War Story 8

By Katie Bigelow

There I was, in the gym, in Iraq.

I was in Iraq in the early days starting with a ground war in 2003.  We lived out in the dirt without many resources. I imagine what you’re thinking…they had a gyms in Iraq at that time? The answer is yes. We always had some sort of gym. Soldiers are resourceful. Oftentimes, our gym was comprised of hunks of concrete and rebar fashioned into a barbell or dumbbell or a pull up bar and whatever else we could scrounge together.

After being established in Iraq for a while, MWR brought treadmill weight sets so many of us spent long hours between flights and missions in the gym. I also ran, a lot. I carefully chose the time of day where I could safely run in the light of day but not the heat of day. As a woman aviator, I had significant concerns about any sort of unplanned landing and apprehension from enemy forces. It was my hope and goal that I could out run anybody, regardless of how much weight I was carrying in gear. I’m not gonna lie.  For this woman, I had to work really hard to be faster and stronger than my counterparts. My thinking was that f I can survive an unplanned landing, I would have to next figure out how to survive the land and enemy forces who treated the women they “loved” like slaves. How would they treat a woman like me? All that to say, I spent long hours in the gym and running out in the sand.

I was often the only female around the gym so I wore headphones and tried not to talk to anyone. Lots of people seemed to think that I needed their particular type of advice despite the fact that I have had extensive training in weightlifting. They were familiar faces, but I didn’t know people  other than by name and the occasional hello.

One day, however, a soldier I frequently saw at the gym stopped me and asked me a simple question.  “Did you fly on a mission yesterday?” I had, in fact, gone on a medevac mission the day before.  It was noteworthy in that I had felt bad for the patient because the soldiers carrying the litter dropped the patient on rocky terrain on the way to the aircraft.  It was the only time I saw a litter patient dropped. 

The moment I said that I had been on that mission, arms wrapped around me in a bear hug by a random stranger soldier.  He had come with his buddy to the gym hoping to find the pilot that they knew worked out there.  He was the soldier that had been dropped. But all he remembered was being the soldier that have been rescued. He just hugged me and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” In that moment, it felt like there could have been no greater privilege than to be a medical evacuation pilot.

Many, many other soldiers we flew wouldn’t live to see their family, and it was rare for them to go home whole after a ride from a medical evacuation helicopter. But I will forever feel honored to have had the privilege to have at least tried to bring them home to their family. I prayed for many hours, for many soldiers, and their moms and their wives and their children whose lives would forever be changed because of those moments that I was living through with a soldier in my helicopter. When I see wounded warriors and vets from the past two decades, and I often wonder if we were together on one of those days in the aircraft flying as fast as a helicopter would go to the hospital.

I am so thankful for brave and smart American surgeons that gave every ounce of their skill and effort to save our soldiers. I never really saved anyone. I just drove the ambulance….as fast as the helicopter could possibly go.