Army medic from Schaumburg hailed for rescuing Kuwaitis

The U.S. Army is hailing a Schaumburg native and his Chicago colleague as heroes for their quick thinking and resourcefulness in rescuing two injured men from a car crash Oct. 2 in Kuwait.

Second Lt. Phillip Compean, a 1994 graduate of Hoffman Estates High School, was driving a Chevrolet Trailblazer along Highway 30 outside Kuwait City when he saw the accident unfolding in his rearview mirror.

A fast-moving car about four car lengths behind the Trailblazer was cut off by a slower car moving into its lane, Compean said. The faster car swerved to the left, banked off the median, then shot across four lanes of traffic back to the right to hit a light pole on the shoulder.

Compean, reached by phone Thursday in Kuwait, said he's still surprised no other vehicles were involved, as he likened Highway 30 to the I-290 expressway.

Compean is an ambulance platoon leader in the 708th Medical Company. With him was his company commander, Capt. Jimm Dodd of Chicago.

Both men are trained medics and were on a scouting mission to lease some local ambulances to replace the Army's aging ones.

When they saw the crash, they pulled over and went back to see if they could help the injured driver and his passenger, both men in their early 20s.

The driver's ankle was crushed and his wrist and hand were broken, bones pushing right through the skin.

Even more serious were the passenger's injuries. He hadn't been wearing his seat belt and had struck the windshield with his head. His leg was broken and parts of the dashboard were imprinted on his chest from the force of the collision.

The injured men were in pain but conscious. A Kuwaiti contractor riding with the Americans translated as the two injured men told the soldiers where they hurt.

The Kuwaiti called for an ambulance, and in the 20 minutes in took to arrive, the Americans did what they could.

The soldiers noticed fluid pouring out the bottom of vehicle. Fearing it might be flammable, they urgently worked to get the injured men out of the car and safely away from it.

Compean said they had only a basic medical kit, but resourcefulness and inventiveness were part of their Army training. So they made a splint out of a PVC pipe for the driver's injured hand.

A civilian who stopped to help had a pillow in his car that the soldiers took to rest the more injured man's head.

Compean and Dodd employed all the usual security measures in leaving their vehicle and approaching the crash, but the environment for U.S. military personnel in Kuwait is very different from neighboring Iraq, Compean said.

"The people of Kuwait are very nice people," he said.

Compean added he hasn't heard yet how well the men are doing but plans to follow up. He's hopeful that, as serious as the accident was, neither man had life-threatening injuries.

Back in Schaumburg, Compean's mother, Charlene Salzmann, was impressed by how useful her son's medical training proved in such an unexpected situation.

"Boy, he took care of it right there," she said.

Compean joined the Army right after Hoffman Estates High School, getting assigned to military burials at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia and joining the detail that guarded the White House.

He left the Army after his original enlistment but joined the Army Reserves while he pursued a biology degree at Harper College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated.

Compean was working as a medical assistant at the Armory in North Riverside when the Reserves called him up and sent him to Kuwait.

The second youngest of five children and the first of two to join the Army, Compean currently lives in Chicago but is engaged to another Schaumburg native.

He's only in his second month in Kuwait but expects to remain for nearly a year.