Heroes 2011
'It was time to get to work'
Cpl. Helen Ruhl dove out of the mangled Humvee so quickly that she didn’t even notice she was on fire. “Honestly, I still don’t remember that,” she said. “They told me that my commander had to actually put me out.
“I could stand, I looked down and still had both of my hands, so I thought it was time to get to work.”
What the 25-year-old Army medic remembers from the first moments of that September 2009 ambush in eastern Afghanistan was the heat and blinding white flash from the rocket-propelled grenade that detonated in her Humvee driver’s lap.
Within seconds she and her fellow soldiers were dragging him from the wreckage as bullets bounced around them. Army officials say her calm concentration on tending to his wounds while under fire undoubtedly saved the soldier’s life, and earned her a Bronze Star with “V” for heroism.
But Ruhl, a one-time explosive ordnance disposal technician who switched to the medical corps to be closer to the front lines, downplayed the praise, crediting training and teamwork with making sure no troops on the mission lost their lives.
The ambush happened just outside of Asadabad, as members of the 4th Brigade Combat Team returned from their fourth straight day of resupply work. U.S. troops in the region had frequent contact with enemy forces, but Ruhl said they were mostly just a few “pop shots” and minor skirmishes that barely slowed missions.
This time, the soldiers didn’t get any such warning. The first shot of the attack was the grenade that punched through the Humvee door, severely damaging the driver’s legs.
The blast left Ruhl’s ears squealing and her vision blurred, leaving her disoriented in the opening moments of the ensuing firefight. She hadn’t realized how badly injured her driver was until he was bleeding out on the ground next to the smoldering vehicle.
“It sounds cold, but when I got to (the driver) I didn’t see him,” she said. “I saw his legs and that was it. At that point, he was a pair of legs I needed to fix.”
Ruhl put a tourniquet on his right leg while directing another medic from a trailing Humvee to tend to his left one. Because of her hearing loss and the firefight, the two had to use hand signals to communicate.
They managed to temporarily halt the bleeding and pull the driver toward another truck for cover. As they loaded him in, Ruhl had to pick up a rifle and return fire against the attacking gunmen.
While they sped away, the injured soldier asked for morphine to blunt the pain. But Ruhl worried he might stop breathing if she gave him the drug, so instead she kept reassuring him and quizzing him about friends and family.
“Before, I didn’t have time to be angry or upset,” she said. “I had time to do my job, and that was it. But it became personal then, because I was asking those questions.”
When they arrived at a nearly base, Ruhl helped stabilize the soldier and tend to two others with minor injuries. A medevac helicopter arrived soon after, and told Ruhl they were ready to evacuate all four wounded troops, including her.
“I said to the pilot I wasn’t one (of the wounded). I didn’t know I was hurt yet. I had no idea that any of the blood on me was mine.”
In fact, Ruhl was bleeding from her eye and her ears. The blast ruptured a cyst on her brain near her optic nerve, which had caused the vision and hearing problems throughout the response. She also had a host of minor shrapnel wounds and burns.
Her injuries were severe enough that she followed her driver on medical evacuations all the way back to the U.S., monitoring his condition with local surgeons at each stop. In the end he lost his leg, but Army officials said he would have lost his life if not for Ruhl’s immediate response.
Ruhl’s injuries also left her unable to return to combat, but she currently completing undergrad work at University of Colorado to continue her medical career. She said her story is more about the importance of training than individual heroism.
“It’s muscle memory,” she said. “I’m not sure I knew what I was doing. I just knew that what I was doing was working.”
shanel@stripes.osd.mil Twitter: @LeoShane
