170: Combat First Aid in Ukraine by Michael Baker

Today, we have a special guest episode.

Dana Lombardy of Lombardy Studios hosts talks on military history and current events. To find out more about Dana's work, check out LombardyStudios.com.

For this episode, he brings in retired Rear Admiral Michael Baker, a general surgeon who travels to Ukraine to teach combat first aid. 

It's a great story about volunteering and working in a war zone to help Ukrainians save soldiers' lives. 

Great news: FeedSpot ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 10 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at: https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

Special thanks to Max Jansson for posting the
Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins instrumental "I'll see you in my dreams," performed live at Secret Policeman's Third Ball 1987. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wTVLIZaxMk

---

00:00:05    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:41    DANA LOMBARDI
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the War College. My name is Dana Lombardi, and I've been using the facilities here for about 10 years to do War College presentations. They've been mostly historical. In the past couple of years have been trying to look at more contemporary things that are going on in the world. This morning we're going to talk about the events in Ukraine and also how this impacts ourselves and our allies. We have really good speakers who have personal experience with this. And they have a lot of things to tell us about what is happening there and also what they have done and some of their personal experiences. The gentleman to my immediate right is retired Admiral Michael Baker, a surgeon.

00:01:26    Jack Gaines
Today, we have a guest episode. Dana Lombardi of Lombardi Studios hosts talks on military history and current events. To find out more about Dana's work, check it out on LombardiStudios .com. For this episode... He brings in retired Rear Admiral Michael Baker, a general surgeon who travels to Ukraine to teach combat first aid. It's a great story about volunteering and working in a war zone to help Ukrainians save soldiers' lives. So let's get started.

00:01:55    MICHAEL BAKER
Thank you for that kind introduction. So I got to tell you this story about how I got involved. Why is a general surgeon going to Ukraine in the middle of a war? In fact, a retired general surgeon. I mean, what am I doing? I decided after all my surgery training and medical school and everything, I felt grateful to grow up in this country, believe it or not. And I decided I would join the military. The military at that time was scaling down, but very short of specialists. So they said, well, we're going to put you in the reserves for now in case we ever need you and we'll find something for you to do. And I said, okay, I can do a couple of years in the reserves and then that won't interfere with my career and I'll go back to civilian life. So I signed up. Little did I know that they would hook me into doing more than those two or three years in the reserves, and I wound up spending quite a long time retiring as a rear admiral with a warfare pin of river and coastal patrol, which at the time was extremely unusual. I had all kinds of odd assignments, most of which had nothing to do with surgery. It was very strange. So Europe's been at peace for 75 years since World War II. How did this happen? If you believe Mark Twain, he says God created war so that Americans would learn geography. And normally I start this talk with some history and geography. We won't dwell on that today because of our time constraints. Normally this is like a 90 -minute talk. So Ukraine's been part of many countries. Borders changed all the time, but Ukrainians are not Russians. That's the key thing here. They never have been. There's a lot of reasons that Putin listed for attacking Ukraine. One of the big ones that's outlandish is NATO's getting too close. So I have to show you that one real quick on the map. And you can come up with some arrows. But if you look at the dark blue, dark purplish color, those are the original NATO countries sort of pre -1991. You know, England and France and Germany. And the purple ones... adjacent to Ukraine, those are all former Russian Soviet republics. So, you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, what did they do after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Well, they all rushed to join NATO because they're afraid of the Russians. What a surprise. Where is the border close? Well, they already share a common border. So how do you get any closer to NATO than sharing a common border? They also are pretty close to Turkey. Anybody know what that is? Hunt for Red October? It's Kaliningrad, Sean Connery's port of embarkation with a nuclear sub. There's a Russian naval base with nuclear weapons in the middle of NATO countries. Now, I'm a surgeon, so we would call this a metastasis. I don't know what to call it geopolitically, but it's right between Lithuania and Poland, and my prediction would be that the next place that the Russians would go if they triumphed in Ukraine would be to open that corridor. So the Russian effort backfires so extravagantly that previously neutral Finland and Sweden decide to join NATO. You know, it's kind of interesting. So now there's more NATO countries. It really did backfire because everybody fears the Russian bear, as you'll see. And I put that on there just to remind everybody that the bear is coming. There's really reason here why the Ukrainians stood to fight. Everybody thought it would collapse in two weeks, including all the NATO countries and the Western powers. They did stand. And I think it's well exemplified by the response. There's 18 guys on a place called Snake Island. And the garrison on Snake Island became famous because they were approached by a battle cruiser, the Moskva. And the 18 guys gave a response that became symbolic to the rest of the war with the Russian military. And it actually have we have postage stamps now that talk about it. Next slide.

