Frontline Hero: A Combat Medic's Battle to Save Lives and Limbs

Victoria Honcharuk, a Ukrainian combat medic, is speeding in her Land Rover Defender towards an injured soldier a few miles away. She’s in Eastern Ukraine, and she and the two medics who accompany her are traveling in the “zero line” of battle, that is, the point where friendly and enemy forces meet. It’s an area with enemy fire, artillery strikes, and drones that deliberately target medics.

Her car is unmarked because the Russians preferentially target any vehicle they know is providing medical help. “Going after medical people is a war crime but the Russians go after the medics, because if they kill the medics,” she explains, “they know that without medical care additional infantry soldiers will die.”

In the case of the injured soldier she and her team are coming to evacuate–we’ll call him Oleh–Honcharuk knows that if they don’t get to him rapidly, he would certainly become a double amputee, and that’s if he doesn’t die first. She and her cohort know about his situation because they use walkie talkies to monitor the battlefield, and she had learned moments ago that Oleh’s injuries were severe enough that his fellow soldiers were forced to apply tourniquets to both his legs.

All soldiers are trained to apply tourniquets, so Oleh had received life-saving medical help from a fellow soldier. However, as Honcharuk knew, if a tourniquet is left on much longer than a couple of hours, the tissue below the tourniquet will die. When the tissues die, there’s no way to revive them and they immediately become vulnerable to infection. When the tissues are dead, amputation is the only choice if a soldier is to have a chance at life.

Mere minutes after Honcharuk learned about Oleh’s plight, she and her team arrive at his side. Oleh is in imminent danger of going into shock from blood loss. It’s a critical medical emergency because when a person is in shock, their organs no longer receive oxygen—and without immediate treatment, death follows.

Honcharuk quickly puts a catheter in his vein to add fluids. The tourniquets are preventing additional blood loss in his legs, and his remaining injury is only a minor shrapnel injury in his shoulder.

The shoulder injury would under most circumstances be considered minor, but in Oleh’s case, as Honcharuk says, “It was only a little bleeding but because he had already lost so much blood, even a little bleeding is very dangerous.”

The team get Oleh to the Land Rover and while driving to the stabilization center, Honcharuk is using hemostatic gauze designed to promote blood clotting. After five minutes of firm pressure, Oleh’s shoulder injury stops bleeding

Honcharuk’s next urgent task is to remove the tourniquets and replace them with bandages. It’s a delicate process; she gradually untwists the tourniquet’s windless, a turn at a time, to decrease the tourniquet’s pressure. For her a joyful moment comes when blood flow returns to Oleh’s legs and he exclaims, “I can feel my legs now!”

What Honcharuk did for Oleh is part of a day’s work for her. Although she prefers not to give exact numbers, the people she and her crew treat and evacuate in a week is in the dozens.

They’re also responsible for evacuating the dead. Honcharuk has personally endured the unthinkably sad experience of recovering the bodies of four men who lived in the same compound as her. She often thinks about how the Russians stole their lives. “They could have married and had children and grandchildren, but this won’t happen because Russia came and decided to kill them.” 

Before becoming a combat medic, Victoriia had the job of her dreams, working for Morgan Stanley in Manhattan. She loved the work, she loved her colleagues, and she had even been accepted at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She left it all to fight for her country’s right to exist. 

Honacharuk didn’t say this, but she clearly stands in the tradition of the American heroine, Harriet Tubman, who once observed: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."