Air Force aids Army with medevac missions

Published June 29, 2006
By Master Sgt. Orville F. Desjarlais Jr.
455th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan -- Last year, the Army asked the Air Force for help with its medevac operation. Called an in-lieu-of mission, the Air Force agreed to assist and tasked Master Sgt. Scott Currin to form the first team of Air Force enlisted aerospace evacuation technicians, or flight medics, as they like to call themselves.

Sergeant Currin, a senior flight medic at the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks City Base, Texas, knew the type of Airmen he needed on his team: ones with good flying skills, medics who specialized in treating trauma and people who could work in unique environments. Sergeant Currin found those traits in Tech. Sgts. Mark DeCorte and Shawn Bendixson, deployed from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and Kirtland AFB, N.M., respectively.

"I knew I could trust them to do something that has never been done before by the Air Force," Sergeant Currin said. "I didn't need someone who always needs to be told what to do."

The major difference between a medical evacuation, or medevac, and an aeromedical evacuation, or aerovac, is that medevac refers to moving patients from the point of injury, usually from the battlefield, to a nearby medical facility. The Army uses the UH-60Q, a specialized helicopter built on the Black Hawk's heritage. An aerovac refers to transporting patients via a fixed-wing aircraft, usually a C-130 Hercules or C-17 Globemaster III, from a medical facility to a higher level of care.

The flight medics' first order of business was to get qualified to fly in a helicopter, which meant attending helicopter survival school in January. When they finished in February, they deployed here.

A medevac crew consists of two pilots, two gunners and a flight medic. Two of the flight medics are based here, while one is always deployed to a forward-operating location like Qalat or Tarin Kowt to stay close to the action. They say when lives are in the balance, time is of the essence.

Because the Air Force normally doesn't carry out the medevac mission, it doesn't have a helicopter designed for that purpose. This meant the flight medics had to make do with what they had, the HH-60 Pave Hawk, a helicopter the Air Force uses for combat search and rescue missions. It, too, is a distant relative of the Army's Black Hawk.

"Our experience is with fixed-wing assets, like C-130s. Integrating to a rotary asset has been challenging," Sergeant Currin said. "(Treating patients in a helicopter is) like working in a broom closet as opposed to an auditorium. We've had to change the way we do business."

The flight medics have had to get accustomed to noisy, vibrating helicopters. They adapted their Air Force aeromedical evacuation medical equipment for use in the Pave Hawks. They found ways to secure their equipment, and they ran a cargo tie-down strap along the ceiling so they could grab hold of it to steady themselves when they have to lean over patients while wearing heavy body armor and other clunky equipment.

"The changes may sound rudimentary, but they really helped," Sergeant Currin said.

The 33rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron, deployed from Kadena Air Base, Japan, was the first squadron to have a combat-search-and-rescue mission and a medevac mission. They placed one HH-60 on alert to handle either task. More often than not, they used the alert aircraft for medevacs.

"This is my sixth deployment to the Middle East and fourth to Kandahar," said Maj. John Mangan, the 33rd ERQS commander. "We've done five times as much work than in all the others combined. If we got 10 rescues in the other deployments, that was good. On this deployment, we're out every day, every night -- sometimes four sorties a day. We escort the Army everywhere. When we fly with an Apache on our wing, let me tell you, that's pretty nice."

Every time they successfully pick up a patient, the medevac crew paints a little foot on the side of their aircraft. During four months, medevac aircrews have painted 135 feet on their aircraft. That equates to 30 percent of all medevac missions in Afghanistan. Not bad, considering the Air Force only has three aircrews on call.

"I have been blessed to be able to come out here and do something that has never been done with a team I was allowed to select," Sergeant Currin said.