Charles Bowen and Ty Able
Sgt. Ty Able
It was a warm, dry night in the Summer of 2019 when the quiet skies above a remote village in Wardak Province, Afghanistan were ripped apart by the unmistakable sound of approaching Black Hawks. Within moments, the helis were deploying dozens of battle-hardened, elite soldiers from the United States Army's famed 75th Ranger Regiment – a hardcore unit of special forces operators who are among the most badass warriors on the face of the earth.
Their objective was simple – this village was home to a group of high-value targets who had been connected with a string of brutal terrorist attacks throughout the region, and the Rangers were here to capture them if possible, kill them if necessary.
Unfortunately for the Rangers, these HVTs were ready for them – and they'd had plenty of time to dig in and prepare defenses around the village.
The Rangers came under attack almost immediately, taking intense fire from AKs, PKMs, and RPGs, firing out not only from the target compound but from other fortified positions scattered around the village as well. Gunfire and bullets ripped through the valley as the Rangers grabbed cover and returned fire with rifles, LMGs, and grenade launchers, and what had once been a tranquil village was now the heart of a raging all-out gunfight lit up by explosions and tracer rounds.
Suddenly, as one element of the assault force was maneuvering to cover inside a building, a huge explosion ripped through their ranks as an IED or a grenade went off in the midst of several Rangers. The calls for, "Medic!", rang out loud and clear, even above the chaotic blast of gunfire and grenades.
Staff Sergeant Charles Bowen and Sergeant Ty Able raced into action immediately.
With bullets whizzing around them, pinging off stone walls just a few meters away, Bowen and Able charged towards the danger. They were combat medics for Bravo Company of First Battalion, and it was their job to find these wounded men and get them to safety, and they weren't going to let themselves get slowed down by a little thing like a few thousand 7.62 milimeter rounds directed towards their faces.
Bowen and Able reached the site of the explosion and found one wounded guy who was still healthy enough to walk and one guy unconscious and bleeding badly from a gushing chest wound. Running into a hail of gunfire, the two men grabbed the unconscious Ranger and dragged him to cover, which, in this case, was a damn two-foot-high pile of dirt so tiny that you could only use it for cover by laying perfectly prone. With bullets ricocheting and kicking up dirt just inches from their heads, Bowen and Able triaged the soldier and began administering treatment – they cut away his plate carrier, saw he was chewed up real bad under his armor, and began administering an IV fluid drip and TX acid to slow the bleeding and prevent a hemorrhage. The guy was bleeding from shrapnel wounds in his arms and legs, had a collapsed lung, and was losing blood fast.
As Sgt. Able applied pressure to the wound, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood, Sgt. Bowen pulled out a pouch of blood, found a vein, and started pumping the dying man with an infusion of extra blood – and, if you've ever donated blood before, there are plenty of medical personnel who can struggle finding a vein when they're trying to stick you in the Bloodmobile… trying to set up a blood transfusion in the dark laying prone in 60 pounds of gear while the patient is writing in agony and enemy bullets are kicking dust into your eyes is a whole other level of difficulty.
"To provide this level of care, Bowen and Able had to ignore their own survival instincts and concentrate on their patients. They displayed the highest levels of courage as they repeatedly placed their patients' survival above their own safety. They will say they were just doing what they are trained to do, and in some ways they are right. However, although we simulate incoming fire and force medics to treat in the prone position during training there is no way to accurately reflect the reality of combat."
But keeping this guy here was too dangerous, and as the enemy gunfire got even closer, Bowen and Able decided they needed to get this casualty back off the front lines. Grabbing onto him, the two medics pulled the wounded man back to the casualty collection point (CCP), only to find that this place was also not exactly a Sunday afternoon at the zoo either – within moments of arriving at the CCP, Bowen and Able were greeted by a Taliban frag grenade that landed about 15 meters away from them and kicked up a huge cloud of dust, shrapnel, and smoke. Nearby, Rangers on the radio were calling in firing coordinates for inbound Apaches and others were launching grenades towards enemy hardpoints.
