San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Care given to brother in S.A. led doctor to serve in Army
Soldier treated at BAMC, Fort Sam after attack in Afghanistan
It was a busy morning at the Brooke Army Medical Center emergency room when EMTs brought a seemingly elderly patient into one of the facility’s 60 treatment bays.
He was in deep trouble.
The man stared straight at the ceiling, eyes fixed. At first, it wasn’t clear if he was conscious or even could see — he definitely couldn’t talk, the EMTs reported, but did understand questions.
“Can you lift up this leg, sir?” Army Capt. Juliette Conte asked. “Can you lift this leg at all? All right, very good. How about this one? Good, OK. Can you give me a thumbs-up here? Can you give me a thumbs-up? Very good.
“How about on this side?”
The patient, it turned out, was suffering from the effects of a prior stroke. Conte, one of two attending physicians on the ER’s dayside shift, already had helped treat three trauma patients — a stabbing victim and two from a car accident.
It was a typical weekday for Conte, now 3½ years into her career as an Army physician. Inspired by the care her brother received at BAMC and Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston after being badly wounded in a grenade blast in Afghanistan, she joined up.
Lt. John Conte, an ROTC graduate of Rutgers University, was wounded Aug. 5, 2011, while serving as a 10th Mountain Division infantry platoon leader helping secure the Charkh district in eastern Afghanistan.
Violence was a way of life in the district, which sits nearly 7,000 feet above sea level and is close to the Khyber Pass, used by insurgents as a route in and out of Pakistan.
“There was a lot of kinetic activity, guerrilla warfare, unconventional warfare, it was a lot of night missions, a lot of day mis
sions,” recalled Army Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Badillo, a Chicago native who was in the platoon. “It was pretty volatile because at that point they wanted to take control of the local populace, and it was just not something that was allowed. It wasn’t in our plans.”
Complicating matters was Afghanistan’s army, which Badillo said the Americans had to “coerce” to take the lead on security missions. On the day of the attack, the Afghans operated the tactical security checkpoints at a town marketplace, searching the locals.
“They weren’t as thorough as we would have liked them to be in securing the personnel going in and out, and it just happened to be that an individual snuck through with a homemade explosive and was close enough to release that grenade,” Badillo said.
The blast hit the center of their position.
Badillo, a combat medic who trained at Fort Sam, reacted out of muscle memory. In seconds, he rated Conte the second-most-injured soldier.
“He had shrapnel, lower extremities, shrapnel with bleeding, and so immediately that’s a treatment with hemorrhage control. The next one was unconscious,” said Badillo, now 46 and the noncommissioned officer in charge of West Point’s cadet clinic. “And the third was very close to the (grenade), and he had lacerations … to his skull, and so that was the most extreme case. He was No. 1.”
The terrifying news
Juliette Conte tracked her brother’s deployment while in one of the most rigorous periods of her time as an undergraduate student at Columbia University. The tension she felt for her brother was gut-wrenching.
Before he deployed, Conte told his sister — but not their parents — where he was going. In his calls home, Conte held back, shielding her from the worst of the violence.
“He actually had not told me of the 11 soldiers, unfortunately, that were KIA, but he did mention that they were in firefights … and that he himself had had some close calls before his injury actually happened,” she said.
“We’re extremely close, he’s half the world away and all I know is once a week I get a phone call that he’s still alive, and the rest of the week I’m just like, ‘I wonder what he’s doing? I wonder if he’s alive?’ ”
Then word came via a brief message — on Facebook — “from one of his soldiers in the platoon that said, ‘Your brother was just in a grenade explosion today, and he got medevaced out,’ ” she recalled. “And that’s the only information I had, and that was particularly terrifying for me.”
John Conte’s wounds were serious but not debilitating. BAMC was his ultimate destination. On summer break doing research when he was injured, Juliette Conte joined her family in Annapolis, Md., and they flew to San Antonio, arriving the same day her brother did.
His shrapnel injuries included his face, as well as his arms and legs. None required surgery. The shrapnel in his legs raised concerns because of swelling, but his hospital stay was short — overnight.
Conte stayed at Fort Sam’s Powless Guest House for a couple of weeks undergoing rehabilitation and physical therapy. He later went back to his own quarters on Fort Polk, La., his home post, but that didn’t mean he was 100 percent back.
Shrapnel embedded in flesh often comes out, sometimes for months or even years after an injury, and that was — and still remains — true for him.
“It’s still happening,” Juliette Conte said. “He’s got a jar, a collection. And the shrapnel still comes out.”
That her brother’s service would shape her own career wasn’t surprising, given a long family military history.
Conte’s dad was in the Army during the Vietnam War. An uncle also was a soldier. In World War II, her maternal grandfather was awarded the Purple Heart and her paternal grandfather served in the Italian navy.
“I think it was a decision that was slowly brewing for a long time, but that was definitely the deciding thing,” Conte said of her brother’s injury. “We have a military-strong family, and serving your country is always something that I admired and respected. I
think when I was younger … my focus was more on science and health care, but I had a tremendous respect and admiration for the military.”
Saving those who served
Conte entered the Individual Ready Reserve in 2014. In medical
school at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, she was part of a health scholarship program until being commissioned a captain in 2018. BAMC is her first assignment.
Her brother left the Army as a first lieutenant a couple of years after the deployment and is now a corporate refinance lawyer in New York City.
By chance, she ran into Badillo, the medic who cared for him, while on a three-month COVID-19 response mission that ended in mid-October in Little Rock, Ark. Recognizing her last name, he asked if Conte had a brother.
“I was very overwhelmed. I was truly speechless, and I just gave Sgt. Badillo a big hug. What words can you say to the person that saved your brother’s life?” she said.
Badillo called it “one of those once-in-a-lifetime types of moments.”
“You would never think you would meet,” he said. “It was exact, I think, to the day, almost 10 years had gone by.”
Joining the Army boiled down to job satisfaction. Serving in the military would allow her “to treat and take care of … patients who were injured in selfless service to their country,” Conte said.
“Medically, I treat all of my patients equally, no matter who they are,” she said. “But in terms of the personal satisfaction, personal fulfillment, treating soldiers is definitely what gives me the most fulfillment, as well as their family members.”
At BAMC she sees troops, dependents and more than a few civilians in the hospital’s trauma ward. The ER admitted 4,768 trauma patients in 2020, up 8 percent over 2019. That number is up sharply this year, with 5,600 trauma patients admitted.
Conte supervises others as an attending physician. She’s had to pronounce patients dead, and her heart falls when she sees people who suffer from a poor quality of life.
“It’s difficult on everybody, but I think we have a great family in the ER, and we all support each other, we all check in on each other a lot. It’s not that we become used to seeing this stuff, but I think we’re all used to supporting each other through this,” Conte said.
Whether Conte stays in the Army is an as-yet unwritten chapter in her life. She was undeployable while in her residency at BAMC, but now can go overseas. That opens the door to the true start of a military career that is due to end in 2025.
Her current role seems a perfect fit. It’s a place where job satisfaction, a challenging environment and camaraderie intersect.
“It’s not so much a brotherhood, (it’s) a degree of respect and admiration for those who will put themselves selflessly in harm’s way for the well-being of others or to serve others or to protect others,” Conte said. “It’s the selfless component that really speaks to me.”