Ben Brody’s Photo Blog

We are lounging on broken couches for hours, watching movies and eating girl scout cookies - a couple of helicopter pilots, some crewmen and medics, one camera guy.  My thoughts drifted to my upcoming vacation and the fine food and hotels I will surely enjoy, when a loudspeaker blared, “MEDEVAC MEDEVAC MEDEVAC.”

Suddenly I’m alone in front of the giant TV, and the wail of Blackhawks starting up drifts in from the tarmac.  I put on my armor and cameras and run down the concrete to the helicopter, ducking under the spinning blades.  They are about eight feet up, but there’s something sinister about them.  So I duck.

The first run I go on, the medics pick up an unconscious man who was hit by a car.  The best brain injury people are up north in Balad, but that’s way out of our sector.   So we go as far north as Taji, and pass him off to another medevac crew that will take him the rest of the way.  The medics exchange paperwork and stretchers.  The man breathes heavily as he passes under the churning rotors on the airfield.  There are no more calls that day.

I sleep for a few hours on the couch, under the loudspeaker.  The crews have bunks in the building, and they sleep fully clothed, some wearing armor.

The next day, the same scene and we’re airborne, tear-assing due south at 150 mph.  Other pilots plot their routes days ahead, to avoid enemy-heavy areas.  Other pilots have gunners.  Because of the Geneva Convention, this medevac bird has a photographer sitting where there is ordinarily a machine gun.

The landing is dusty, and there is no way to keep it all out of the patients’ wounds.  They are both Iraqi police officers.   One had been shot in the face, the other was hit in the head with a hammer.  A fucking hammer.  If they’re not through killing each other with hammers, we need to leave this country.  There’s just no holding back that kind of wrath.

We deliver them to the surgical hospital in Baghdad.  There are marble floors there and everyone wears purple gloves.  I’ve always avoided that place like the plague.  Blood and torn flesh doesn’t bother me at all, but guts do, deeply, and there’s lot of guts on regular display there.  Mercifully, we leave as quickly as we came.

We flew over my old neighborhood in east Baghdad, the smell rising up to greet me as we banked hard over the mighty Tigris, and headed south, home.