Raziqullah laid motionless on the green stretcher as blood oozed across his forehead, dripping onto the floor of Forward Operating Base Blessing’s aid station.

Army Maj. Durren Hightower, a physician’s assistant, looked up from the massive head wound that exposed the 15-year-old boy’s brain, and sighed, “You know he isn’t going to have a good outcome, right?”

One of the medics, fighting to keep the boy breathing by pumping oxygen into his lungs, replied quietly, “Yes sir.”

Raziqullah, a shepherd, who like many Afghans has only one name, left home early on the morning of April 23 to tend to his flock in the mountains around his village of Gosalak. His family found him hours later at the mountain’s rocky bottom. He had fallen.

The boy’s two uncles rushed him from his tiny village to FOB Blessing, an American military outpost manned by Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in the remote Konar province of Afghanistan.

“The call came in over the radio that we had an Afghan boy at the front gate with a head injury, so our medics rushed down there,” said Maj. Paresh R. Patel, the aid station’s physician. “It was bad.”
According to Patel, the tiny aid station sees levels of trauma like this almost weekly. Local villagers flock to the aid station seeking Western medical treatment they can’t normally get from their local clinics.

As they rushed Raziqullah to one of aid station’s two stretchers, the medical personnel immediately began surveying the unconscious child, his small bruised frame covered in blood.

“What happened?” one of them cried to the interpreter.

“He fell off a mountain,” the interpreter replied.

Raziqullah’s breathing was failing, he was fading quickly. The Soldiers placed an oxygen tube in the boy’s throat, which became his lifeline.

Racing against time, the doctors and medics pumped Raziqullah’s body with medication and treated his wounds, using an ultrasound to check for internal injuries.

Hightower looked at the boys crushed skull with worry.

“This sucks,” said Army Spc. Jeremy Shepler, combat medic, shaking his head in concern as he pumped oxygen into the boy’s lungs.

A fellow medic looked up from Raziqullah and frowned. “Yeah,” he said.

After two hours of fighting to keep the boy alive, Patel called for his interpreter, “We need to go talk to the family,” he said. His face was grim.

With tears streaming down the face of one of the boy’s two uncles, Patel explained that Raziqullah was brain dead, and was kept alive only by the breathing tube that pumped oxygen into his lungs. “What do you want to do?” he asked them.

The young shepherd’s uncles had to make a difficult decision.

Finally they asked to have their nephew’s breathing tube removed.

A Muslim chaplin from the Afghan national army was called to the aid station to pray for Raziqullah, as the two uncles grieved for their fading nephew.

Less than 10 minutes later, Raziqullah died.

His body was wrapped in a white shawl, with strings tied around his toes and chin according to Muslim tradition, and then his family took him home to be buried.

“In the States, you would have a less than 5 percent survivability rate for this type of injury,” said Shepler. “Here it’s almost nonexistent…All we can do is try every time.”

DVIDS
Story by Sgt. Matthew C. Moeller

Army Spc. Danielle Lafoille, a combat medic from Manistique, Mich., places a bandage on an Afghan boy at Forward Operating Base Blessing, April 7. The boy is one of the more than 4,000 Afghans treated by 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division Soldiers at FOB Blessing’s aid station since July of last year.

Every morning outside Forward Operating Base Blessing, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, combat medics comb through a crowd of sick or injured Afghans desperate for medical attention.

“This is their ER. If something happens, this is where they are going to come,” said Army Spc. Danielle Lafoille, of Manistique, Mich.

In fact, since arriving at FOB Blessing last July, the 1st Infantry Division Soldiers have treated more than 4,000 Afghans, some walking as long as two days for treatment.

Although handling mostly minor ailments, such as cuts and runny noses, the aid station has seen its fair share of major injuries.

“We see burns, lacerations; we do get gunshot wounds, major bone breaks. Just a huge variety of things you see in the local U.S. trauma room,” said Army Spc. Timothy Lickiss, a combat medic from Chester, Calif.

“Right now we’re treating two patients who had hot tar spilled on them during an industrial accident,” said Army Spc. Jeremy Shepler, combat medic.

“He was only wearing sandals,” one of the station’s two physicians said. “If this was the U.S., he would have been required to wear rubber boots and gloves. Now he’s just lucky he’s going to keep his feet.”

Many ailments the Soldiers treat are not seen in the U.S. because of occupational safety regulations and vaccinations.

“If they had a higher standard of hygiene or healthcare, a lot of these illnesses would be removed,” Shepler said.

Although service members have been working with Afghan physicians since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, many local clinics in Konar province still do not have the knowledge to properly treat these types of injuries, causing many villagers to turn to the U.S. for help.

“[The local clinics] are great at some things, but then they’ll miss some simple things,” Shepler said. “They may have the technology to do X-rays, but they end up applying bandages like tourniquets.”

A major concern for FOB Blessing’s aid station is bone setters, practicing what the medics call “old remedies.”

“A person will have a broken bone, and they go to the local bone setter, who will put eggs on it. As crazy as it is, that is some of the stuff we have seen,” Lafoille said.

With only one surgeon and one physician’s assistant, the aid station is not always able to provide higher levels of care. If necessary, the Soldiers will evacuate the injured Afghans to other FOBs with better facilities.

“We treat them the best we can here,” Lickiss said. “But we won’t hesitate to push them out to other FOBs with larger facilities if we need to.”

As the end of their deployment nears, the Soldiers know they have made a difference among the Afghan people.

“The locals have learned to trust our medicine, because we bring the standards that [we have] in the U.S.,” Shepler said. “They come to us knowing that we have the knowledge and experience to make sure that they get better.”

CJTF-101
Written by By Army Sgt. Matthew C. Moeller,
5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment