With the 1st Marine Division on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad
THE villagers came running, waving their arms and shouting for help early yesterday when they spotted the group of U.S. Marines. They were carrying a man and his two sons – all three bleeding profusely and crying in pain.
A mortar shell had slammed into their small adobe home and killed six family members.
The Marines rushed the man and his sons to their small base camp on the eastern edge of Baghdad and turned them over to Shock Trauma Platoon 1.
All three were seriously injured, but the older boy, 14, was in particularly bad shape. His left leg had been blown off below the knee and his right leg was hanging by a thread. He also had lost his right hand.
“When he came in here, he had limbs falling off. Our first priority was to try and save what we could,” said Lt. Ralph Gargiulo, a Navy nurse.
The younger boy, 9, had been hit in his left eye and risked losing his sight. His lower body was riddled with shrapnel wounds.
The father, who lost his wife in the attack, also was covered with shrapnel wounds.
The boys were put on cots in the unit’s two-bed operating room – a small olive drab tent packed with state-of-the-art equipment. Doctors worked on them for hours – stemming the bleeding of both and attaching an external rod to the older boy’s right leg. Then they worked on the father.
“We did everything we could for them,” said Gargiulo, a native of upstate New York.
“The doctors who work for us are the best qualified there are,” added Capt. Eric McDonald, the surgeon who heads the unit. “They want to help people – whether it’s them or us.”
Once the three were stabilized, they were flown to a more sophisticated medical facility in southern Iraq.
Through a translator, the father told The Post his family had been in their home the previous night during a firefight between U.S. and Iraqi forces.
“We did what we were told,” he said, referring to the U.S. request that Iraqi civilians remain in their homes to minimize their chances of being injured or mistaken for combatants.
“We stayed inside, but the mortar landed right in our house,” he said, adding that it had been fired by U.S. forces – a claim that could not be independently verified.