US Army soldiers including flight medics of Task Force Shadow Charlie Company 6-101 Dustoff evacuate an American soldier, Southern Afghanistan, Nov. 28, 2010. The soldier got hit by shrapnel from an improvised explosive device. He suffered wounds at his head, chest and arms.
Within a week the New York Times, Time Magazine and the Toronto Star published stories on US Army flight medics, normally referred to as Medevac, an abbreviation of medical evacuation. This caused a little controversy started by Michael Shaw on BagNewsNotes. He asked if this clustering was due to the military’s public relations strategy that wanted the public to see stories of heroic rescues rather than combat.
Around the same time there where at least seven photographers embedded with Medevac units. I was one of them. My friends at dvafoto.com asked me to give my take on that controversy. You can read it in the post “The Medevac Stories with Daniel Etter”.
Here is a list of essays on Medevac units that appeared in the last months:
- “Is child abuse a new Taliban gambit?” by Nicki Sobecki (photos and text)
- “Profiles of a Dustoff 57, medevac team in Afghanistan” by David Brown (text) and Linda Davidson (photos)
- “The Birds Of Hope: With A Black Hawk Medevac Unit In Afghanistan” by James Nachtwey (photos and text… next time a photo editor tells me that you can’t write and photograph at the same time, I tell them: “Have you heard of this dude … Nachtwey?”)
- “In Wider War in Afghanistan, Survival Rate of Wounded Rises” by Tyler Hicks (photos) and C.J. Chivers (text)
- “Frontline medevac teams are life-savers in Afghanistan” by Louie Palu (photos and text)
