On September 11, 2001, David Hale was already a practicing doctor. But as he watched the planes crash into the World Trade Center, he felt helpless—as if there was nothing that he, personally, could do to help. So the next morning he found an Army recruiter and enlisted in the National Guard.
Since then, Hale’s job as emergency room medical director at Woodbury’s Woodwinds Health Campus has been interspersed with two deployments to Iraq.
“The first time I went, I met the embassy people in Kirkuk, and we started an emergency medical technician basic course for the Iraqis. When I left, the program died because the unit that came after us had no interest in doing it. The Iraqis were close, but not quite able to teach the class by themselves.”
Knowing that, Hale spent a lot of time contemplating his goals for his second deployment. His official mission was to oversee medical support for the soldiers in his purview. But his personal mission was to create some kind of medical infrastructure that would remain for the Iraqi people long after he was home again.
“We went out to some of the villages and asked the people what they wanted,” he recalls. “What we heard more and more was that [everyday people] would like some basic health training—how to treat a kid who has diarrhea, how to splint a fracture, clean a wound, deliver a baby. On the first day we taught, we were a little surprised to find that there were more than a hundred people there, all waiting to hear what we had to say.”
Hale also spearheaded an effort to provide free first-aid and midwifery kits to the Iraqi citizens who were learning the skills. Volunteers assembled about 400 of the kits and mailed them to Hale for distribution.
“When we went back three or four months later, they’d been using [the knowledge and supplies],” he says. “They asked questions and told us what they did. It wasn’t just something that made us feel good but didn’t do much for them. It was real—something that would perpetuate itself.”
Hale has been home for about a year now. He spends his time seeing patients and doing administrative work, leading a facility with some of the state’s highest patient satisfaction ratings. Still, his experience overseas continues to inform his work at Woodwinds and throughout the state. He has been working with HealthEast hospitals, the National Guard, and Minnesota’s U.S. Congressional leaders to provide traumatic brain injury screenings and services for returning veterans.
“The Minnesota group [on my second deployment] was actually the first to use what the Army now uses routinely for evaluating traumatic brain injuries,” he says. “Before November ’06, the way it was tracked and recorded was pretty sporadic. Now I think we are making progress.”
