When a suicide bomber hit Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, then-Capt. Katie Lunning sprang into action, often moving the wounded right past the Taliban so she could provide medical care.
The critical care nurse at the Minnesota Air National Guard’s 133rd Medical Group saved a baby “whose veins wouldn’t hold an adult-sized IV,” a woman with a spinal cord injury and 20 others that day, according to the Air Force Times.
For remaining calm under pressure and providing “intensive care unit-level support on medical flights out of the country,” Military Times wrote, Lunning earned its 2023 Airman of the Year award.
“We were pulling them out as they are getting injured,” Lunning said in a Department of Veterans Affairs press release announcing she would receive the Distinguished Flying Cross award — only the second nurse to receive the honor. “August 26th, when the suicide bomber exploded at Abbey Gate, we were the first (critical care air transport team) in. It was the largest medical evacuation out of that coalition hospital ever, and very dangerous on the ground. We had to leave the airplane to go get our patients as well. We took injured Marines and Afghan civilians who really weren’t flight worthy, but there was no choice. We just had to get them out of there. So, a lot of medical events occurred on the airplane, but we ended up being able to safely deliver everybody to Landstuhl, Germany (for further medical care).”
Lunning was on a six-month deployment based in Qatar as a member of a critical care transport team. These three-member teams care for critical patients during flights to hospitals.
During the week before the suicide bombing, when the Taliban was bombarding the area, Lunning would “push a stretcher from the runway to the airport gates, past the throngs of Afghans clamoring to board military jets to safety, down three city blocks as the Taliban proclaimed victory from the streets, until she reached the tiny international hospital where patients in critical condition awaited,” Air Force Times wrote. She was armed with only a Beretta M9 pistol.
She got the phone call about the suicide bombing on August 26, 2021, and was told she needed to return to Kabul from Qatar. This time she would be treating Marines, too.
“It was a different feeling and a sense of urgency, knowing we’re getting out our people, and our people had been killed,” she told Air Force Times. “Very sobering.” Eleven Marines were killed in the explosion.
In all, Lunning worked seven 20-hour missions August 18-29, 2021.
Now a major, Lunning in also an ICU nurse manager at the Iowa Department of Veteran Affairs.
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