April 2012, Mason Steil a Medic and his Army unit deployed to Afghanistan. On June 1st, after being in a foreign country, dodging bullets and IED’s literally for 31 days Mason found himself in the kill zone of an IED in which would change his and his family’s lives forever. This is Mason’s story.
They were everywhere. Everyday I heard dozens of them explode and destroy either from my unit detonating them on purpose and on accident, or from the other units surrounding mine discovering them the same way. On June 1st at 18:45, during a routine foot patrol back to a small OP (Observation Point) 1100 meters from our patrol base I saw something strange, a black piece of plastic half buried in the ground. The footpath was flooded from irrigation, something that had never occurred before. My soldiers pulled 360 degree security while the Platoon Sergeant – SFC Hoover, the RTO – PFC Waugh and I – the Platoon Medic all gathered in the middle several feet from the suspicious object, about 500m away was the TOC (Tactical Operations Center). Little did we know, we were standing in the kill zone of a real IED. What I saw was only a decoy, as we stepped away from the suspected device we began to move forward. I noticed Waugh was behind me, between the SFC Hoover and myself, I stood in place just off the path and told him to hurry so that I could be directly in front of Hoover although my usual spot was directly behind him. We were only about 10 more minutes away from our destination OP. Once Waugh was in front of me and there was about 20m between each of us, everything went black. My ears were ringing, I was confused, it was the loudest boom I had ever heard. As the screams of my injured men clawed their way into my ears I started to understand what had just happened. “That’s what an IED sounds like” I thought. I attempted to run forward towards the screams of “Doc!!” coming from Waugh in front of me. When I took a step, the shrapnel in my legs caused me to slump down, hidden in the tall opium stalks. “Doc!! Medic! Where the hell is Doc??!” I heard quietly beneath the ringing in my head, then I began to feel the hot blood pouring down my face like a faucet. My first thought was to catch it all in my hands, I knew it was bad and I was pretty sure I was not going to make it. I stuck my other hand up above the brush to let the others know where I was, I tried crawling towards Waugh but it was exhausting. I needed to stay conscious but it was getting more and more difficult by the minute. I found out that Hoover, behind me, was injures as well. I was trying to get info my Joes about their injuries so that I could tell them what to do in between spitting out teeth, blood, pieces of bone and other debris. I started to hand off all my medical supplies to my men so that they could help the others and do the job I had trained for almost 3 years to do. I believed then that I wasn’t going to wake up if I fell asleep so I struggled to keep myself awake and sitting upright, but I was convinced I could still treat my men. I told the guys treating me that I was proud of them, their tourniquets on my legs were tight and painful but effective, I knew I had trained them well. I told them to tell my fiancé Katie, my siblings and my parents I loved them and was sorry for putting myself in that spot that day. Soon after I was giving up the last bit of hope a helicopter landed close by, they briskly loaded us inside and the bird began the 25 minute flight towards the hospital at KAF. After we were off-loaded, a team of British medics brought us in the trauma room and I was fighting them from attempting to start a Cricothyroidotomy, a tube in my throat to keep an open airway. I begged them to put me to sleep and begin surgery, I was tired of trying to stay conscious. At that point, I still wasn’t convinced that I would survive this but I knew Hoover and Waugh would be ok. My Joes did my job well and initiated immediate medical attention we all needed when I couldn’t give it to them.
At this point I knew that my only chance was surgery as soon as possible. It took about a week to make the trip from Kandahar to Bagram, then to Landstuhl and finally to Walter Reed in Bethesda. Most of the bones in my face were shattered, and teeth were shoved up into my sinuses when a proportionately large fragment of hot metal entered my left cheek, pushing through the middle of my skull, through the bottom of my right eye socket, and stopped once it wrapped around my optic nerve just millimeters from my brain. I’m missing a chunk of my upper jaw, and have lost sight in my right eye. I sustained a traumatic brain injury and have a few pieces of shrapnel in my legs and groin that were unable to be removed. But I am alive, and I have all my limbs. Most of the young men that I met during my 10month stay at Walter Reed were not as lucky. We all have a lot to be thankful for. I wear a bracelet with one of my soldier’s name and KIA date to remind me that each day I wake up is one that I very well could not be alive for if things had happened just a little bit differently that day. I was angry when I got the call that he was killed in a firefight only 2 weeks after I was medevac’d. I felt a massive responsibility for the 30+ soldiers in my platoon whose lives depended on my medical knowledge and physical fitness. Since I was taken from them before I ever really had the chance to do the job I had trained so long to do, I felt guilty. Guilty that I should have been there for the remaining 8 months of the deployment, and guilty that a medic replaced me that day when Sgt. Rodriguez was shot, above his body armor, right through his heart. But I know now that there wasn’t much anybody could have done. So when I think that his wife lost her husband, and their infant son will never know his father, I try to live each day for him and those who cannot. I’m lucky to be alive. I’m not really spiritual or religious, but I was given a second chance at life that I refuse to take for granted.
Mason Steil – Army Medic
