hat he could, but his attempts to stop the bleeding were useless. He finally resorted to the use of two tourniquets - not accepted practice, but the accepted pressure-point method was not working. Brashear credits the corpsman, whose name he does not know, with saving his life that day. The nearest doctor was on the USS Albany, six miles away. When the Hoist rendezvoused with the Albany, the physician on board called for Brashear to be airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Spain. He was loaded aboard, but events took another bad turn when the aircraft proved to be too low on fuel to make it to the medical facility. It landed on a dilapidated runway and waited until a small plane arrived to finish the trip with Brashear, who was miraculously still alive. As he describes it, "The helicopter ran out of gas, and I ran out of blood." When Brashear finally arrived at the hospital six hours after the accident, he was declared D.O.A (Dead On Arrival). The examining physician ordered that he be sent to the morgue, then decided to check one more time for a heartbeat; he detected a very faint one. "I survived the morgue," Brashear laughs. The bleeding continued in the hospital, but after transfusions totaling 18 pints - almost twice the volume of blood ordinarily found in an adult human body - Brashear regained consciousness. Doctors tried bone and skin grafts to save his leg. Gangrene later set in. Brashear was sent to Wiesbaden, Germany, and then to Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia. Efforts continued to the point that, Brashear had had enough and requested that the leg be amputated. In four "guillotine" surgeries - removal of layers of the limb until all infection is gone - surgeons removed Carl Brashear's leg, finally stopping four inches below the knee. Most people would have given up hope of remaining in military service at that point. Not Carl Brashear. Still attached to the Naval Hospital, he was fitted with a permanent prosthetic l...
