The Easy Day Was Yesterday (26 page)

Eating became a bit of a problem. I mean, there were thousands of starving IDPs walking past us the whole time; we couldn’t just rip out a bar of chocolate and start feeding our faces in front of these people. Jon and I took it in turns getting into the back of the ambulance and eating a cold meal. We always waited till we got back to the Zambian Battalion compound to have a decent feed. Another problem was the call of nature. For most, it was a case of not going. The Zambian company at Kibeho had three toilets dug next to its compound, but you’d have to be pretty desperate to hang your arse over them. The dug toilets at the Zambian Headquarters weren’t too bad, so we went in the morning or at night. But, right now, we were down at the documentation point where a toilet had yet to be dug. Before the good old Infantry had it dug, Jon felt the need, so he found a nice little secluded spot next to an abandoned hut, dug himself a hole and went for it. Just as he was settling in and starting to enjoy himself, he heard some laughter and swivelled around to notice a group of RPA soldiers behind him giggling. It was probably the first white arse they had seen. Needless to say, Jon finished up and got the hell out of there. Jon couldn’t wait to tell me about it. I always knew when he had a good story to tell. Jon was one of those blokes who had trouble getting words out when telling a funny story because he laughed so much during the telling.

As we packed up that evening, we were told that the MSF hospital had six priority one patients and needed assistance to get them out. Carol Vaughan-Evans, Terry Pickard, Jon and I went down to the hospital and identified those patients requiring AME by helicopter. As an MSF nurse identified the patients to Carol, I followed, recording the patient’s state and location within the maze of hospital rooms and patients. At one stage we all walked into a small theatre where a young boy was having his calf muscle sewn back on. The boy was conscious and the doctor, wearing a pair of shorts and a singlet, told the nurse which patients to evacuate. This was unusual for us to see because, back at AUSMED, you were lucky to get anywhere near the theatre, let alone wander in and see a doctor in shorts and singlet. One patient had recently been struck with a machete across her arm, so Jon stayed with her to get her ready for AME. Once all the patients had been identified, Carol, Terry and Jon returned to the compound to prepare a CCP to stabilise the patients before the AME arrived. I stayed at the hospital ready to identify the patients to the infantry. The infantry came to the hospital with stretchers and we transported the patients to the compound where we prepared them for AME. This involved inserting an intravenous (IV) drip, stopping any bleeding and bandaging their wounds. Then we put the patients into the ambulance and drove them to the helipad.

The helo landed at 5.00 pm and we loaded the patients on board. One patient had been shot through the bladder and bowel and could not sit up, but it was a case of either sit up or stay here, so Jon and I forced him to sit up. Once we had him on the helo we noticed a lot of blood coming from the bullet hole in his backside. We checked the stretcher and saw that the bandage had fallen off. The end result was we simply pretended that we hadn’t seen it. We could not evacuate the man with the broken femur because there was no way we could get him to sit up, so we decided to take him with us to the Butare hospital.

The RPA were not happy that people were being evacuated by helo and wanted to inspect every wound to be sure we were not smuggling people out of the camp. This delayed the AME by 20 minutes, but it eventually took off. This was my first experience in negotiating with the RPA Major (who spoke good English) and was certainly not to be my last.

We moved from the helipad back to the Charlie Company compound and were told that we had another wounded IDP. This one had been shot in the lung and had a sucking chest wound. He was in a bad way and, as it was getting dark, we decided to take him with us in the ambulance. Carol and Jon stabilised the man for travel. The military treatment for a sucking chest wound is to stick the outer wrapper of a field dressing over the hole and, using sticking plaster, stick three sides down. This creates a valve, stopping air from going in, but letting air out. This bloke was covered in blood and sweat; there was no way that plaster was going to stick. Jon had to hold the wrapper firmly over the hole and try to judge when he was breathing out so he could release the wrapper to let the trapped air out. We were then faced with the problem of getting through the RPA checkpoints. Carol and Jon sat in the rear of the ambulance and continually worked on the patient as we talked our way through each checkpoint. At the checkpoints we were forced to open the ambulance and the patients were checked to ensure there was no faking of injuries.

