The Screwdriver Tourniquet And The Surgeon Who Buried An 18-Gauge Needle

The Screwdriver Tourniquet And The Surgeon Who Buried An 18-Gauge Needle

The RPG flash came first. Then the heat. Then the pressure—immense, crushing, like every molecule of air inside the helicopter had been replaced by a solid wall of shock. The round tore up through the floor, ripped through his leg, and detonated somewhere in the engine compartment. The airframe began to shake with an unbelievable violence. He watched his own blood spray across the metal. Somewhere behind him, the door gunner was already shot through both hands. The minigun had gone silent. And far below, on a dusty Mogadishu street, two Delta operators were walking toward certain death because nobody else would. The comms were total chaos. Everybody’s world was a window this big—and it was as bad or worse than the window next to him.

How A Door Gunner’s Bleeding Hands Became One Man’s Call To A Minigun

By the time that helicopter went down, no one on the radio could agree on what was happening. Voices overlapped. Calls for help were answered with static. Requests for air support were acknowledged and then forgotten in the next burst of gunfire. The man who would later hold his own tourniquet with a screwdriver cranked so tight it bent the leather of a crew chief’s belt—he was still standing. Still fighting. Still trying to make sense of a sky that had turned into a shooting gallery.

His name would become known only to those who read the classified after‑action reports. But on that afternoon—October 3, 1993—he was just a crew chief on a Black Hawk designated Super 62. His door gunner, Paul Shannon, was already hit. He looked up and saw Shannon’s hands torn open, blood sheeting down the gunner’s wrists. The minigang went quiet. There was no one else.

“I got up, helped him with his hand. I gave him my CAR‑15. And I ended up on the minigun.” He never got off that minigun.

Below them, the black smoke of a downed helicopter marked the spot where Super 64 had crashed. Inside that wreckage, pilot Mike Durant was fighting for his life, already surrounded by a mob that was growing by the second. Requests had been made—urgent, desperate requests—to go in and try to assist. But the fire was too heavy. The streets were too narrow. The enemy was everywhere.

Then Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart stepped off the ramp of another helicopter. They were Delta Force snipers. They had heard the calls for help. They asked to be inserted. They were told no—twice. The third time, they were given permission. And they went down into hell.

Gary Gordon Out First, Randy Shughart Right Behind Him

The crew chief watched them go. He had seen Gary and Randy before—quiet men, the kind who did not need to talk about what they were capable of. They moved with a purpose that seemed almost casual, as if walking into a firefight was no different than walking into a chow hall.

“Gary and Randy went there believing that they were going to be able to recover these guys and get them out,” he would later say. “And I believed it. When they left, I didn’t have any feeling that that was going to be the last time I saw them.”

But he would remember it forever. He could still picture it decades later. Gary was out first, his boots hitting the dirt before the helicopter had fully settled. Randy followed, landing just after Gary was already on the ground and moving. They did not hesitate. They did not look back.

What actually happened next was something the planners had not anticipated. The crowds of armed Somalis—militiamen, looters, fighters—had seen the helicopter go down. But their cover was the American aircraft itself. The smoke, the wreckage, the spinning rotors—all of it shielded their movement. By the time Gary and Randy reached the crash site, they were already surrounded by an enemy that seemed to rise from the dust like a plague.

The crew chief did not know any of this in the moment. He only knew that his own helicopter was now hovering directly over the two snipers, providing whatever cover he could from the minigun. And that was when the RPG found them.

Flash, Heat, Overpressure, And The Most Violent Shake Of His Life

The rocket‑propelled grenade did not announce itself. It simply arrived. One second, he was scanning the rooftops, his finger on the minigun’s trigger. The next second, the world turned white.

“I still remember the flash being first, the heat that followed, and the immense overpressure in that bird as that round detonated.”

The explosion happened inside the helicopter. The RPG had come up through the floor, passed through his leg, and then continued upward into the engine compartment. He felt the impact not as a cut or a burn but as a violent rearrangement of his entire body. The shockwave compressed his chest, his sinuses, his eardrums. Then the airframe began to shake.

“I remember the unbelievable violence that airframe started shaking.”

The pilots—Jim Yakone and Mike Gaffina—did not have time to assess the damage. They did not have time to run checklists or call mayday. The bird was dying under them, engine compartment on fire, hydraulics failing, and one of their crew chiefs now bleeding out on the cabin floor. But they were pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—the Night Stalkers. “Night Stalkers don’t quit” is not a slogan. It is a diagnosis.

They took that bird with whatever it had left to fly. Somehow, against every law of aerodynamics and luck, they got just enough lift to carry them a couple blocks away from the last crash site. Then they put it down into a port with a very hard landing. The impact jarred every bone in his body. But they survived.

He looked over at Paul—the door gunner with the shot‑through hands—and asked a question that now seems absurd. “Where’s my gun?” He was already thinking about the next fight. That was the training. That was the reflex. The firefight was not over just because his helicopter had crashed. The firefight was everywhere.

But then a second concern pushed its way past the adrenaline. He looked down at his leg. The wound was not a neat hole. It was a ragged canyon of torn flesh, shattered bone, and blood that was not slowing down.

“Can I stop myself from bleeding out?”

Improvised Medicine In The Back Of A Burning Helicopter

He crawled over to the other crew chief. Not the wounded door gunner—the other one, the one still on his feet, still trying to assess the damage. He asked for the man’s belt.

There were no combat tourniquets on that aircraft. That is a lesson the military would learn from this battle—from this exact moment. But in October 1993, the standard issue was still a field dressing and hope. The crew chief handed over his belt. The leather was stiff, dark brown, worn from months of use.

He wrapped it around his own thigh, above the wound, and cranked it tight. But the belt alone was not enough. It would loosen. It would slip. He needed something to hold the tension—something that could bite into the leather and keep it from releasing.

Someone handed him a screwdriver. Not a surgical instrument. Not a tool designed for human flesh. A big, heavy, O‑ring screwdriver from the back of the helicopter. The kind used to open access panels and pry apart stubborn bolts.

He wedged the screwdriver under the belt and twisted. The leather groaned. The metal shaft bit into the belt’s fibers. He twisted again, and the pressure on his thigh became a new kind of pain—sharp, focused, deliberate. He was tightening his own tourniquet with a tool never meant for the job.

“Those guys helped me get the tourniquet on. To control my heart, I really worked on trying to remain calm.”

He focused on his breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. He had seen other men panic from blood loss. He had seen their eyes go wide, their hands flail, their voices rise to a shriek. He would not be that man. He would stay calm. He would stay conscious.

Word came over the radio that a helicopter was coming to extract them. But the airspace was too hot. The commanders did not want anyone else flying into that kill zone. Then Dan Gelatada heard the call. He had been shot himself earlier—the “seesaw bird,” they called it, the one that had taken hits and still managed to limp home. But Gelatada did not care about his own wounds.

He went over to a helicopter that had not even been fully certified. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t care where it’s at. If it flies, I’m taking it.”

He climbed into that bird and flew straight into the chaos.

When the rescue helicopter landed, the crew chief was still holding his own tourniquet. He had not let go. He could not. The screwdriver was still in place, still cranked to maximum tension, still the only thing keeping him from bleeding out in the dust of a Somali port. They loaded him onto the aircraft, and he flew to the MASH unit with his hand wrapped around that improvised device.

“I wasn’t quite ready to let go,” he would later say, “because I didn’t know if they knew I was holding my own tourniquet.”

18 Gauge, Buried To The Hub, And Not A Single Flinch

Dr. John Holcomb—though everyone called him “Doc” or “Yorchek” in the chaos of that MASH unit—had been an orthopedic surgeon from upstate New York. He had not signed up for this. No one had. A mass casualty, by definition, is an event you do not expect. It is any situation where the number of wounded exceeds your capacity to care for them.

