November 1 – AUSTIN – Today, Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chair Dawn Buckingham, MD, is proud to introduce the next part of the series highlighting VLB’s Voices of Veterans oral history program. This week they highlight the service of HM3 Hunter “Doc” Hayes, who served in the US Marines as a US Navy Corpsman in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hayes said he spent much of his younger years in Lufkin and while he wasn’t born there, he believes he’s from there, even though he spent part of his adolescence across the pond.
“I went to a school in Ireland for half of my 10th and 11th grades,” Hayes said. ‘My father and uncle had a number of businesses in Ireland, and so did I
fortunate enough to travel with them and go to school in another country.”
Haye’s decision to join the military was made in the summer of 2001, just a few months before harrowing images of the tragedy burst across television screens and plunged America into war.
“I was in boot camp when September 11 happened. And I always heard, you know, in boot camp they try to mess with you, you know what I mean,” he explained of that fateful day in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. “When they came in and told us, I thought, ‘oh, they’re just kidding us, it’s not true’ and about a week later we had our medical appointments and dental appointments and I saw it on the TV, I thought : oh my God, it’s real.”
Hayes said that when it came to his service, he didn’t want to sit behind a desk and be in the middle of it and in the mud, so to speak, and that he chose the Navy with the ultimate goal of becoming. a doctor.
“My grandfather was in the Navy during World War II, and it’s just an attractive service because there are so many things you can do in the Navy. You can be on the ground, you can be on a boat, you can a sub, you can fly, I mean it’s just the best service,” he said of his choice.
Hayes said he won’t forget the first time he worked in the emergency room before leaving for Kuwait. He said he was sent to a Marine Trauma Training Center in LA County, and that’s actually where he learned about trauma at the LA County Hospital in East LA.
“It was like a war zone,” Haye said of LA County Hospital. “I mean gunshot wounds, just significant trauma. I mean, if it wasn’t, I mean this really prepared me.”
He vividly remembers the first time he assisted with a trauma there, something he has never forgotten all these years and combat missions later.
“It was a Jane Doe, nobody knew her name, but she was in a car accident. I guess her wallet flew out of the car or something, and I drove her in, and we got her into the little bay .” And there are doctors everywhere. They do what’s called a clamshell, and open her chest, and they inject adrenaline into it, pump her heart up, all that stuff, and I wrap her up and breathe for her,” he explained. “It was just crazy. And they took her to the OR, but I mean, she died in the end. I’ll never forget the time, 1:52 a.m.”
Hayes said he spent about three years in total training and was finally given the opportunity to deploy in July 2004. He said they had a small layover in Germany where they used the phone, smoked some cigarettes and headed to Kuwait for about two hours. before leaving again, this time to Iraq. Hayes said that while he was in Iraq, he was not assigned to a specific team or platoon, but was instead assigned to stay next to the battalion aid station.
“There was no one else who could do my job,” he said of not being assigned to a platoon. “There was no one who had had the training that I had at the Naval Trauma Training Center, and my OIC said, I begged every time because I wanted to go out with 3/7 because they had been there and done stuff like that and I It was like I was charging hard to go.”
Hayes said he became close with the boys in his group during his time in Iraq and could talk to them about anything. He said he remembers as if it were yesterday the first suicide bomber he encountered and that, like Jane Doe in LA County, that moment has never left him.
“It was October 17, and it was like our first suicide bomber, and me and one of the surgeons, Dr. Nelson, put a man in a cooler because he had been murdered and he had no legs and that was it. Just, I’ve never seen a body more charred and decomposed than this guy in my life, and here you’re holding him down, trying to pull him off the truck and stuff, and it smells like goddamn grilled chicken,” said he said about that day. “I still can’t eat grilled chicken because of it, and I’ll never forget that. I remember just walking around and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?'”
Hayes said his medical department came to the realization that they needed to talk together about what they were seeing and feeling. Realizing that they would have to live with this for the rest of their lives, they accepted it and dealt with it. While it wasn’t always easy, he said they also talked about the heroism that came with their duty.
“We’re accredited with saving 25 Marines, but I mean, it’s satisfying, you know what I mean, but a lot of times it’s like we saved them because we had to amputate something or other,” Hayes said. “It’s always hard to say that we, to say, hey, we had to cut off your legs – and this was in the field, mind you, this wasn’t in a hospital. This is in a fucking tent with a little giggling I saw that we would do that, it’s quite barbaric, but you have to do what you have to do to save lives.”
Click here to listen to HM3 Hunter “Doc” Hayes tell his story.
