Army Staff Sergeant Phillip Trezza, who served as a medic in Iraq two decades ago, recently shared poignant memories with his teenage daughter, Taylor. During their conversation, he recalled some of the most challenging experiences he faced during his deployment.
In a recent session with StoryCorps, part of their Military Voices Initiative which captures the experiences of service members and their families, 21-year-old Sergeant Trezza recounted his deployment to Iraq. Taylor, his daughter, asked him about his experiences, prompting him to open up about a particularly harrowing moment.
TAYLOR TREZZA: Do you remember the first person you couldn’t save?
PHILLIP TREZZA: Yeah. We’re out on a patrol, and I see an explosion in the distance. But when an explosion happens, you see it first. It’s silent. It kicks up the dust. So you can literally see the sound coming to you, and then you feel it. It’s just enough time to think, oh, crap. It was a car bomb that went off on a pretty busy corner, and we were the first platoon there, which meant I was the first and the only medic there. Everybody’s screaming. Everything is chaotic, and everybody’s looking at you for direction. I had to try to figure out who could be saved and who couldn’t. You know, do they have a pulse? Are they breathing?
Trezza described his role in the aftermath of a car bomb explosion at a crowded intersection, where he was the sole medic on site. He recounted the difficult decisions he had to make about who could be saved, noting the pressure and the chaos of the situation.
The first person that I went up to actually work on, I put a tourniquet on the person’s leg, and then I realized that they had a very bad head injury, and they were not alive. So I immediately wasted time, and then I just went to the next person. And then I went to the next person. It’s a very strange feeling to have irresponsibility of trying to decide who’s going to live and who’s not going to live. I think I still hold some of that weight. I remember there was a kid that was pretty close to this explosion. His parents directed me over to him, and it was a surreal moment for me trying to explain to them he was gone. The dad, he said, Mr., finished? And I said, yes, finished.
T TREZZA: Yeah.
P TREZZA: The older I get, the more I think that humans should figure out how to deal with things without having to kill each other because I fixed way more civilians than I did soldiers.
His reflections also touched on the broader implications of his experiences, expressing a desire for peaceful resolutions to conflicts. Trezza noted, “The older I get, the more I think that humans should figure out how to deal with things without having to kill each other because I fixed way more civilians than I did soldiers.”
FADEL: Army Staff Sergeant Phillip Trezza with his 17-year-old daughter, Taylor Trezza for StoryCorps in Richmond, Virginia. Their interview is archived at the Library of Congress.
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