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Adam Ellington knew as a child that he wanted to serve as a medic in the military, and he joined the Army at age 17. Today, Adam is a major with the U.S. Army Reserves 807th Medical Command Deployment Support, and also works full-time as a hospital quality and safety manager. Here, Adam talks with colleague Joel Thomas about his passion for his work as a medic and his service as a pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Transcript
Adam Ellington: I knew very, very early on that I was going to join the Army. I talked to my first recruiter when I was 12. I asked my parents every year if I could join yet and was told, “We can talk about it later.” My 17th birthday present was them waiving the requirement to be 18 to join the service. And so I joined very, very shortly after my 17th birthday.
Joel Thomas: Well thank you so much for your military service. Why do you choose to serve our country?
Adam: It's a family thing. I'm somewhere between seventh and ninth generation Army. One of the things that was fairly influential was when I was 16 and went on a scout activity, we went to see a veterinarian. There were a dozen kids there and a couple of grown-ups. Towards the end, he was doing an autopsy on a very young ostrich that had died. And the farmer wanted to know why his baby ostriches were dying. He turned around and there were two of us left in the room; the other dozen people had run out the door. And then I was starting to get closer to 17. I was having conversations with my parents about joining. They asked what I wanted to be. And I said, "I'm going to be a medic. That's it. There's no other option. That's what I will do and what I'll be."
I got a position as a medic in the National Guard, and then after I had been in the National Guard for about 10 years, I knew I wanted to go active duty. And I ended up doing Medevac, what the Army calls “Dust Off,” for 10 years after I finished being a medic. I did three tours in Afghanistan. I think I flew about 300 times, but picked up 400 casualties. On my second deployment, we got word that an IED had gone off on a convoy and we needed to go pick up casualties from the vehicle that had been hit. We landed 50 to 100 yards past the convoy, and they started bringing a casualty up the hill to us.
If there's an IED, people will just mass. So you'll see thousands and thousands of people on the side of the road. One car started driving through the crowd. And then he started driving off to the other side of the road. There're Apache pilots out there providing security. An Apache pilot didn't like anybody moving when we were there. He kind of dived at the guy a little bit. Nothing unsafe or anything, just kind of like, "Hey, I'm looking right at you." And the guy kept going. And this Apache pilot really wanted to get his attention. So he fired off a set of emergency flares saying, "You need to stop moving."
A few days later, we found out that there was radio chatter going on from somebody in that crowd saying, "I have the big gun," which we assume was a DShK, which is a Russian 55-caliber machine gun. It's an aircraft killer. So that guy moving through the crowd was moving a DShK to shoot me down. And the Apache pilot who got his attention scared him enough that he never got out and did anything. So that completely and totally saved my life.