Sergeant Able continued working to stabilize the wounded man, but Bowen directed his attention to another Ranger who was approaching the CCP – a badly-wounded K-9 soldier bleeding from a bullethole in the neck, limping back to base, being almost dragged along by his loyal German Shepherd. The guy collapsed into the dirt near Sgt. Bowen, who immediately and unhesitatingly jammed his middle finger into the gushing bullet wound in the guy's neck in a desperate attempt to plug the bleeding. Enemy bullets ricocheted off the dirt berm they were using for cover, but Bowen and Able heroically continued working to stabilize their patients – Able hooking up another transfusion bag, and Bowen digging around to asses the wound in the other man's neck.
Unfortunately, that gunshot to the neck was bad. Like, it created a hemorrhage and the dude couldn't breathe.
So Sergeant Charles Bowen had to crike him on the battlefield.
A cricothyroidotomy is a 10% more chill version of a tracheotomy – it's basically that thing you see in movies where a dude is choking and the doctor has to cut a hole in their throat and jam ball-point pen in there so the dude can breathe. Sergeant Charles Bowman did this by the light of his night-vision goggles, with mortars and gunfire ripping all around his head, Apache helicopters making strafing runs with 30mm cannons, and the incessant cacophony of men screaming and fighting all around him. When enemy gunfire got too close, both Bowen and Able repositioned their bodies so they could shield these wounded men from further damage from incoming fire – putting themselves in extreme danger for the sake of saving their patients.
But, after all of the insanity you just read, here is the REALLY crazy part:
All of this is standard operating procedure for a combat medic.
This is the job. What sets Sergeant Bowen and Able apart isn't what they've already done, but what they're about to do – something that has never been done in warfare before.
With both of their casualties in imminent risk of bleeding out on the field, Bowen and Able drew blood from other Rangers on the battlefield and then transfused that blood into the wounded men.
Combat Medics have carried blood into battle since the early days of World War One, and today it's basically standard for combat medics everywhere in the world to go into potential live-fire scenarios carrying a few pints of cold blood that they can transfuse into wounded soldiers when necessary. However, recently the Rangers have been experimenting with a process called the Ranger O-Low Titre Protocol (or ROLO, which, it should be noted, is only one letter off from YOLO), which is where the combat medics pre-screen a couple of O-negative or O-positive Rangers who can be called on to donate blood mid-battle. But, up until last summer, nobody had ever actually attempted this in a real fight.
So, at the height of a raging full-scale firefight, with Hellfires, 30mm, and 105mm cannons pounding the earth at danger-close ranges as nearby as 30 meters (!!), Sergeants Charles Bowen and Ty Able drew three pints of blood from three heroic fellow Rangers and then used that blood to save the lives of two of their brethren. They did this while laying prone, under fire from enemy positions less than 100 meters away, in the dark, after having already been involved in an hour-long combat situation.
Then, when they were done with that they saved four more soldiers' lives, triaged a couple more, then provided covering fire with their M4 rifles while the rest of the Ranger team evaced onto a Chinook at the end of the fight. Both of those wounded men survived, as did four others treated by Able and Bowen.
"Staff Sgt. Bowen's actions during this operation are some of the most impressive feats I've ever witnessed. Not only did his actions save the lives of his fellow Rangers, but he performed a staggering display of technically superior field medicine while under fire for more than 90 minutes. His blatant disregard for his own safety was evident throughout."
At the end of the day, they were credited with saving the lives of six Rangers, all while constantly exposing themselves to repeated and concentrated enemy gunfire. Though the action took place last summer, the story just became declassified in January 2020, and both men are currently up for commendation medals for heroism (Sergeant Able was also named the USO Soldier of the Year).
They are scheduled to receive their medals two weeks from now, on March 26th.
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