Landstuhl

But then you get people who say, "Well, a woman gave birth on an airplane." Well, in fact, she didn't.

She gave birth on the tarmac in, in Rheinmein- uh, or Ramstein, Germany, right in front of our US Army hospital that everybody gets evacuated to at Landstuhl, one of the best hospitals in Europe.

Uh, these, you know, it's a horrible humanitarian tragedy, but it's one that's been 20 years in coming.

Well, the misinformation and the disinformation that's coming out of Afghanistan has been happening for 20 years, and it's certainly happening over the course of the past few weeks or the past month.

I'm in Afghanistan in 2010, and Mrs. Sladek gets a, when we still had a landline, looks at the caller ID on the landline and sees American Red Cross.

And she picks up the phone, and in the short version here, she is told that if she would like to go meet my dead body in Landstuhl, Germany, they will reserve a seat for her on the charter flight to Landstuhl, Germany, so she can meet my body when it gets there from Afghanistan.

Was there another Terry Sladek in the Corps? No, it's me.

Big screw up, huh? Yeah, a little bit.

Uh, and you were kind of out of it and I remember asking, like, the general, like, [chuckles] "Why are you here?" Um, what was that first 48 hours like from whatever you can remember, dude? I'm sure there's, like, flashes of what you, what you can remember from that whole thing.

Yeah, so, um, we, we all got medevaced eventually to, to Landstuhl, Germany, and they had-- We'd come in at different times based on severity of injuries and how they direct flighted some people and, you know, other people went to other in-country, uh, medical facilities before getting moved.

Um, but yeah, I remember [clears throat] on the flight to Landstuhl, like, I finally I think it was Landstuhl.

They had a C-130.

I've never heard of that.

If you take too much, that's how you die, um, from what I understand.

But, I just, like, my lungs didn't remember to breathe at the moment.

Um, and then we got to, we got to Landstuhl, and we were all kind of asking about each other and, like, you know, "Where's so-and-so?" And wanting to get up and go to their rooms.

Okay.

So, Levardus Robert Martin Burton, born in Landstuhl, West Virginia.

Or West Virginia.

West Germany.

I got West Virginia on the line.

Yeah, there's no Landstuhl.

Landstuhl, West Virginia.

Mountain Mamas in 1957.

And so we saw, especially in Ramstein, we saw people coming back from different conflicts.

The major military medical facility is just down the road in Landstuhl.

So we would see some of these things coming back and it was eye-opening what we were exposed to.

I mean, just little things like the Armed Forces Network television, where the TV commercials were like loose lips sink ships.

Twelve American servicemen were killed and 78 wounded in bloody fighting in Mogadishu Sunday after U.S. forces raided a hotel where Adid was believed to be.

From the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, some of the wounded talked about their experience.

We fast-roped into the objective and started losing our helicopters, which was our way out.

So we had to wait for our reinforcements to come on the ground to pull us out.