EVERETT — Army Cpl. Jason Bierman said it took him about five days to learn how to sleep again. It’s just been too quiet lately.
For much of the past year, Bierman would hover each night at the edge of slumber. Lying in bed fully dressed in his flight suit, a cellphone-sized radio near his pillow, he’d close his eyes, waiting in half-sleep for the blurt of a three-toned call-to-duty.
No more. Bierman just returned from Iraq after a tour of duty as a flight medic in Trauma Junkie Four-Zero, a Black Hawk medivac helicopter in the Army’s 159th Medical Company (Air Ambulance).
Between sips of a double hazelnut latte during a visit to his home in Everett this month — Bierman’s a devoted coffee drinker and had Starbucks coffee shipped to him in Baghdad — the soldier recalled his time in Iraq.
As a flight medic, he saw the raw end of the war. Sometimes it was directed at him.
"We got shot at a lot, but we never did get hit, never went down," he said. "We were pretty lucky."
Bierman, 27, grew up in Everett and Marysville, graduating from Mariner High School in 1994. He enlisted at age 24, an old man in a sea of 18-year-old recruits. Before signing up in 2000, he had been working as a part-time police officer in Granite Falls.
The 159th, part of the Army’s 421st Medical Battalion, is based in Wiesbaden, Germany. His company and its 15 Black Hawks were deployed to Kuwait in February 2003 after a fit of false starts.
"They kept saying, you’re going, you’re not going. You’re going, you’re not going," he recalled.
The soldiers finally believed it was true when their commander said it really was time, and waved the deployment orders over his head.
"That’s when we knew it was on."
First deployed to Kuwait, Bierman and the three other soldiers aboard Trauma Junkie Four-Zero "crossed the berm" into Iraq in late March. They picked up their first casualty within an hour.
Bierman said his most vivid memories revolve around the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in August.
Two of the company’s pilots came running into his hangar yelling "mascal," he recalled. Mascal is medic shorthand for mass casualties. Crews, Bierman included, sprinted to their aircraft.
Within 20 minutes of the bombing, six of the unit’s helicopters were on the scene.
It was organized chaos on the ground. Soldiers had sealed off the area, more than a dozen were dead, and many more were wounded.
After two trips to evacuate patients, Bierman’s helicopter returned once more to the scene only to be told there were no more people to pick up. But two soldiers from the unit were missing, and Bierman went inside the U.N. building to find them.
He soon did, in a hole on the fifth floor. He tried to pull out three people who were trapped.
The helicopter crew worked for hours. Finally, when they had gotten the last man out, they saw that both his legs were gone.
The man was loaded onto an ambulance, and Bierman and his fellow soldiers discovered later that he was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nation’s special representative in Iraq.
The war and the insurgency kept the flight medics busy. Bierman figures he treated 784 patients: wounded soldiers and Marines, Iraqi prisoners of war, children, pregnant women.
Not all of those wounded in the war lived. Bierman said he struggled with the fact that he couldn’t save everyone.
On the borderline cases, Bierman would call the hospital where the wounded were sent. But he finally stopped that practice.
He quit after his helicopter was called in to pick up a soldier who had hit a roadside bomb with his Humvee in downtown Baghdad.
"He didn’t look that bad," Bierman recalled, remembering his excitement when they got to him quickly, began treatment and hustled him off to the hospital in moments.
"I felt great, I was really amped we got him in time."
When he radioed the hospital later to check on the soldier, he was greeted with an awkward silence. "There was a pause. And then, ‘Call us on a land line.’"
Bierman wondered why the hospital wouldn’t tell him over the radio how the soldier was doing. Then it sunk in. "You’ve got to be kidding me," he pleaded into the headset.
A surgeon later told him the solider had died from a small piece of shrapnel that hit him near his temple.
"That was it. I never called again."
Bierman doesn’t criticize the decision to go to war, or his role in it.
"I think we needed to be there," he said. "Saddam is not a friendly person.
"I never got done with a mission and said, ‘Why are we here?’" he added.
But now, away from the war and back into an Army that revolves around morning inspections and spit-shined boots, Bierman is ready to get out of the service when his four-year enlistment ends in April.
He’s planning on going to nursing school and getting a part-time hospital job.
"I always told myself I was an excellent flight medic but a terrible soldier," he said.
Reporter Brian Kelly: 425-339-3422 or kelly@heraldnet.com.
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