In the few minutes we were talking, the soldier lost consciousness. So I loaded him in my jeep, took him to a tent we had set up along a river, and administered Benadryl, epinephrine, and oxygen.
He woke up, looked at me, and asked, “Who are you?”
I didn’t tell him how lucky he was to still be alive.
In addition to directing the jungle survival course, I ran the Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) throughout Central and South America. This was an extension of the same program that had been used in Vietnam in which free medical care was administered to poor peasants and intel was gathered that could be of value in planning future operations.
I ran similar events in Honduras, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, and Nicaragua. First, I’d get a grant of seventy thousand dollars from an organization that managed Central and South American military aid, and I’d use it to buy medical, dental, and veterinary supplies. Then I’d recruit volunteer doctors, nurses, and medics from the different military hospitals and clinics in the United States and Panama. I’d look for dentists, OB-GYNs, and veterinarians too.
We’d strategically select a remote area filled with poor people in need of medical attention and set up field tents. We’d have a dental tent, an OB-GYN tent, an admin/registration tent, and a general sick-call tent where everyone came in to be checked.
Once we put out the word that we were going to be there, hundreds of men, women, and children streamed in, often accompanied by their farm animals. Some would walk for two or three days, then stop and bathe in a nearby river. They were proud people who wanted to look their best.
The native women were remarkable. They’d arrive dressed in their finest clothing. Some had never seen a dentist in their lives.
The people sat on the wooden dental chair, and the dentist would pull their bad teeth without using Novocain. The men and boys would cry. But the women never complained. We pulled bad teeth, rotten teeth, and teeth that looked like they might go bad. We used a fifty-gallon barrel to hold all the bad teeth. By the end of the week, it would be a quarter filled.
Meanwhile, the veterinarians and some of the medics would go into the fields and inoculate the cows, goats, and sheep.
Some of the people who attended were suffering from serious injuries that hadn’t ever been treated. I remember one girl limped in with a club foot. We managed to get her a flight to an Army hospital in Texas for treatment.
Another father and son carried in the almost lifeless body of a teenage girl. She weighed about seventy pounds and was running a 106-degree temperature; her unconscious body was hot to the touch. Upon examining her, we found that she’d had a spontaneous abortion and part of the fetus was still stuck inside her. It was infected and she had become septic. She’d probably had no more than an hour left to live when her father put her in my arms.
We worked on the girl for hours, and she survived.
I staged a number of MEDCAP programs in El Salvador. Since 1980, a civil war had been raging there between the military-led government, which was supported by the United States, and leftist rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).
The MEDCAPs we held there turned out to be great sources of intelligence. We’d set them up in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, near FMLN strongholds. Grateful patients would tell us where the rebel camps were located and what routes they used to smuggle in weapons.
I was wearing many hats in Panama—running missions and serving as director of the jungle survival course, director of MEDCAP, and liaison to SEALs who were deployed to Panama.
I also supported many of the military operations in El Salvador. The first SEAL funeral I attended was for Lieutenant Commander Albert Schaufelberger, who had been the security chief to the American military advisers stationed in El Salvador. Schaufelberger had been waiting to pick up his friend outside Central American University when he was approached by an FMLN gunman, who shot him three times in the head. In accordance with Schaufelberger’s sealed instructions, his ashes were scattered in the Pacific from a SEAL patrol boat.
I arrived in El Salvador toward the end of the conflict. By the time the government and the FMLN rebels signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords, in January of 1992, approximately seventy-five thousand Salvadorans had died.
From my point of view, the Salvadoran conflict was unique. For one thing, the Red Cross seemed to be openly supporting the rebels. Whenever we saw a Red Cross ambulance, we knew the rebels were nearby. In the evenings, armed fighters from both sides of the conflict would frequent the same restaurants and bars. We knew who they were, and they knew us.
One night I was on a joint SEAL–Special Forces op with an experienced SF operator named Chito. The two of us were lying in long grass dressed in Salvadoran garb—Levi’s, jungle-camo tops, and ball caps. We had a wheelbarrow filled with automatic weapons and ammo that we were supposed to push for about twelve kilometers, to a rendezvous point.