F*cking almost got shot today.

That's the way a medic started his letter to one of our Angels. You can read all about it at my buddy MaryAnn's blog.

I write a lot about the medics who work the CSH's and aid stations and the casualties they have to deal that come in their door. Lots of these folks also have experience as combat medics - the ones who go into combat with a unit and are right there on the scene with them. In a combat unit, nobody has it tougher than the medics. A lot of them are 19 year-old kids, with 16 weeks of training and all of a sudden they are responsible for providing all the care that a fully-equipped ambulance team of EMT's back home would...with only what they can carry in a backpack.

Two that I adopted, PFC Krystle V, a medic with the 303rd MP Co and Carlos with the 3ID talked about that, and asked for books to help them learn more. And evey medic asks for snacks, games, toiletries, etc for the men and women in their units. They never stop taking care of their own, and watch out for them every way they can. When I ask what they want for themselves..., it's always what they want for their charges instead.

On Iwo Jima, the Japanese targeted the medics first, knowing that if they wounded one, the rest of the Americans would do anything to get to him. They also reasoned that every medic they killed also counted for all the wounded Americans he would have saved.

"You don't get combat pay because you don't fight"

From Stars and Stripes

Bill Mauldin drew medics in his classic cartoons about WWII infantrymen in Europe. My uncle Harry was a medic with Patton's army in France, and told me about crawling out of a foxhole to find his Dodge ambulance full of holes after a German artillery attack.

My buddy Jason at Ramadi mentioned that he has to send a 19 year old female medic out tomorrow, and that he lost a medic, Lee Lewis in OIF in 2005. Jason said he was a good man and a good father. I bet he was a good medic, too.

And my niece, Karen, just finished Medic school and was assigned to the the 10th CSH in Colorado. They're expecting to be deployed again soon......

God Speed

-Rog