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Medevac Pilot From Tampa Braves Perils In Iraq

Photo from Karlo Felix

Black Hawk medevac pilot Karlo Felix, 37, is a native Brazilian whose family lives in Tampa. This is the 16-year Army veteran’s second tour in Iraq.

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By GRETCHEN PARKER, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 22, 2008

Even when everything goes right on Karlo Felix's job, the day is still hairy.

If the GPS coordinates are correct, and his 200-mph flight to the scene is safe, and he finds the right spot to land his Black Hawk, and he touches down evenly and without stirring a brownout of dust, and the medics find the wounded soldiers and carry them back, and he lifts off in time to save the fighters' lives - it has gone as well as it can go.

Some days, though, are more perilous than others.

Like one day last month, when his medics were shot at as they tried to carry seriously injured soldiers 100 yards to his helicopter.

The story has a good ending, thanks to some quick thinking by Felix and his crew and a stroke of ingenuity by the medics - who kept cool even after the first bullet whizzed between them and missed by only 6 inches.

Felix, a native Brazilian whose family lives in Tampa, is 37 and has been in the Army for 16 years. He's been a medevac pilot for four years. This is his second tour in Iraq.

His crew and his Black Hawk, emblazoned with a red cross, have been shot at before. Medevac teams are known for pulling off heroics in trying to reach the wounded.

Their mission is to save people. The enemy sees them as a target.

For Felix, his reaction is always the same, and it's always visceral. It ticks him off.

"That's your first instinct, when someone shoots at you, you get pissed off and angry," Felix said in a telephone interview last week.

Then this thought runs through his head: "How dare you? I'm here trying to save somebody, and you're shooting at me?" As he puts it, "The red cross is not target practice."

Things Get Rough

On this day, Jan. 18, he and another medevac Black Hawk were on their way to help a convoy of Stryker armored tanks hit by a roadside bomb in an area north of Baghdad. It was a 10-minute flight from the medevac's base at Camp Taji.

Five soldiers were seriously hurt, including one who was about to lose his leg below the knee. The connection with his foot was a single tendon.

As usual, they landed facing each other so they each could keep a lookout behind the other's tail. They landed in a ravine about 100 yards from where they had seen the convoy, to keep from pelting them with dust.

Getting the first soldier to the medevac went smoothly. Of all the bad injuries, he was a priority because he was having trouble breathing and kept losing consciousness.

The second patient was the one who was about to lose his foot. Uninjured soldiers carried him on a gurney to the medevac.

After that, things got rough.

One of the medics was Floridian Aughe McQuown, a 34-year-old native of Lake County, and he remembers standing next to his longtime friend and fellow medic Robert Congdon when they heard the gunfire from the sniper.

It sounded like the crack of a whip, and the bullet went right between them, hitting the Stryker.

McQuown said he couldn't believe how close it was. The next one hit the ground behind him.

There he was, standing next to his friend "like they were waiting on a light to turn green." (He and Congdon, a Las Vegas native, try to keep their humor up to help them deal with stress, he said.)

They jumped into the Stryker, slammed the hatch shut and tried to think what to do. They were stranded. They knew they had to reach Felix and the other pilot, but the radio in the Stryker was not set up to communicate with medevacs.

It was Congdon who put on a Stryker crewmember's helmet, while they reprogrammed the radio so it could communicate with the Black Hawks.

With helicopter noise blocking out the sniper fire, the pilots had no idea what was keeping the two medics. When they heard from them over the radio, they called for help from the Apache helicopters 700 feet overhead that were there for backup.

In minutes, the Apaches were firing machine cannon rounds near the Strykers. The sound was something you would have to hear to fathom, McQuown said.

He laughed when he recalled that "even the Stryker guys were impressed."

"They were like, 'Are they with you? You brought that?'"

Time was passing, and McQuown and Congdon couldn't wait any longer. They had to run, even though the Apaches' cannons were still firing.

They got the last three soldiers to the Black Hawks. McQuown carried one, who had suffered a broken leg, on his back. All five soldiers survived.

"You try to shut off all your emotions. You do the best you can and try to just focus on that person's life, on stopping the bleeding, on getting this person breathing again," McQuown said.

McQuown, Congdon and a third medic in training, who tended to the most critical victims alone by running back and forth between the Black Hawks, received Bronze Stars for valor.

'That Was ... Wow'

Not until it was over did the medics allow themselves to think about how dangerous it all was.

"Later on, when you're not busy, just sitting around drinking coffee, that's when it hits you," McQuown said. "Damn. That's really all you can say, is, 'Damn. That was ... Wow.'"

It's common for McQuown and the other medics on his team to rehash a mission after they get back to camp and clean up.

"A lot of us sit there and try to go over everything and say, 'Was there something else I could have done? Something I didn't do?'"

He misses his wife and children back in Savannah, Ga., at Fort Stewart. What keeps him going, McQuown said, is knowing that if he doesn't do a good job at work, someone's husband or wife won't be going home.

Felix has his own way of coping and keeping his head on straight when he's taking the medics in and out of an emergency.

He focuses on flying.

"I have to make sure I'm not exposing the helicopter to any more danger. If I don't do that, if I brownout and crash or hit a set of wires and crash, I'm not doing anyone any good," Felix said.

Felix said he's always aware of how much danger he's in. He's learned all the variables. Enemies waiting to shoot at medics. Or at him, with grenades attached to rockets.

In the end, he said, "You just take a deep breath and go in."

He asks medics for just the information he needs: the basics on the soldiers' injuries. Head injuries - no sharp turns. Amputations - extra-gentle landings. He tries not to do anything that would cause more pain for the soldier patients.

And Felix shares a creed that many medevac pilots hold: Don't look in the back.

The blades of the helicopter roar overhead, and his headset muffles most sound. But sometimes he still can hear soldiers scream.

"When you're hearing these guys screaming in the back, and you can smell gunpowder," he said, "some of the smells and images can stick with you for a while if you're always looking at it and worrying too much about it."

"For the sake of maintaining your mental health, you just hope everything goes all right."

After a mission, Felix doesn't ask Congdon or the other medics about their injuries. He doesn't want to know.

"I'll say, 'Did he live?' That's all I want to hear."

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at gparker@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7562.

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