After two hours of travelling through rough terrain, the convoy (which consisted of two military observers from Uruguay driving a Pathfinder, the infantry 6 x 6 troop carrier with the infantry section and Lieutenant Tilbrook on board, the ambo with the two casualties and Jon and Carol in the back, and the CCP land rover) came across a muddy section of road. The Pathfinder driven by the military observers drove straight through the bog without hesitation as the other three vehicles prepared to negotiate it. The 6 x 6 troop carrier took off up the right-hand side of the bog with the driver giving her all she had. Soldiers bounced around the back as the 6 x 6 slowed down and stopped right in the middle of the bog and wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. I decided there was bugger all we could do from the back so put the ambo into 6-wheel drive, threw her into second gear, told Jon and Carol to hang on, and gave her a solid kick in the guts. We took off up the left-hand side of the troop carrier with the old ambo, being top heavy, bouncing all over the place. As I came level with the stranded 6 x 6, the bog began to direct me towards the rear of it. There was no way I was going to take my foot of the accelerator, momentum was the only way to get through areas like this. If the back of the ambo connected with the front of the 6 x 6, so be it. Fortunately, the ambo didn’t connect and I could feel the wheels start to grip the road under the mud and we drove through the bog. I pulled over behind the Pathfinder and had a look at the situation, watching the CCP vehicle also become hopelessly bogged. The only thing we could do was to try to winch them out using my winch. There were no trees around so, for a quick recovery, the winch on the 6 x 6 was useless. I opened the back of the ambo to give Jon and Carol some fresh air and told them what we were doing. Carol was concerned about the sucking chest wound and said that we couldn’t stop for long. I turned the ambo around, parked it, pulled the winch out, and attached it to the bull bar on the 6 x 6. Jon operated the winch from the front of the vehicle as I operated the gears and accelerator while, at the same time, the driver of the 6 x 6 tried to drive forward. All we did was buckle the bull bar and drag the ambo back towards the bog. The 6 x 6 was so heavily bogged that we couldn’t get a chain around the chassis so the bull bar was as good as it was going to get, and we’d just about stuffed that. Again Carol told me we had to go. ‘One more go,’ I told her, ‘one more go.’ I backed up the ambo and attached the chain lower down on the bull bar of the 6 x 6. Once again, with Jon on the winch and me behind the wheel, we tried to recover the 6 x 6, but once again the ambo was being dragged towards the bog. I told Lieutenant Tilbrook that we couldn’t help any more and that we had to go because the sucking chest wound was getting worse. Tilbrook and I made arrangements to marry up at the UN Headquarters in Butare.

Once again we were on the move towards Butare following the military observer blokes. Thank God they were with us; I had no idea where the hell we were. The observer guys drove fast in their Pathfinder while I pretended to be in the Paris to Dakar rally, throwing the ambo into every corner trying to make some ground on the observers, but they always seemed to be waiting for me. This went on for another hour when Jon put his head through the adjoining window and asked how long it would be until we got there. I told him another half an hour and he informed me that they were both suffering from motion sickness in the back, and were preparing to open the hatch on the floor to vomit through. Any wonder, the way I was driving, but while I felt for them, I couldn’t stop laughing. Neither of them did vomit, but both looked like shit (and probably felt the same) once we arrived in Butare.

When we arrived at the hospital we were told that there were no doctors on duty and that one would have to be called in. In the meantime, with some assistance from three nurses from Care Australia, we moved the sucking chest wound to a theatre we’d located. We put the bloke on the operating table and attached his drip to the drip stand — he was into his fourth litre of fluid. Jon and I went scavenging for more fluid and anything that could help this bloke, but found nothing; this hospital was worse off than we were. The patient was still bleeding quite badly when we were told that no doctor was coming, so we carried him back to the ambulance. Just as we were putting him in the ambulance, a doctor arrived, much to our relief. We got the sucking chest wound out of the ambo again and put him onto a trolley so Carol could do a proper handover to the doctor. The doctor, a Tutsi, took one look at the sucking chest wound, a Hutu, then got back into his car and drove away. We threw a few mouthfuls of abuse at this prick. After all we had been through to get this bloke to some proper medical care, our efforts were being rejected. We were at a loss. We thought of driving the bloke back to Kigali, but we wouldn’t get there until 4.00 or 5.00 in the morning. By then he’d be dead and we wouldn’t be back in time to return to Kibeho first thing in the morning. We thought of keeping him until morning and calling for a helicopter, but again he would be dead by then. All seemed lost.

