He put down his gun to pick up a baby …

A story picked up by my local paper today. (I’m not in Boston.)

He put down his gun to pick up a baby

Platoon fulfills mission of mercy for fallen medic

By Kevin Cullen
THE BOSTON GLOBE December 5, 2006

 

It was a routine patrol, in the third week of June – if, in fact, there is such a thing as a routine patrol in Fallujah, in Iraq’s Anbar province.

MICHELE McDONALD / The Boston Globe
Navy medic Greg Cinelli held Baby Mariam last month at Massachusetts General Hospital, where the Iraqi girl had successful surgery.

Chris Walsh, a Navy medic assigned to a Marines weapons company, was riding in a Humvee with three Marines, when a hidden bomb exploded in the dirt road just in front of them.

Even before the thick dust had settled, the Marines, and Walsh, were out of the vehicle, looking for the insurgents who had planted the remote-control device. The triggerman, as several who joined the pursuit vividly recall, was spotted first on a rooftop, then on the ground making his escape through the maze of ramshackle houses that line the road.

When Walsh and the Marines came to one doorway, M-4 rifles up and ready, a woman emerged from a room, holding an infant and saying, over and over again, “Baby. Baby sick.”

Walsh put his gun down and the woman put the baby down.

Walsh had seen bad things – as an EMT back home in St. Louis, and at war. But he told his comrades he had never seen anything like this: The child, just a few months old, looked as though her insides had been turned inside out.

Her name was Mariam, and she looked up at Walsh with dead eyes.

Suddenly, finding the bad guys became secondary. Walsh, the Marines recall, examined the child, pulled out a digital camera and took pictures to show the doctors back at base camp. As soon as Capt. Sean Donovan, a doctor assigned to the First Battalion 25th Marine Regiment out of Fort Devens in Ayer, Mass., saw them, he knew the baby had a rare condition in which the bladder develops outside the body. Donovan said she wouldn’t live long without surgery of a kind she couldn’t get in Iraq.

“Then,” Donovan recalls Walsh saying, “we’ve got to get her out of here, sir.”

The Boston Globe
Marine Lance Cpl. Corey Robbins (left) and Navy medics John Garran (center) and Greg Cinelli were reunited with Baby Mariam at Massachusetts General Hospital. A Marines weapons company found the ailing Iraqi girl in Fallujah.

It seemed a noble sentiment, if, in the middle of a war, a bit naive. But Walsh meant it. Saving Baby Mariam became his mission. At chow one night, he stood up and explained to the Marines in his platoon what he wanted to do. He said he’d need help. And one by one, the Marines put up their hands.

Mike Henderson, a Marine major from Maine, told Walsh and Donovan that his nephew was born with the same condition, called a bladder exstrophy, and that the boy had successful surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Donovan began using his computer, trying to find the appropriate medical care and a shortcut through the maddening military bureaucracy, a way to get the child out. The Rev. Marc Bishop, a Chelmsford, Mass., priest who is battalion chaplain, started e-mailing friends back home, looking for money and help.

Meanwhile, each week, under the cover of darkness, wearing night-vision goggles, Walsh and a dozen Marines made their way to the shanty where Mariam lived. They parked their Humvees a mile away and walked a different, circuitous route each time.

Staff Sgt. Edward Ewing, the platoon leader who devised and led the covert nocturnal visits, said Walsh’s team followed a routine: Lance Cpl. Eric Valdepenas, a 21-year-old from Seekonk, Mass., and Cody Hill, a 23-year-old lance corporal from Oklahoma, hid outside Mariam’s house, providing cover, along with some others; Cpl. Jared Shoemaker, 29, a police officer from Tulsa, accompanied Donovan and Walsh inside the house, where they tended to Mariam as best they could, trying to ward off an infection that could kill her.

“We’re going to get her the help she needs,” Walsh would say, to a family that didn’t speak English but somehow understood that the Americans, loathed as an occupying force by many in Fallujah, represented Mariam’s only chance.

Over the summer, they made great strides. Bishop had struck gold with an e-mail to Christopher Anderson, one of his parishioners at St. Mary’s Church in Chelmsford. Anderson, who is president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, lined up 16 companies to pay to get the baby to Boston.

Donovan, meanwhile, had found Dr. Rafael Pieretti, a Venezuelan surgeon at Massachusetts General who is one of the few doctors in the United States who specialize in the condition. Pieretti and Massachusetts General offered their services free of charge.

But there it all stalled. There were some 5,000 Iraqi civilians seeking to leave the country for medical care, and Mariam, it seemed, would have to wait her turn.

 

  

On Labor Day, Sept. 4, Walsh and his team were on another routine patrol in another section

of Fallujah, about a mile from Mariam’s house. Ewing was in the lead vehicle and noticed some kids playing soccer off the side of the road. Then came the blast, which lifted the rear of Ewing’s 5-ton Humvee off the road. But it was Walsh’s Humvee just behind that took what the Marines call a belly shot: The bomb exploded directly under the vehicle.

