Medic gives needed lesson in humanity
From the long-running Omar Khadr saga, a controversy that’s evoked some of the least admirable of human emotions and conduct, has come a voice almost breathtaking in its honesty, humility and humanity.
When we see politicians exploiting the worst in us, as Canadian parliamentarians spread hate in the U.S. media, and Donald Trump continues to inflict his mean, crude world view on Americans, it is a story that stands as a refreshing reminder of decency and duty, of compassion, and of the merit of looking hard into one’s soul and conscience.
Thanks to reporter Colin Perkel of The Canadian Press, we learned this week of retired American serviceman Donnie Bumanglag and his role 15 years ago in saving a young boy’s life.
In 2002, Bumanglag was a 21-year-old medic supporting U.S. special forces in Afghanistan. He was aboard a helicopter returning to base when it was diverted to Khost to pick up an “enemy fighter” who had been shot. That fighter was 15-year-old Omar Khadr. When Bumanglag and his team reached the boy, he was lying on a wooden door and appeared barely alive.
American soldiers — anguished at the loss of colleague Sgt. Chris Speer, killed by a grenade, and the blinding of another of their men — told Bumanglag the boy had killed Speer, that he was a Canadian who had been Osama bin Laden’s houseboy, and to keep him alive, if possible, as a source of information.
Khadr, covered in blood and sand and looking to Bumanglag like “a little kid,” was taken aboard and the helicopter lifted off. The American medic immediately began trying to save him.
On unlikely circumstances do life and death sometimes pivot. Khadr, it turned out, looked like one of Bumanglag’s cousins. Perhaps that resemblance saved his life.
“All I seen was a kid that looks like a kid that I knew,” Bumanglag said.
Even so, he was confronted as he worked with waves of conflicting impulses.
He wondered whether he should even try to save this “terrorist,” or whether he’d be using up supplies that his own men might need. He thought, he said, of simply pushing Khadr out of the helicopter. But he knew also that saving a victim so grievously wounded would demonstrate his skill under pressure.
As the sun went down that afternoon, Bumanglag worked on Khadr for more than two hours, into darkness, in the back of the helicopter. The boy was brave, he said. “He fought for his life as much as we fought to save him.”
By the time they touched down at the U.S. base in Bagram, Bumanglag had “plugged all the holes” and kept “things viable.” But when he passed Khadr off, he didn’t know if the boy would live or die.
Thanks to Bumanglag’s efforts, Khadr did survive. But he was soon enough consigned to the new horror of Guantanamo, all but abandoned there until 2012 by successive Canadian governments.
For that failure to safeguard a citizen’s rights, the current Liberal government — spurred by judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada — recently apologized to Khadr and paid a reported $10.5 million in compensation.
Bumanglag, now 36, left the military in 2003 and returned to his native California. He became a police officer for 10 years. Suffering flashbacks and post-traumatic stress, he retired five years ago and studied educational psychology, in part to come to terms with his own experience.
His deep, courageous reflections on what happened when his paths crossed with the young Canadian in Afghanistan show a maturity and empathy seldom, if ever, seen in the bizarre and mortifying antics of his president.
In recounting his experience, he also shames those Canadian politicians who resorted with unseemly haste to political opportunism after the federal government’s settlement with Khadr. Some, such as Conservative MPs Peter Kent and Michelle Rempel, have even taken to U.S. media to pander to anti-Muslim sentiment there.
Bumanglag knows how self-serving such grandstanding and unmerited claim of the moral high ground can be.
“This is war,” he said. “This is something that most people can’t fathom, and they want to be real quick to give an opinion just because it makes them feel good about themselves,”
He said that, unlike Khadr, the Americans killed and injured in Khost were grown men who had signed on as elite professional soldiers knowing the risks.
Khadr was a boy taken by his father to another country and tossed into an ideology and war over which he had no say or control, Bumanglag said.
It’s naïve, he said, to think the boy could have walked away from the compound to which his father had taken him.
Unlike many of Khadr’s critics, Bumanglag showed the ability to put himself in another’s shoes.
Had he found himself, like Khadr, under heavy bombardment that July day, with his fighters killed and the enemy closing in, Bumanglag said he probably wouldn’t have hesitated to throw a grenade.
While there has been criticism of both the fact and the reported amount of the compensation paid Khadr, Donnie Bumanglag offered an informed professional opinion of the latter.
“If you say you’d go through what he went through for $10 million, you’re out of your mind, and that’s the truth.”
Fifteen years on, he says: “Everybody may hate him, but I’m glad I saved his life.”
The story of the medic who saved Omar Khadr’s life stands as a refreshing reminder of decency and duty, of compassion, and of the merit of looking hard into one’s soul and conscience