To the Middle Boy
It was right before dinner time when you and your cousins came. Our pagers beeped: three high-pitched short staccato bursts. We knew what they meant. We had already been in Afghanistan for a few months by then—a team of Army medics working with the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit at the Kandahar Airfield. The pagers clipped to our belts announced casualties with a series of beeps. Whenever that happened, there was a collective pause: people stopped, mid-chew, mid-conversation, mid-step. Then, a cacophony: a stampede of boots as we made our way to the trauma bay; the creak of double doors as they opened and closed; the whip of glove after glove against their cardboard containers and then stretch (and sometimes, rip) as we worked them over slick palms; the tinny sound of metal instruments on top of metal trays; the squeak of markers against a whiteboard divided by medical tape to keep track of the interventions made for each patient.
Mass casualty exercises made these sounds familiar to us. We had rehearsed the workflow many times over, had clarified who was with what team, what type of patient should be placed where, had practiced different interventions with mannequins, with each other, with volunteers.
Outside, under the trauma bay’s awning, we waited for you. We paced. We cracked our gloved knuckles. We stared at the ground and at the airfield behind us, waiting for the ambulance to bring you and your cousins from the MEDEVAC helicopter. When you arrived, everyone’s movements were fluid—as fluid as they could be—and within seconds, we transferred you from the back of the ambulance to your own gurney.
Seconds. The seconds it took for the executive medical officer to say, It was an IED. The seconds it took for the interpreter to say, They were just crossing the street. The seconds it took for one of the sections to say, He’s coding. Like the seconds that it took for us to read that message. Three urgent-surgical. Pediatric.
They said:
Three boys.
Three boys: two brothers and a cousin.
Three boys: two brothers and a cousin: 7, 8, 11.
Three boys: two brothers and a cousin: 7, 8, 11, crossing the street to pick a pomegranate and stepping instead on a roadside improvised explosive device.
You were the younger brother, the middle boy, the 8-year-old. Amidst the chaos of the transfer—from the ground to the Black Hawk, from the Black Hawk to the Field Litter Ambulance, from the Field Litter Ambulance to the Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit Trauma Bay—a slipper, small, red, with a Transformers logo on it, remained with you. I imagined the flight medics placing it on the litter, it slipping into the space between the litter straps and the space blanket that they used to cover you. When you arrived, it lay on top of another blanket before it slid next to your gurney.
Within seconds. The transfer was quick because you weighed so little. I think of you, in the middle of all of that space: how your body drowned in that hospital gown; how your head barely sunk into the pillow. We could have swaddled you in the blanket. You were so small that the members of your treatment team huddled shoulder-to-shoulder, asking for items from the pediatric crash cart as they swarmed to take care of you. A medic tasked with monitoring your vitals said: I think he might make it; his vitals seem okay, before being reminded that children compensate a lot differently from adults.
The trauma bay, now full, included the squeaks of each gurney as the corpsmen and the medics and the physician assistants and the physicians and the surgeons moved you and your cousins to MRI, to CT, to surgery; the shouts for blood draws, for catheters, for warm blankets; the interpreter’s voice as we asked him to introduce us to you, your brother, and your cousin, and later, to your fathers, to translate: My name is. To translate: I’m here to help. To translate: It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay—
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“It was when I began saying ‘see you tomorrow’ that the interpreter finally pulled me aside and said, gently, I think you’re becoming too attached. ”
Your father and your uncle stayed. They had arrived through the double doors not too long after you did, their clothing bloodied from the explosion. The interpreter had spoken with them as they moved from the wall to the seats next to the double doors, and I remember how silent they had been and how they had nodded, their eyes moving from son to son to son.
Your brother and your cousin survived. On the days when we were in our aid station across Kandahar, I would still go to the Role 3 to visit them. Once, I brought cookies; another time, toys. I would knock on the door, wave, ask the interpreter to ask if it would be okay to come inside. At one point, the boys had gotten so used to my presence, they asked me how to pronounce my name, and I did the same with them. It was when I began saying See you tomorrow that the interpreter finally pulled me aside and said, gently, I think you’re becoming too attached.
They survived. I want to say, I’m sorry you didn’t. That, years later, it is still so difficult to describe the silence that rang through the trauma bay when your vitals plummeted and vanished. That now, there is an echo: I didn’t realize how much of the deployment I tried not to think about. I still wonder if we did enough. I think about you all the time.
About the Author
Stephanie Cuepo Wobby grew up in Baguio City, Philippines before immigrating to California. She enlisted in the Army in high school and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing at Columbia University.
Read Stephanie’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Frederic Koberl.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
