Theodore II

If someone asks you how much a single soldier's life is worth to the United States Air Force, show them a three-hundred-million-dollar C-17 cargo jet flying across continents with only one hospital bed bolted to the floor. In 2010, a young American soldier wounded in Afghanistan suffered catastrophic lung failure. Even with a combat ventilator turned to one hundred percent oxygen, his damaged lungs could no longer pass oxygen into his bloodstream, and field doctors knew he had only hours to live. A standard medical helicopter cannot run an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machine, which pumps a patient's entire blood supply outside the body through an artificial lung and requires heavy electrical power and pressurized cabin stability at thirty thousand feet. Refusing to let one soldier die, U.S. Air Force critical care specialists from the 59th Medical Wing and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center flew directly into the war zone with a portable heart-lung bypass system. They cleared the cavernous cargo bay of a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III built to haul a seventy-ton battle tank and strapped the soldier's bed dead center on the steel deck. For three thousand miles from Afghanistan to Germany, five military doctors and nurses stood around that single bed in the roaring cargo hold, monitoring every drop of his blood until he survived. No nation on Earth fights harder for a single human heartbeat than the United States military.