00:05:46    MICHAEL BAKER
Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian warship ordered Ukrainian soldiers manning a Black Sea outpost on Ukraine's Snake Island to surrender. What happened next made headlines around the world.

00:06:04    MICHAEL BAKER
It was the go F yourself heard round the world. And tonight we're learning the Russian warship that attacked Snake Island has been destroyed by Ukrainian forces. The Times of London reporting that the Vasily Bikov seen in this earlier video was hit during a firefight after the Ukrainians used a smaller vessel to lure the Russian ship closer to shore where a hidden missile battery could open fire.

00:06:25    MICHAEL BAKER
You know, I'm a sailor, but I would never say anything like that. So what it really amounts to is the fact that fighting for your home is a lot different than being an invader who fights to loot and to rob and to rape and to destroy. Napoleon stated historically that the moral is to the physical as three is to one. It's really true. It might even be higher. I'm going to show you a video of a 15 -year -old boy credited with about 100 kills of Russian armor using his drone to guide the artillery. That's pretty amazing for a 15 -year -old. So how did I get involved with this? To tell you the quick story, I have a friend and shipmate named Malcolm Nance. He was an MSNBC contributor. He's an author. First week of the war, he predicted that Ukraine would beat Russia. He was an outlier. And then he went and joined the International Legion and went to Ukraine. So there's volunteers from over 50 countries. They get background checks and psyche evals, unlike the Russians who take them out of jail and prison. He returned home in August to promote his book, and he was at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. And so I said, I'm going to come down there and let's go out and talk after the lecture. He gave a great discussion about Ukraine. Interesting guy. And he wrote a book called They Want to Kill Americans about militias and terrorists. Great read, actually, fairly interesting. And even though I don't really drink, I learned what certain drinks like a French 75 was. I didn't even know what that was, but now I know. So I want you to meet my friend Malcolm Nance. He's an author. He's an NBC commentator. He's an intelligence guy from the Navy background. And he's the only one who predicted Russia would lose. So here's a clip from the Commonwealth Club. I said this on MSNBC. I said,

00:08:02    MICHAEL BAKER
Club. I said this on MSNBC. I said, these guys are going to fight. I can tell by the look in this man's eye. He is ready to kick Russian ass and enjoy it. And, you know, he's a very short guy, he's a thick guy, you know. And the other commander, the commander of land warfare was General Serski. You know, guy's about five foot five. Five foot fives of five foot five inches of I cannot be defeated. No, really. And as I looked at them, I was like, whoa. I think there's something happening here in media that is not being factored. And I said this on one of the MSNBC shows about three or four days before the invasion. And they were like, well, you know, the invasion will be quick. Analysts were coming on. The invasion will be quick. They'll lose rather fast. And I said, hey. Let me tell you something. They were talking about the Ukrainians losing.

00:08:52    SPEAKER_01
were talking about the Ukrainians losing. He would be in there within two weeks. It would all be over. The entire war would be over.

00:08:54    MICHAEL BAKER
He would

00:08:58    MICHAEL BAKER
entire war would be over. Keefe would be taken in 72 hours. I kept thinking, this is why intelligence field collectors are the smart ones to listen to. We're on the ground. And I've been in the city of Keefe. It's the size of Chicago. It has a bigger population. It's five million people. And these 20 stories Soviet apartment blocks that are 20 buildings deep. And I'm like, no one's ever taking this city. All right. There's little old ladies right now who are woefully heartbroken. that they didn't get to throw their Molotov cocktails out the 18 -story window on top of Russian tanks. If you go to the checkpoints in Kiev right now, there are thousands upon thousands of Molotov cocktails in crates waiting for the reservists because they expected to be fighting hand and fist with the Russians. The Russians never got near going anywhere near taking. Kiev, except one ambush that the Ukrainians let them into the city and slaughtered them wholesale. And, you know, I said the same thing in the pre -war. I go, they're never going to, they're going to lose this war. They don't have enough men to win this war. The Russians. Yes.

