Part 4: In the end, it all comes back to garbage

‘Can you walk at all?’
Corbin hurried over to his wounded friend. Deierlein had a stoic look on his face. At first the expression made Corbin think that maybe Deierlein was just kidding around, the way he always did. Then the expression broke his heart.

“Can you walk at all?” he asked him.

The question surprised Deierlein. He thought he had stepped on a land mine or been cut in half by a roadside bomb.

“As I flew backward and looked down at my boots and legs, they weren’t coming with me as I fell,” Deierlein recalled. “As I hit the ground all I could think was, ‘I guess this is it, I will bleed out within the next 60 seconds or so.’”

He was flooded with relief when he realized that his legs must still be attached if Corbin was asking him whether or not he could walk.

“Hell no!” he answered.

Courtesy of Drew Corbin Capt. Drew Corbin: ‘Oh no, he's bleeding internally.’

Corbin prepared to drag him over to one of the Humvees. Deierlein told him to hang on a second so he could throw his own smoke grenade.

Then Corbin noticed with some alarm that Deierlein was barely bleeding.

“I’m an EMT for the fire department,” he explained. “I thought, ‘Oh no, he’s bleeding internally.’”

Within seconds Deierlein was in the back of a Humvee, where Sgt. Geof Rogers, a medic, assessed the entrance wound in his left hip and applied pressure. Corbin called ahead to get a MEDEVAC helicopter in position.

Courtesy of Drew Corbin Sgt. Geof Rogers, a medic, applied pressure to Deierlein’s hip wound.

They rushed Deierlein to a medical aid station about 2 miles away. The helicopter picked him up there and brought him to a Baghdad hospital on the west side of the Tigris River.

“From the point he got shot to when he was in the hospital was probably 15 to 20 minutes,” Corbin said, adding that the rapid evacuation probably saved Deierlein’s life. “You’ve heard of the ‘golden hour.’ I don’t think he had an hour.”

Awakened by a phone call
While Deierlein waited for the helicopter to show up, he asked some troops in the aid station to call his wife Hiwot and tell her what had happened. He recited her phone number. Someone dialed the number on a cell phone and placed it in Deierlein’s hand.

“Hello?” Hiwot answered sleepily. It was about 4 or 5 a.m. in Atlanta.

Deierlein asked her whether she’d received a phone call.

“No,” she replied. “Why?”

“I’ve been shot,” Deierlein told her. “They shot me!”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes, I’ll be fine.”

“Are you in pain? Did they give you painkillers?”

“They don’t give painkillers to Rangers.” (Deierlein was high on morphine during the conversation, though it didn’t deaden his sense of humor.)

“Do I need to do anything?” Hiwot asked.

“You have to call my parents. Talk to my dad, not my mom, and you need to downplay it.”

“OK, I’ll tell them it was a BB gun.”

“No, tell them it was a sling shot!”

Going home
Deierlein underwent surgery in the Baghdad hospital. His pelvis and sacrum — the triangular bone at the base of his spine — were shattered by the sniper’s bullet, and his internal bleeding was so severe that he was given 8 pints of blood. The human body contains about 10 pints.

The next day he woke up in a hospital at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad, and the day after that he arrived at a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

On Sept. 11, 2006 — five years after he watched the Twin Towers fall from his office window in Manhattan, and less than two months before the American public would show their opposition to the Iraq war by voting a Democratic majority into Congress — Tom Deierlein was on his way home.

He would walk again months later, but some of his injuries were permanent. The bullet caused nerve damage that will impair his bowel and bladder functions for the rest of his life. He must wear a colostomy bag. Chronic pain may dog him always. 

Courtesy of Phil McIntire Maj. Phil McIntire: ‘We don’t need to be watching garbage.’

For the friends who remained behind in his civil affairs company, Deierlein’s shooting left a deep well of anger and frustration.

“He gets shot watching garbage contractors,” said Maj. Phil McIntire, Deierlein’s commander. “After that, I got in trouble for turning down missions. I’d say, ‘No, I don’t see a military need for that. We don’t need to be watching garbage.’ It probably wasn’t good for my career, but that’s OK. People’s lives meant more to me than that.”

Corbin in particular felt horrible about the circumstances surrounding the attack by the sniper, who escaped in the chaos after the shooting.

“Sewage and shit,” Corbin said, enunciating the “t.” “Oh my God, no life is worth that. It made me so angry when he got shot. … We spend money to pick up trash and the trash never goes away. It’s never-ending. It’s just pointless to risk someone’s life for that.”

Deierlein’s friends missed him. Mealtimes became awkward and oddly silent. They ceased to be occasions for raucous laughter to release pent-up stress.

The endless games of rock-paper-scissors came to an end. So did the other ongoing and impromptu competitions.

Cigar Night soon fizzled out.

MORE FROM CHARITY BEGINS AT WAR

Charity Begins at War Section Front

Part 1: From executive suite to Baghdad Journal: Called back to active duty — ‘No joke’ Day 2: Minimal training for a huge task Journal: Readying for ‘very dangerous job’ Part 3: Venturing ‘outside the wire’ Journal: ‘ThunderCat6’ arrives in Baghdad Part 4: It all comes back to garbage Journal: Goodbye Baghdad; hello bed rest Part 5: Charitable spirit survives Journal: A new foundation Charity Begins at War Section Front   Add Charity Begins at War headlines to your news reader: