‘Like I was back in Iraq’
Ohio representative and former Army surgeon sees action again
Ohio congressman Brad Wenstrup’s combat surgeon instincts kicked in after a colleague was shot at a baseball practice Wednesday.
Wenstrup, a Republican from the Cincinnati neighborhood of Columbia-Tusculum, used scissors to cut through Rep. Steve Scalise’s pant leg to get to the Louisiana congressman’s wound, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., told CNN. Wenstrup, a podiatrist, was a U.S. Army surgeon.
Scalise was among five wounded in the morning shooting. Scalise, who was shot in the hip, had surgery Wednesday morning and was in critical condition, according to MedStar Washington Hospital Center.
“I felt like I was back in Iraq,” Wenstrup told CBS News.
Wenstrup, 58, who is in his third term in Congress, was called to active duty in 2005 and served 14 months as the chief surgeon at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison hospital.
About a decade into his medical career, Wenstrup decided to join the U.S. Army Reserve.
His sister had been diagnosed with leukemia, and Wenstrup was a match for a bone marrow transplant. It saved her life.
The experience prompted Wenstrup to do more to help people, he said.
“Time was ticking by, and I thought, ‘ I’m not getting any younger.’ I wanted to serve, so one day I just called 1-800USA-ARMY and joined,” he told the University of Cincinnati’s alumni magazine. Wenstrup told The Cincin
nati Enquirer in 2012 that witnessing the horrors of war and surviving them gave him a renewed sense of purpose. “I made it home while others didn’t,” he said. “It gave me a greater appreciation of life and of freedom.”
He earned the Bronze Star and remains an active reservist as a lieutenant colonel.
After police had the shooter “down,” Brooks said, members of Congress deferred to Wenstrup.
“I did what I did in Iraq,” Wenstrup told ABC News. “You assess their wounds, and you cut down their clothes and look for the wound and make sure that you stop the bleeding.”
He made sure Scalise was conscious by asking him where he was and asking him to count. Scalise was in pain and “losing a lot of blood,” Wenstrup said.
Medics arrived and bandaged Scalise. Wenstrup said they gave him Gatorade and water to replenish his fluids.
“I’m glad I was there,” Wenstrup told Fox News, “but it’s a sad day in America.”
Rep. Jack Bergman, a Michigan Republican and former three-star general in the Marine Corps, told Fox News, “Dr. Wenstrup was the lead medic, if you will, on this mission.”