00:10:12    MICHAEL BAKER
So he goes back to put on his uniform and roughly a week later, out of the blue, I get some contact saying, would you be willing to go teach combat casualty care in Ukraine? And in this case, it was the International Medical Corps reaching out in the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. And it trains medical providers to deal with acute injuries on the highway, on the battlefield, wherever. But it's really very straightforward. It was introduced about 1980 because an orthopedic surgeon and his family went down in the airplane, and he felt that the family had been very badly handled and poorly treated. And he said, we've got to teach people how to do this right. There are ways to do it. So it's been taught to over a million doctors and other medical professionals. In the U .S. military, we teach it to physicians assistants and to dental officers because they got to know. You never know when combat will come their way. So here I am, retired guy, walks the dog, tells his kids, I'm going to go to Europe and teach ATLS. They're used to me going to South Korea and Germany, so they didn't think too much about it. And I come from a background where you don't really tell people where you're going anyway, because that's operational security. Some of you may know and nod your heads when I say that. It's 12 hours from San Francisco to Warsaw, but we had a layover, of course. It was 18 hours by the time I got there. Then it gets more interesting. I have to change planes, and I go to the desk, and I go, where's the gate for this city, and how do you pronounce it? And she smiles and tells me the gate and says it's pronounced Zhezhov just like it's spelled. And I go, okay, next slide, please. Yeah, I guess I won't be learning Polish any too quickly. So we fly into Zhezhov. And there we get a van to the border. And we actually get out and it's 90 minutes, but we meet a van on the other side. The reason is there's 10 miles of trucks backed up on the border and it would take us three days to get through. So we walk across, which is why they told us to only bring carry -ons, which was really good advice. But we didn't get to go straight because you don't want to travel with all those ammunition trucks and fuel trucks and stuff. So you get to take a few side roads. It takes a little longer. So we finally get there and Ukraine felt like a country that was at war, but it didn't really feel like war imminent. You know, there were checkpoints and fighting posts and armed guards and air raid sirens and bomb shelters everywhere. And going down the highway, you had these barricades with concrete blocks and sandbags. Those are called serpentines. You're met by the greeters, just like at Walmart. And the greeters sometimes will inspect your van or your truck to see what you're doing. And we got an app installed in our phone for the air raids, which was really cool. So Mark Hamill paid to develop the app and paid to distribute it in Ukraine so you could get an early warning to go to the bomb shelter. Very cool. I did a little sightseeing. We had a security brief like we always get. We were in the International Medical Corps as NGO volunteers, but my entire team was prior military, which made me a little suspect. how they reached out and found all of us. So everywhere you'd go, there's places you could run behind a blast wall if you had to hurry. There was displays of knocked out Russian equipment in lots of places, which was interesting. I also found that all the monuments and statues and things were sandbagged because they said, you know, if the Russians can't steal it, they try to destroy it, which is a technique. So let me tell you about ATLS real quick. It focuses on the first opportunity to take care of a casualty. We teach a common language. We all use the same terminology. We do a standard approach, literally ABCs, as I'll show you. And it used to be called care during the golden hour because in the U .S. it was mostly injuries on the highway where you had some time and had a golden hour. In Battlefield, your foot steps on a mine, you might have a golden four minutes. So we teach and always have an interpreter by my side who's fluent in English. We do didactic lecture. It always starts that way. followed by a demonstration. And then we do hands -on skill stations. If you're an educator, you know that each of these three things is very important for getting things into people's heads. And so everywhere I went, I always had an interpreter by my shoulder, which was very interesting, and they were very good. They went over our slides in the beginning because the slides had been done by Google Translate. And I guess there were some things in there that didn't come out the way that they wanted them to sound in Ukrainian. So they fixed all our slides. And we do an ATL's protocol language. It's literally ABCs, airway, breathing, it's circulation, it's disability, it's exposure. And then if you get through all those and you don't find anything bad, you do a secondary survey. But, you know, if you can't get past A and B, it's