The Boston Globe
Maureen Walsh (right), the mother of slain medic Chris Walsh, and nurse Katie Dinare visited Baby Mariam last month at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Ewing and some Marines rushed to the smoking wreckage. Medic Greg Cinelli tried to keep them away. They pushed their way past him, and Cinelli turned his attention to Hill, who had severe burns over more than half of his body. Hill was in shock but kept asking about the others.

“You made it out!” Cinelli told Hill. “They can, too!”

But Cinelli was just trying to give Hill the will to live. There was nothing he or anybody else could do for the others: Valdepenas, the youngest of eight children, who left the University of Massachusetts at Amherst when his unit got called to active duty, Shoemaker, with a wife back in Oklahoma, and Walsh, the author of the mission for Mariam, were dead.

With their seven-month rotation about to end, and 11 members of their battalion dead and 83 wounded, the Marines decided there was only one way to honor their dead brothers and that was to make sure the baby was saved.

E-mails from Fallujah shot all around the United States, detailing the risks that Walsh and the Marines had taken, the effort expended and the blood spilled. Suddenly, the red tape loosened, and in early October Mariam was flown to Boston. The surgery was successful, and she is doing well.

More than a month after Maureen Walsh buried her son, she stood in her living room in Kansas, reading a handwritten letter from Donovan.

“You need to know this about your son,” Donovan wrote.

She had not known about Mariam, had not known that her son spent months, surrounded by the chaos of war, trying to save her. And it was then, as she stood there, tears falling onto Donovan’s letter, that Maureen Walsh knew she had to see the child, and hold her in her arms.

Chris Walsh grew up in Kansas, the oldest of five children. He was popular, but had an instinctive sympathy for those who were not.

“He would bring home the kid no one else would play with,” his mother recalled.

Walsh had liked working the streets of St. Louis as an EMT, although he told his mother there were too many wasted hours between real emergency calls. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he joined the Navy reserves.

His father, a Marine, had seen combat in Vietnam. His brother Patrick was a Marine serving in Iraq.

Navy medics are assigned to Marine units, and Walsh began getting the training he needed to go to Iraq.

“He believed that no able-bodied person, who had no responsibilities beyond themselves, should stay here when there were people with spouses and children overseas,” his mother said.

On patrol in Iraq, Navy medics are more than medics. They carry weapons, just like the Marines, and they fight, just like the Marines.

“When you’re in an infantry unit, you’re in the infantry,” said Edgar Gallego, a corpsman and New York City EMT who partnered with Walsh in Iraq.

And Walsh was always pushing to do more.

Ewing said that whenever they were on patrol, Walsh would ask to stop when they saw injured Iraqis on the street. In Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni insurgents, this was more than risky. Ewing and his Marines would take up cover positions as Walsh operated his impromptu sidewalk clinics.

“It wasn’t part of his job. Wasn’t part of our job,” Ewing said. “But Chris could not pass someone who was suffering and not help.”

A few hours after Walsh, Valdepenas and Shoemaker were killed, another patrol from their company was hit: Two Marines lost legs in the blast. Ignoring the order to take some time off, Ewing and his men raced to the scene to help their fellow Marines. And a few days later, Ewing resumed leading the middle-of-the-night visits to Mariam’s home.

All 30 men in the platoon joined, at various times, in the volunteer effort. Mariam’s family wondered what had happened to Walsh and the others, but the Marines decided not to tell them.

Three weeks ago, Maureen Walsh stood on the 17th floor of the pediatric ward at Massachusetts General, rocking Mariam in her arms. The vacant stare that Chris Walsh first encountered has been replaced by a pair of bright, inquisitive brown eyes.

Mariam stared up at Maureen Walsh and smiled back.

Having arrived in Boston listless, malnourished and underdeveloped, Mariam has put on two pounds.

“This is a different girl than the one who arrived here in October,” said Dr. Laurence Ronan, who has overseen Mariam’s care and will take her and her grandparents back to Iraq soon.

Mariam’s grandparents, who traveled with her because her mother has not yet recovered from complications at childbirth, told Maureen Walsh they had learned of Chris’ death last month, when Donovan visited them at the hospital.

Mariam’s grandfather took Maureen Walsh’s hand in his and, speaking in Arabic, said,

“Thank you for your son.”

Mariam’s family does not believe it was coincidence that Chris Walsh was the one who came into their house in hot pursuit of someone who had tried to kill him and instead put down his gun and picked up Mariam.

“This,” her grandfather said, nodding solemnly, “was an act of God. God sent Chris. To Mariam. So she will live.”

Maureen Walsh shares that assessment.

“There were too many coincidences for it to be coincidence,” she said. “Chris was waiting his whole life for something like this.”

Tears?

Me too.

Then I asked,

<palign=”center”>"How many more … how many more must die?"

God bless,

Nunzio

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