Petty Officer 2nd Class Travis Mandigo recently rescued a Japanese man after a car crash outside Atsugi Naval Air Facility. (Jim Schulz / Stars and Stripes)
NAVAL AIR FACILITY ATSUGI, Japan — On a recent Sunday morning in his barracks room, Petty Officer 2nd Class Travis Mandigo, an aviation electrician with Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Light 51, heard something that didn’t sound right.
“It sounded like metal on asphalt. It’s not a normal sound on a Sunday morning,” he said.
He looked out his fifth-floor window and saw an overturned van outside the fence sliding down the road on its roof. Mandigo bolted from his building, jumped the b barbed-wire-topped base fence and ran to the van, by then stopped and on its side.
“I got there and the guy (inside) was moving,” Mandigo said. “He was bleeding profusely.”
The motorist, with heavy injuries, suddenly opened the door and ran from the vehicle.
“He just took off, ran 20 feet and collapsed,” Mandigo said.
The petty officer said his Navy training and pre-service experience as a lifeguard kicked in. He looked for broken bones and a concussion, he recalled, then starting pressing pressure points to stop the blood flowing from the man’s head, mouth and chest.
Mandigo raced back to the van, pulled out a piece of it, returned and elevated the man’s legs on it to prevent shock. Enlisting the help of an onlooker to keep the man’s legs steady, Mandigo then continued to work to stop blood loss — despite the cuts to his own hands from jumping the fence.
When an ambulance arrived soon after, he helped load the man into the vehicle. Base security took Mandigo to the medical clinic for an inspection, he said, particularly because he had been exposed to so much blood.
A Yamato city police official later confirmed the injured man was a 52-year-old Japanese national who suffered injuries that should require a few weeks to heal.
Accident investigators found the car may have swerved over the center line and overcorrected, flipping and sliding about 77 yards.
After the incident, Mandigo’s command praised him before the squadron for his heroism.
Mandigo said the accident unsettled him. “It was the worst accident I’ve ever seen,” he said, “the first time seeing all that blood.”
But it demonstrated his strength under fire, he said: “I proved, I think to myself, I’m not afraid to act.”
Hana Kusumoto contributed to this report.