over in a couple of minutes and see if they're bleeding aggressively or the heart stopped. It's over real quick. So you go through this rotely, but if you find something, you intervene. So you have to do a life -saving intervention. This is what we teach them. If the airway is occluded, some of you may have taken those first aid courses where we teach you how to do a jaw thrust or a chin lift or whatever, turn the patient on his side, clear the airway. We teach them how to secure an airway, either intubating or doing a surgical tracheostomy. We make sure they're breathing. Maybe they've got a punctuating wound to the chest and a collapsed lung. We call it a pneumothorax. We put in a chest tube and they learn how to do it. We teach them how to deal with the circulation problems, the pressure dressings, the tourniquets. And then if you find something after you're done putting that tourniquet on, you go back and go do your ABCs again, make sure nothing went south. So we did our skill stations after the didactic lectures. And then after the skill stations, again, my interpreter's right there. We do a hands -on. This is a pediatrician learning how to do a surgical airway, a tracheostomy on a mannequin. I'm standing back because that's a pediatrician with a scalpel. And that's just like a non sequitur, as we say in Latin. But he learned. And so we taught Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And so they figured, well, you guys have Wednesday and Saturday off. Why don't you teach Stop the Bleed, which is another course related to the American College of Surgeons. So in between, we taught civilians how to stop the bleed, how to recognize life -threatening bleeding, what to do about it. And we taught pressure dressings, wound packing, tourniquets. And just to give you some flavor of the demonstration, remembering that it was translated into Ukrainian as we did it. There's a lot of reports of guys putting their own tourniquets on to save themselves. But you get the point. They're teaching themselves, and whoever raises their hand first and does it right, I guess, gets to go home early. I don't know. I'm just teasing. Altogether, it's about a four - or five -hour course. So this was to civilians. This was to school teachers and librarians and bus drivers to learn how to do this. But I thought I was done. When I finally went home and faced my kids, who were very irate that I went off to the battlefield to teach people casualty care, Of course, a couple of weeks later, I got asked to go back several more times. So I went back to Odessa in October. I went to Ismail, which I'd never heard of. And you find some interesting things when you go to these little places that you've never heard of. Who would have ever thought that I would find the Ukrainian Rotary Club in Ismail? So when I was in Kiev, I'd gone across this way. But now I'm down here in Odessa. And then you're going to see the next one at Ismail where this blue. Star is going to show up. So that's down near the Black Sea. It's where the Danube enters into the Black Sea. But when you look at this map where the conflict is right now, you know, these colors denote levels of conflict. We're right close, you know, as the rocket flies, we were in the neighborhood. So it was interesting. We got our windows rattled. A few people got their windows blown out and stuff. But I still think it's a lot more dangerous to go to certain cities around the U .S. and walk downtown. So what did we achieve by making these trips? Well, we had 569 doctors and other medical professionals pass the course, got certified in ATLS. We had over 2 ,000 people stop the bleed so far. In the last tours, we trained and certified Ukrainian instructors because if you ever did nation building stuff, you want them to be able to do it. We don't want to keep going there, although I am going to go there to certify them shortly. And everybody leaves with two things. They get a certificate of completion, which I can't tell you how important that is to them, and they get an IFAC. an individual first aid kit with all the stuff we taught them how to use. These are very important. So I was in Cambodia circa 1996 or so before it was really open to the world. When I came back 10 years later, my interpreter still had his certificate on the wall of his place of employment. That was like the best thing he had ever done. So just to segue into what to worry about if Putin's successful, I think the next stop is Kaliningrad. I'm going to put a couple arrows on this map. We showed you where that sub -base was. He's got to open that corridor. There's no question. That's a real choke point, a real problem. But I'm also worried that the next place might be Moldova. There's already Russian occupiers in Moldova. And of course, the place that I worry about the most, although he talked a lot about Poland in his interview with Tucker Carlson, very worried about Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, now Poland. He mentioned Poland 38 times in a two -hour interview. That's not an accident. Just to take you to a different