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And then of course the major difference between Afghan and Saudi was the kit. Just padding around camp we were lucky to be able to ‘dress down’ in relaxed rig with shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flops. But of course when we went out on Patrol then the full kit had to be worn.
Layers of protective gear go on to make us look like alien soldiers invading from outer space, with goggles, helmet, gloves all hiding away as much skin from the outside world as possible. In reality the only bit of skin on show is the bit of your forearms, your chin, cheeks and neck. Everything else was under cover of some sort. And as you start to put on the kit it starts to get heavy, and increases what they call the thermal load. This is the effect that wearing a load of kit has on your ability to work. How hot you get and how fatigued you feel as a result.
And it’s odd. I could sit on the rower there for 45 minutes and bang out 10km and feel tired but able to go on, but after 2km of patrolling in the same heat on a different day I could feel like I was ready to die from the exertion.
One day early on in my tour I did ‘go down’ with a heat injury. I had patrolled down to the frontline Control Post (CP) during the morning and felt fine, had some lunch, hydrated and even had a nap there whilst waiting to patrol back up. On the way back,
not 1500m out of the CP gates I started to feel tired. I felt heavy and like my feet were lumps of lead. I felt light headed and slightly dizzy. I tried to concentrate on the footsteps of the man in front.
At every occasion I went down on one knee for a rest and panted to get air in me. But it wasn’t helping. I stood up and started to feel really woozy and had to take a knee again. I spoke up and said I was struggling and needed a break. The patrol got me across to a tree-line and I undid my body armour and helmet. The difference this made was amazing. I then tried to stand up, and fell again. This was not good. Thankfully we were near a road and I was half walked, half carried down the track to the main road where two Huskey vehicles had been sent to pick me up.
I was taken the 2km back to the main CP and straight into the med tent. There I was stripped by the medic and his assistant and sprayed with cold water to cool me down. My heart rate was all over the place, and my blood pressure was terribly low – something that is unusual for me as I am on hypertension tablets – and I was asked to describe how I felt. It was really like I was boiling up from inside. Like my internal thermostat had broken down and was ramping up off scale. It felt like I was cooking – a horrible feeling. I still felt dizzy and couldn’t stand up.
I was force-fed cold water and sprayed with more cool water. Ice packs under my arms and
in my groin soon got my temperature down and I started to feel normal again. Thankfully, I had recognised the symptoms early and had spoken up. AND the Huskeys had been close enough to come and get me. Without them I would have had a struggle to get ‘home’.
I felt better and after a couple of days I was back out there again. One of the locals actually said going down in the heat would make me stronger and more able to cope with the heat. What it certainly did was to give me a scare and made me realise the signs and symptoms of heat injury.
But I haven’t been the only one to ‘go down’. We had lost several people to heat injuries on this tour. A couple have been in a seriously bad way and had to be air-lifted from the ground by a Medical Emergency Response Team. One was particularly bad and was in such a state he was mumbling incoherently. He was later med-evc’d home categorised as ‘Very Seriously Ill’. All this is not good.
I have felt tired and fatigued on patrols since then, but thankfully I did not ‘go down’ again. But it was a constant danger. And it’s a really scary thing, simply because you can’t do anything about it. You either get it or you don’t. You can be as fit as a butcher’s dog and still go down. It’s almost like a lottery.
I had never really looked forward to winter. I like the warm weather. But I was OH-SO looking forward to getting back to the UK and the cold autumnal weather there. I’d miss the knocking about in shorts and flip flops, but I wouldn’t miss the 45 degree heat at all...
www.raf-ff.org.uk
Envoy Winter 2011
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