Blood covered the floor as Maj. Megan Martin rushed into the room, pulled from sleep and thrown into an emergency situation.
“I showed up — I had just been woken up — and there was blood everywhere,” she said. “It was immediately clear this wasn’t your average injury. He needed a hospital.”
What had started as a typical evening during a multinational training exercise in Morocco quickly shifted when Master Sgt. Andrew Tomlinson, an aeromedical evacuation operations specialist assigned to the 109th Airlift Wing, suffered a severe laceration on his leg from a shattered glass countertop.
Within moments, Tomlinson realized he had gone from supporting the mission to becoming the patient.
“As soon as it happened, I knew it was bad. There was a lot of blood, and I could tell this was bigger than anything I could handle myself,” he said.
Tomlinson and the 109th’s aeromedical evacuation team were participating in African Lion 25, U.S. Africa Command’s largest annual joint exercise. The training brought together approximately 50 nations and 10,000 U.S. service members for operations across Ghana, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia.
Martin, serving as an instructor, said the mission was to both learn from their Moroccan partners and demonstrate how U.S. Air Force flight nurses and medical teams provide care to patients in flight.
That training environment changed instantly as medical personnel responded to Tomlinson, shifting from simulated scenarios to a real-world emergency.
“He had definitely gotten himself real deep. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing muscle or bone, but it was clearly deeper than fatty tissue,” Martin said.
The severity of the wound, combined with limited medical resources on site, quickly drove the decision-making process. Tomlinson’s team navigated both physical and communication challenges as they transported him to a Moroccan military hospital, where concerns about infection and overall care capabilities began to grow.
“I had complete trust in them,” Tomlinson said. “These are the same people I train with and rely on, so I knew I was in good hands.”
As the patient stabilized, the focus expanded beyond immediate treatment to a larger challenge — coordinating his evacuation out of the country.
“There were really two parts to the situation,” Martin said. “The clinical side of someone being badly injured, and the operational side of figuring out how to get him out of a foreign country.”
Once the need for evacuation was established, the aeromedical evacuation system — a global network designed to rapidly move patients to higher levels of care — was set into motion.
Coordinating from a remote location without standard systems access, team members worked across multiple time zones, reaching back to partners in Djibouti and Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to initiate an emergency aeromedical evacuation mission.
“It’s not like we were near a normal airport with regular flights,” Tomlinson said. “They had to coordinate an emergency flight around the exercise, and we didn’t have the programs we normally use in an operational environment.”
Despite those challenges, the system moved quickly. Within hours, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III launched from Germany, carrying an aeromedical evacuation crew and critical care team to transport Tomlinson to higher-level care.
In less than 24 hours from the time of injury, the same system the team had been training to support was activated to evacuate one of their own — a real-world demonstration of the mission’s speed and capability.
For Tomlinson, the experience underscored both the seriousness of the situation and the trust placed in the team around him.
“Once we got on the aircraft, I knew things were moving in the right direction. That’s when it really hit me how serious everything had been. It definitely gave me a new perspective on what we do. You don’t fully understand it until you’re the one going through it,” he said.
In the end, the incident served as a powerful reminder of the purpose behind every training scenario.
“You think everything is a well-oiled machine,” Martin said, “but sometimes you’re figuring it out in real time. What matters is that the team makes it happen.”