On October 3, 1993, the capacity of the 46th Forward Surgical Team was about six critical patients at a time. The number of wounded that came through their doors that night would exceed that by a factor of ten.

It started around 5:30 PM. John Holcomb—the officer embedded with Task Force Ranger—ran into the hospital and delivered the news in three words. “We’re in trouble.” The unit had been hit badly. A lot of casualties. “How much?” someone asked. “We don’t know. Just get ready.”

Then the helicopters started coming. A little bird brought in the first two—Dan Bush and Jim Smith. Dan Bush would not survive. The surgical team worked on him, but the wounds were too extensive. By the time they called it, more people were already arriving.

That was when the crew chief from Super 62 was rolled in.

“He was fully conscious and fully in control,” the surgeon remembers. He looked down at the man’s leg and saw bandages soaked through with blood. He saw the belt—the crew chief’s belt, still wrapped around the thigh, still cranked tight. And he saw the screwdriver. A long, heavy screwdriver, bent slightly from the torque, holding the tourniquet in place.

“I’m like, this just doesn’t look good.”

But the surgeon did not say that out loud. He introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Dr. Horchek. I’m here to take care of you.” And as he said those words, he picked up an 18‑gauge needle—the kind used to draw blood, not to test for nerve damage—and buried it in the bottom of the man’s foot.

The crew chief did not flinch. Not a twitch. Not a withdrawal. Nothing.

“That’s when I said, ‘I’m not sure I can save your leg, and I may need to take it off above the knee.’”

The crew chief—his name was Brad, though that would come later—did not scream. He did not cry. He did not argue. He just looked at the surgeon and said something that stopped the room cold.

“Doc, don’t worry about me.”

He rolled his head to the side, toward the stretcher next to him. “You got to take care of my buddy. He’s hurt worse than I am.”

The surgeon followed his gaze. There was another soldier—another crew member from the same downed helicopter—with wounds that were, indeed, even more catastrophic. The surgeon looked back at Brad. “Okay,” he said. “We’re going to get you taken care of.”

And then he went to work.

Twenty-Two Operations, One Screwdriver, And A Phone Call To A Sobbing Wife

The operating room became a carousel of blood and bone. One patient would be wheeled in, the team would do what they could, and then the instruments would be rushed to the back for cleaning. As soon as they were processed, the next patient was already on the table. “They just kept going around that circle all night,” the surgeon recalls. “We were in continuous operations for about 36 hours.”

The man next to Brad took an RPG to the hip. How he was still alive was a mystery. The desire to survive, the surgeon noted, is truly an amazing thing to watch. But even that desire had limits. The man died a couple hours later in the ICU.

The surgeon did twenty‑two surgeries in that thirty‑four‑hour window. He did not sleep. He barely ate. He drank water when a nurse shoved a cup into his hand. And through all of it, he maintained the one rule that kept the operating room from falling apart: the surgeon does not lose control.

“If the surgeon loses control, then the operating room loses control. So you had to be 100% in control, no matter what your emotions were going on inside.”

But around midnight, something happened that tested that control harder than any wound.

He was going through the patients, checking on who was left, what needed to be done next. He came up to Brad. And there, in the chaos of a wartime MASH unit, someone had given the wounded crew chief a satellite phone. Brad was holding it out to the surgeon. “Hey, doc,” he said. “It’s my wife. She’s a nurse. She’ll understand. Talk to her.”

And before the surgeon could refuse, Brad pushed the phone into his face.

All these things were going through his mind—the other patients, the next surgery, the man with the RPG wound who had just died, the stack of instruments waiting to be cleaned. But he took the phone. He heard sobbing. Heavy, uncontrollable sobbing from a woman who had been told her husband had been shot down over Mogadishu.

“Hi, this is Dr. Horchek,” he said, keeping his voice as steady as he could.