place, remember, this is a 90 -minute lecture. You're getting the CliffsNotes. I believe the Hamas attack on Israel is related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are together. Ask yourself, who benefits? Who's benefiting? So if you pull back the curtain on this, on October 7th, we're now four months, the Hamas terrorists from Gaza launch an attack. They kill a lot of civilians. There's horrific scenes that are just out of horror movies, rapes, beheadings, all kinds of terrible stuff. So ask yourself, what's the connection? Who benefits? You always got to ask who benefits. Is Hamas benefiting? Well, they're losing a lot of soldiers. Palestinian people getting anything out of this other than death and destruction? I think the coalition of Russia, North Korea, Iran, and maybe China. They launched this assault on democracy for a couple reasons. They're using Hamas to assault Israel. And what does it do? What does it accomplish? They enable Russia to hammer Ukraine. You know, North Korea supplies the artillery. And it forces the U .S. and the allies to divert their attention and their support. So now instead of 100 % on Ukraine, it's 50%. So who actually benefits from this? Russia and Iran benefit big time. They've divided the U .S., the NATO allies. They've reduced the flow of weapons and aid to Ukraine. They've divided our surveillance and intelligence assets. We're now using them two theaters. And they're weakening the West. They're weakening democracies. Ukraine's off the news media, right? Because Gaza's on the shows Americans only can watch two minutes at a time. So they sunk the Israeli -Saudi rapprochement, which almost had them with diplomatic relations and travel. They've divided citizens of Western nations. Got the Oakland City Council voting. to condemn israel i mean what does oakland have to do with that but anyway they've reduced the military aid to ukraine and of course we have a congress that's a whole nother series of lectures and sailor swear words that i won't go into um so whose fingerprints are on it if you look at this real quick who benefits um these guys do this the foreign minister of iran there with vladimir putin his axis of terror he welcomes hamas a week after the attack the iranian foreign minister and hamas are welcome to Moscow for talks. What a coincidence. So what's the future? I'm going to show you what I think the future is, and then I'll be done. I'm optimistic that Ukraine will survive and they will thrive. This crisis created a very solid national identity. They already had a pretty good one with those demonstrations to get rid of their former president. It mobilized the people really in new ways, and they're going to continue to develop as a democracy and a market economy. They're looking to the EU. That's where they want to be next. So the future, I think Ukrainian democracy undermines Putin, makes him look bad. People will see freedom and prosperity in Ukraine like we saw, and they will want that. Some of you are my age, and you might remember that West Germany and West Berlin were a shining light compared to East Germany. You know, I'd get off that subway in East Berlin, and I go, I just went into a black and white movie from, you know, from a color movie. And, you know, they were dark gray. So this led to the Berlin Wall coming down. This could lead to Russia coming down if Ukraine stands fast. So I want to give everything that we can to the Ukrainians for this fight. We've got to ignore the Russian blackmail. We're giving them long -range attack -ups. We need to give them more. We need to give them cruise missiles and more. We need more Abrams tanks. I saw the first one on the battlefield recently. Need F -16s and helicopters. And history provides us with an interesting option. I've written a couple of editorials on this. I want to resurrect the Flying Tigers model of World War II, and I'll tell you why. Lockheed made over 3 ,000 F -16s. They're flown in over 27 countries, and they're all being retired. So how many pilots do you think there might be out there that could fly an F -16 and only need a six -week refresher? So I bet there's former F -16 pilots who would go fight for democracy, maybe for money or whatever, that would... Go to the fight and stand up. Just like Malcolm Nance went and fought with the International Brigade, maybe we could have an international volunteer squadron like the Flying Tigers. This is the F -16. It's a fabulous platform. So our world's really messed up. So how do I remain optimistic with all this crazy stuff going on in Ukraine and Gaza and everything? I think Ukraine really is fighting for all of us, you know, the NATO countries, all the democracies and the U .S. And I think we all need to be in this fight. So on that note, I'm positive with the kids, the future. I'm going to end with a slava Ukraine and turn it over to Jim. Back to Dana. Thank you.

00:24:01    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode. email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field, working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, 1CA Podcast.