The nurses from Care saved the day by organising for the sucking chest to go to another hospital at a school called Groupe Scolaire. In the meantime, we had found a ward for the broken femur. The nurse there wanted some morphine for the patient so, while Carol organised that, Jon and I got the patient back into the ambulance. We moved off again towards Groupe Scolaire. The nurses from Care had arranged for us to be met at the front gate because the RPA providing security for the place wouldn’t allow us entry. Groupe Scolaire was only a 10-minute drive and we soon arrived at the front gate with the Care Australia nurses in front and the observers bringing up the rear. We were met at the front gate by a foreign aid worker driving a ute. We collected the sucking chest wound and loaded him into the back of the ute. There was no official handover — Carol gave the aid worker some hastily drawn-up notes and that was it. We made arrangements with Care Australia to return our stretcher to us at Kigali. The ute drove off and we never saw the sucking chest wound again. He probably died.

I only had a general idea where I was so, once again, I was glad the observers were around as they knew the area well and took us back to the UN compound where they lived. The infantry and CCP vehicles had arrived there after being recovered from the bog and, best of all, they had a crate of coke with them. I managed to get a couple of bottles which I shared with Carol and Jon. It was a well-deserved coke that tasted bloody good; what a day! The time was 11.00 pm and we were all exhausted, totally rooted, and we still had to drive to the Zambian Headquarters. I didn’t realise how exhausted I was or how great the pressure was to get these guys to some aid, but once we had freed ourselves and had a drink of coke, I just felt like lying down and slipping into a coma. The drive back to the Zambian Headquarters took 30 minutes but seemed to take two hours. As we drove along the winding road I began to hallucinate that the road was going straight ahead. I could see the road quite clearly going straight and then I’d shake my head and realise that the road wasn’t going that way, it was going the other way. Had I not shaken myself out of this dream, I’d have driven the ambo off a cliff face. At the time, as my mind played tricks on me, I wasn’t concerned and the hallucinations attacked me the whole way back. I couldn’t ask Jon or Carol to drive; they had been working their arses off the whole way in the back of the ambo while battling motion sickness. I was so relieved to see the Zambian Headquarters gates appear in front of me.

When we arrived back at the Headquarters we couldn’t go to sleep because the back of the ambulance looked like a butcher’s shop. There was blood and old bandages everywhere. It took an hour to clean up and disinfect the back of the ambulance so we could sleep in there and be ready to go again first thing in the morning. We’d used some of our medical supplies from the ambo so we restocked with IV bags, giving sets (used to deliver the IV fluid from the bag to the IV needle), IV needles (cannulas) and bandages. Throughout the afternoon we had used the patrol medical kits that we brought with us from the SAS, and these were open with the contents lying all over the place, so we refurbished these as well. We couldn’t wait to sleep and got our heads down as soon as the nightly brief was over. Thank Christ Lieutenant Tilbrook’s briefs were short and to the point. Jon was usually asleep when I got back to the ambo so I updated him in the morning.

On Saturday we arrived at Kibeho at 7.45 am and were informed by a Jordanian UNICEF worker that the hospital was overrun with patients and that the MSF workers were not there. At this stage the UNICEF worker was the only foreigner in the camp. Carol, Jon, Rob Lucas (a nurse) and I went down to the hospital and saw about 100 IDPs who had either been shot or macheted or both. It was absolute chaos. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. There were bleeding IDPs all over the place. Their wounds were horrific. The first woman I saw had been hit in the face with a machete. The machete had gone through the bridge of her nose down through to her bottom jaw and all of this was resting on her chest, and she just sat there and looked at us with desperate eyes. ‘Fuck me,’ was all Jon and I kept saying to ourselves. There were people with massive cuts to their heads, to their arms and all over their bodies. One man had been hit across the head and his brain was clearly visible, yet not damaged. Later I saw a local nurse just fold the skullcap and skin over and sew it up. There were people with bullet wounds to various parts of their bodies, some with several bullet wounds and some just lying on the ground in a huge puddle of blood in the last stages of life. I saw a large box of bandages sitting alongside the IDPs and started to hand them out in an attempt to get them treating themselves. We just didn’t have the numbers to treat them all. The situation was just beyond huge, beyond anything I could ever have imagined. Yesterday we had nothing; today we were overwhelmed.