Inside SEAL Team Six(73)

The seeds turned out to be tiny bugs. But they tasted better than anything else we ate during that deployment.

Before we departed Panama, the commanding officer called me and the LT into his office and said, “Guys, I want you to make sure that nobody gets in trouble. I’m sending you down with a couple of trucks, our best boats, and I want them back looking like they do now, no scratches, dents, or dings.”

We were in Riberalta about a week more when one of the SBU-26 guys, a petty officer third class named Hutch, was driving one of the trucks down a dirt road to a four-way intersection when this eleven-year-old boy on a Honda 125 cut in front of him. Hutch slammed on the brakes but still hit the boy with the truck.

The boy flew off the bike, hit the road hard, and lay on the ground unconscious. Bolivian authorities arrested Hutch and threw him in a tiny, filthy, barbaric-looking jail cell.

The boy, meanwhile, was loaded into the back of a vehicle and dropped off at the so-called hospital.

I received a call over the PRC-77 radio to get to the hospital ASAP and was there in ten minutes. When I examined the unconscious eighty-pound, eleven-year-old boy, I saw that his pupils were unequal and not reactive to light—a sign of serious head trauma. Otherwise, he was breathing fine and didn’t appear to have any other injuries.

The hospital looked like a dirty garage—so filthy and ill equipped that you wouldn’t want to use it to work on your car. I introduced myself to the doctor on duty and told him that I was an American medic and was there to help the unconscious boy.

The doctor said, “Do not interfere. The boy will either live or die. Don’t bother this process.”

What?

“Doctor,” I said. “I don’t want to cause trouble here, but I insist that we take care of this boy immediately. Check his vital signs, do pupil checks, and order an MRI and a CAT scan as soon as possible.”

He became very agitated, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

It was obvious to me that we needed to get the boy to a real hospital. Brian L., also from ST-6 and executive officer at SBU-26, searched for a plane and pilot; he tracked down a confiscated drug plane and we used that to fly the boy to a real hospital in the city of Santa Cruz. (Note: Brian L. is now one of the highest-ranking admirals in SEAL teams.)

There I met a Bolivian doctor who had trained in the United States and had actually saved the life of a SEAL buddy of mine in Vietnam.

He assembled his OR team, which was made up of an anesthesiologist; an assistant, who wore flip-flops; and myself.

I asked him, “Where can I wash up?”

He said, “Don’t worry about that.”

None of the team scrubbed up or wore surgical masks or gloves.

The impact of the accident had caused the boy’s brain to slam forward against the front of his skull, then push back again—coup-countercoup, it’s called. His injury required brain surgery.

As the Bolivian doctor spoke to me in broken English, he took a scalpel, cut along the top portion of the boy’s head, then peeled down his face, exposing his skull.

Then, as I held the boy’s head, the doctor picked up an old hand drill that you wouldn’t want in your toolbox and started to drill into the boy’s skull.

As he was doing this, the doctor asked me, “So, how’s the pussy in Panama?”

I said, “Fine, Doc. But don’t you think we should pay attention to what you’re doing?”

As he drilled, he used a piece of gauze to catch the tiny bone fragments that were falling free from the boy’s skull.

The doctor drilled six holes in the boy’s head. I initially thought he was just drilling the holes to relieve the pressure on the boy’s brain. Instead, the doctor took a wire saw, put it in one hole, and started to saw through the bone. Then he did the same thing to the next hole. Once he’d finished with all six holes, he lifted off the top of the boy’s skull and placed it on a table.

The boy’s exposed brain was about the size of his fist and mostly gray.

While the Bolivian doctor continued to talk to me, he reached down and started to cut away pieces of the front of the boy’s brain that had turned black.

He said, “Black brain, no good.”

He was correct. The black parts of the brain were necrotic and would have caused infection and resulted in the boy’s death.

When he was finished with the frontal lobe, the Bolivian doctor sliced off the black parts of the temporal lobe and the back of the brain.

I said, “Doc, you’re cutting away so much of his brain. Is he ever going to be okay?”

“Oh, yes. He’ll learn to work around it. He’ll think differently. But he’ll be okay.”

As I watched, the doctor took a piece of IV tubing and cut some slits in it. Then he placed the tubing on the boy’s brain and pushed it down, so that the blood drained away. He said, “Look, drainage tubing made in Bolivia,” and he laughed.