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FALLS CHURCH, Va. -- January 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of
Desert Storm, and also a turning point in Air Force Medical
Service's Critical Care Transport Teams.
“We were not serving
the Army as well as we could have in the Air Force,” explained Lt.
Gen. (Dr.) Paul K. Carlton, a former Air Force surgeon general who
had been working on the concept of CCATT since the 1980s.
As the U.S. military and its allies assembled in the
Middle East in the summer and fall of 1990 -- Operation Desert
Shield -- in response to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion
of Kuwait, then-Col. Carlton set up the 1,200-bed Air Force 1702nd
Contingency Hospital in combination with an Army Combat Support
Hospital outside of Muscat, Oman. Yet, as Desert Shield turned to
Desert Storm on January 19, 1991, the hospital only took in 42
patients, and those were only from surrounding bases.
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Tech. Sgt. Theresa Hillis, of the 68th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron at Norton Air Force Base, Calif.; Senior Master Sgt. James Cundall, right, of the 118th AES, Tennessee Air National Guard, Nashville, Tenn.; and Tech. Sgt. Dennis Mulline, left, of the 137th AES, receive a mission briefing during Operation Desert Storm. (U.S.
Air Force courtesy photo)
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“We did not get any war wounded,” said Carlton, who
offered beds to the U.S. Central Command surgeon in an
effort to better utilize the facility.
To make the
case for his hospital, Carlton traveled to the battlefield
to offer assistance.
“I picked up a
couple of air-evac missions just to let more people know we
existed,” he said. “I told Army commanders to send anyone to
us.” But it soon became apparent the Air Force could not
meet the Army's needs. “We could not take people with
catheters or tubes, much less needing a ventilator.”
Instead of relying on the Air Force, the Army built large
hospitals closer to the front.
“The Army built up
just like they did in Vietnam,” Carlton said. “They had a
very big footprint.”
AFMS leadership wanted smaller
hospitals connecting back to the U.S., but to do that, they
needed a modern transportation system. Although Carlton and
other colleagues had been working on improvements to patient
transportation since 1983, air evacuations were still very
restrictive. The equipment needed to keep a patient alive
was new and untested.
“Modern ventilators blew out
lungs all the time,” Carlton explained. “We needed to work
the kinks out and we needed the opportunity to work in the
modern battlefield. We needed critical care in the air.”
When the war ended in late February, Carlton and other
AFMS officers returned home and brought their CCATT ideas to
the Air Education and Training Command.
“The war was
not an aberration,” Carlton said. “We had to modernize our
theater plans to be able to transport patients.”
Carlton and his colleagues trained three-person crews to
work with new and improved ventilation equipment aboard
airplanes.
“That was the long pole in the tent,” he
explained. “When you take a critical care patient you say,
‘we can ventilate that patient,' and you better be able to.”
With the new program up and running, the AFMS made CCATT
available to the other services.
CCATT gained
momentum when, in 1993, Carlton and his colleagues traveled
to Mogadishu, Somalia, for an after action brief on the U.S.
Army's “Black Hawk Down” engagement, and explained CCATT to
the Joint Special Operations Command surgeon. He, in turn,
handed Carlton a check and said, “I want that as soon as you
can make it.”
The turning point came in 1995 during
the Bosnian War, when an American Soldier riding a train to
Bosnia was electrocuted by an overhead wire and fell off the
train. He was immediately transported to Landstuhl Regional
Medical Center, Germany, where doctors wanted him
transferred to the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center
in San Antonio. When Maj. (Dr.) Bill Beninati picked up the
patient for the flight to the U.S., he was still very
unstable. Somewhere over Greenland, the patient went into
septic shock and Beninati and his team resuscitated him.
When they touched down in San Antonio, about 12 hours later,
the patient was in better shape than when he left.
“That's when the Army took notice,” Carlton said. “We had
convinced them that we could do what we said.”
Soon,
the Air Force surgeon general at the time, Lt. Gen.
Alexander Sloan, approved the CCATT concept. Later, with the
strong endorsement of Air Force Surgeon General Lt. Gen.
Charles Roadman II, CCATT became a formal program.
CCATT proved invaluable in the next conflict, Operation
Iraqi Freedom, where casualty evacuation became a vital
necessity, as well as in Afghanistan. Carlton is proud of
CCATT.
“We have developed a modern transportation
system to go along with the modern battlefield for the Army,
Navy and the Marines,” he said.
Today, CCATT is
considered a vital component of AFMS, but it took a war to
liberate Kuwait some 25 years ago for the military to
realize how badly it was needed.
By Kevin M. Hymel, Air Force Surgeon General PA
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2016
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