He stepped out into the long hallway, away from the operating room, away from the other wounded. He said the words she needed to hear. “He’s alive. Unfortunately, he lost his leg above the knee, but he’s coming home. He’ll be home shortly.”

Then he said the hardest words of the night. “I’m sorry, but I really got to go. I got a lot of work to do.”

He wiped the tears off his face—tears he had not even realized were falling—turned around, walked back into the operating room, and gave the phone back to Brad. He looked at the next patient on the table. The next young man whose life was balanced on the edge of a scalpel.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Dr. Yorchek. And I’m here to take care of you.”

The Screwdriver That Survived, And The Loss That Never Left

Three decades after the Battle of Mogadishu, the surgeon and the crew chief met again. Not in a hospital. Not in a war zone. In a quiet room, where the surgeon pulled out a slideshow he used to give to cadets—medical lessons, leadership lessons, lessons about what it means to be a young lieutenant leading soldiers into harm’s way.

“I’m not sure you’ve ever seen these,” the surgeon said.

The first photo showed the hospital on October 3, 1993. Chaos. Blood. Bodies everywhere. The second photo showed a close‑up of a leg—Brad’s leg—wrapped in bandages, soaked red, with a belt and a screwdriver still in place.

“Wow,” Brad said. “I didn’t realize there was actually a photo with the screwdriver. I’ve never seen these.”

He stared at the image. His own leg. His own improvised tourniquet. The tool that had kept him alive long enough to reach the surgeon’s table.

“It’s funny, though, as I look at it,” he said slowly. “I’m moved. But I don’t know that I feel a loss from that. You know, there were greater losses that day.”

He paused. The room was quiet. “When I see a photo like that, I think about not the wound, but some of the responsibility that I should have after that. Being able to walk away with that—and so many didn’t. It’s changed the way I live my life.”

The surgeon nodded. He had seen that same look before. It was the look of a man who had been given a second life and was still trying to figure out what to do with it.

“So glad to see you,” the surgeon said.

“Oh, my pleasure,” Brad replied. And for a moment, the helicopter crashes and the RPGs and the screwdriver and the 36 hours of surgery all collapsed into a single, simple, human connection.

Two men. One battle. Thirty years. And a screwdriver that would never be used to open an access panel again.

What The Battle Of Mogadishu Taught The American Military About Tourniquets

The morning after the battle, the surgeons and nurses and medics finally stopped. Twenty‑two surgeries. Thirty‑four hours. The pile of discarded bandages filled a bin the size of a small car. The floor was sticky with blood that had dried in overlapping layers. And somewhere in the debris, someone found the screwdriver. They did not throw it away. They did not clean it and return it to a tool chest. They kept it—because that screwdriver was not a tool anymore. It was a witness.

The lessons learned from October 3, 1993, would change the way the American military approached combat medicine. Combat tourniquets became standard issue. Every soldier, every airman, every Marine now carries at least one. The training is relentless. The equipment is constantly improved. All because a crew chief on a downed Black Hawk in Mogadishu had to improvise with a belt and a screwdriver.

But the deeper lesson—the one that cannot be packed into a kit or taught in a classroom—is about the men themselves. Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, who stepped off a helicopter knowing they would not step back on. The pilots who flew a burning aircraft far enough to save their crew. The surgeon who buried a needle in a man’s foot and then called his wife in the middle of a massacre. The crew chief who held his own tourniquet and asked not for help for himself, but for his buddy.

That is the lesson. That is why the Battle of Mogadishu is still studied, still remembered, still honored. Not because of the tactics or the technology. Because of the screwdriver. Because when everything else failed, ordinary men did extraordinary things with whatever they had in their hands.

And some of them—like Brad, like the surgeon, like the pilots and the door gunners and the Delta snipers who never came home—they carried that screwdriver in their minds for the rest of their lives. Not as a wound. As a responsibility.