helicopter. There were serious injuries, but it was unclear how many or how serious, and whether the bomb was part of a search and rescue trap, where enemies lie in ambush awaiting the rescue team.
The PJs were used to working with cloudy information, but this was ambiguous even for them. Lesmes knew they would have to bring heavy equipment, like the Jaws of Life and a diamond-tipped saw, because “you can’t just cut through an armored vehicle like a car door,” he told me. Weight was an obstacle, especially at altitude in the mountains. If the choppers were too heavy, they wouldn’t grab enough air to stay aloft. Fuel limitations were a challenge. Space was a bigger one. Each PJ came with gear, and each of the two helicopters only had interior space on the order of a large van. They didn’t know how many soldiers were injured badly enough to need evacuation, and how much space they would need for them.
Lesmes was certain of just one thing: he wanted to make sure they saved enough room for potential patients so that they would only have to visit the explosion site once. It would take extra time to treat and load severely wounded soldiers. The more time on site, the more likely the operation would draw enemy attention. The rescue team could end up needing a rescue team.
He was twenty-seven, and the previous year had led a stateside hurricane rescue team. Afghanistan was his first extended deployment, and he was directing a team with older members who had had numerous overseas deployments. As usual, Lesmes brought two team members to the operations center to get information and help him make sense of the situation. “Sometimes other guys are able to get really good questions out that I wouldn’t normally think of,” he told me. “And you want to share as much information as possible, and there isn’t a lot of time.” But there was little additional intel. “In Hollywood, a drone flies over the site and you get all the information,” Lesmes told me. “But that’s Hollywood.”
He walked out to the helicopters, where PJs were donning their full battle rattle, as he put it. The situation didn’t fit the usual decision trees; he laid out the challenges, and asked the men: How do we solve this?
Just move equipment around to cram more stuff into the helicopters, one team member suggested. Another said they could leave a few PJs with the Army convoy if they needed extra helicopter room for patients. One recommended they evacuate the most serious patients, and if a second trip was needed, move the convoy from the explosion site and meet them somewhere less conspicuous. But the bomb had exploded in the middle of a procession of vehicles, in rugged terrain. Lesmes didn’t even know how mobile the convoy would be.
“We weren’t coming up with any real solution that would give us an advantage. I wanted a speed advantage, and the ability to leverage the weight and space for wounded soldiers,” he told me. “The distance and the timeline and the constraints and the unknown of the enemy all started to add up. I just started feeling like we didn’t have the setup to be successful in a worst-case scenario. There wasn’t that pattern recognition, it was outside of the normal pattern.” In others words, he didn’t have the definitive intel he would have liked. Based on the information he had, Lesmes guessed there would be more than three serious injuries but fewer than fifteen. An idea started to form, one that could preserve more space for potential patients. He could put aside a tool he had never dropped in this situation: himself.
Lesmes had never not accompanied his team on a mass-casualty category alpha. He was the site conductor. His role was to keep a broad view of the situation while PJs were “heads down” working furiously to save patients, or their limbs. He helped secure the site; communicated with his guys, the base, and helicopter pilots who were circling waiting to pick up patients and go; he radioed planes for backup if a firefight erupted; he coordinated with officers in the area, frequently from other military branches. Emotional chaos was an explosion site certainty. Soldiers watching their shell-shocked teammates suck on fentanyl lollipops, in danger of bleeding out, are desperate to help, but they must be moved. The site had to be managed. This time, as long as there were not many more injuries than Lesmes