 91-Whiskey course learns those three letters in their first days of training.
Highs and lows
Campigoto is far ahead of his young charges. They’re wanna-be medics who haven’t begun training and offer a perfect test of his leadership. Every move is a potential mistake.
“Across his shoes, not across his thighs!” Campigoto says as they strap one patient to a litter.
The triage team moves slowly in the burning sun. One soldier calls out for water while another man is loaded on the truck.
“He just loaded his immediate first,” said Becker, the evaluator. “A bad sign.”
This is Campigoto’s most seriously injured patient. He should be loaded last, so medics at the forward support hospital can get him off the truck first and quickly into the operating room.
But that’s just one mistake. More than 25 minutes pass before Becker, a 34-year-old Corpus Christi native, ends the drill. It was supposed to run 20 minutes, but not everyone is in the truck.
She says nothing to Campigoto. It slowly dawns on him.
“I did it backwards! I loaded the immediate first!”
He curses.
But Becker, in an interview, said Campigoto is the best of three soldiers she’s graded so far. His high and low crawls were excellent, and he took control of the situation. His failure in triage was due to fatigue.
But worse things lie ahead for combat medics at war. Becker’s boss, Sgt. 1st Class Truck Carlson, will never forget the day a 7-year-old Iraqi girl was rushed in for treatment during the first week of the 2003 invasion.
She was bleeding to death.
A Marine Corps veteran of Gulf War I, he saw a 21-year-old medic all but die with the child.
“After the child had been pronounced (dead), she was trying to clean her face so this young girl would be presentable to her parents,” said Carlson, a 38-year-old native of Atlanta. “And you could see that she had that thousand-yard stare. She had lost her innocence.”