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In this episode of Trint’s “A Photo A Story”, Jeff looks back on one of the most wrenching experiences of his reporting career. It was 2005. Jeff was stationed in Balad, Iraq, shooting a series on battlefield medicine for ABC News and how advances in frontline medical care were keeping soldiers alive who would have died in previous wars. 

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Jeff and his crew were given access to a Medevac flight filled with injured soldiers that was heading to the American military hospital in Ramstein, Germany. Seeing these young people with severe injuries, many wearing bracelets of their fallen comrades, Jeff was able to see up close the painful consequences of a war. But also how a new medical innovation was giving a solider with an urgent shrapnel case, hope of survival.

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Watch the video above or see Trint in action by viewing a read-only link of this transcript, with playback features to read-along with the video. Or if you’d just like the text, you’ll find Jeff’s story below.

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Jeff: It's one of the few times in my career where I actually have cried. I had to go behind one of the pallets, the cargo pallets and just kind of get my thoughts together and compose myself because I found it so deeply sad to see this tableau in front of me.

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Jeff: This photograph shows the inside of a C-17 U.S. cargo plane normally used to transport tanks. But in this photograph, it is transporting severely wounded soldiers from Iraq to the German military hospital in Ramstein, Germany.

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Jeff: I was working on a series for ABC News on frontline medicine in the Battlefield and the huge medical advances, scientific advances that were really changing the outcome for injured soldiers.

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Jeff: In this case, it was late at night and we were alerted that a young soldier from a forward operating base had been hit with some sort of shrapnel that had resected his intestines. So basically slashed through his stomach.

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Jeff: Very quick medical attention from the medics around him, helped him stabilize him. A helicopter was dispatched to bring him to Balad, where he went into surgery, where they cleaned up the wound and stabilized him and put him under. And then they put, then he was put on this dolly that was this brand new technology of a Mobile Intensive Care Unit with a nurse and a doctor with him for the entire time.

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Jeff: It was a very powerful sight. This young guy, early 20s, his face looking perfectly healthy, but all these tubes coming out. And I remember interviewing the doctor and I said, so what are his chances of survival? He said, he's going to be fine. You know, we're pumping him full of antibiotics. We just need to reattach his intestines, his gut, and he'll be fine. He'll have scars in his belly. And I said, Well, so what would have happened back in the Second World War or the Korean War? He said he would have died for sure. We just didn't have the antibiotics. We didn't have the means. And what you know, what about the Gulf War in the early 90s? He said even then it would have been touch and go. But the science now is so much better. The medicine is so much better that I can look you in the eye and say he will be fine.

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Jeff: I think the thing about this picture that for me is so powerful is that it really looks like a gothic painting. If you look at the interior of the plane, it looks like a church. And these people on gurneys strapped to the floor of the plane. It really does look like some medieval image.

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Jeff: I don't talk about this. I haven't talked about this very much in my life, but there are only a few times in my 30 plus year career as a reporter that I cried. And this this was one of them. I just looked around and I saw all these young people and they had on their wrists, these black bracelets. And they were, had the names of their fallen, their platoon mates, their comrades who had died and all of them had black bracelets. Some of them had three or four bracelets on their wrists. And I just, it was overwhelming. These were 19, 20, 21 year-old kids. And at one point, I was just so overwhelmed. I went behind one of the pallets and I cried. I just I found it so gut wrenchingly sad.

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Jeff: I did a few months later tracked down that soldier in the ICU, mobile ICU unit, and I went to visit him in Corbin, Kentucky, in the place where Colonel Sanders fried his very first chicken. And I found him. And I remember walking up to this house and there was a red pickup truck with a guy underneath. And I said, I'm looking for so-and-so. And he said, you're talking to him. And this was maybe three months, four months later. And I said, It can't be. I saw you unconscious on a evacuation flight in Iraq and you were a mess. And he pulled up a shirt and he said and he showed me these scars. He said, it's the same guy. I'm totally fine.

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Jeff: And it was such an incredible epilog to that story. And it really drove home how much medical science changed so quickly to have an outcome like that. 

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