CLEVELAND, Ohio – Scott Steele’s military and professional career was launched on a whim and a prayer, so to speak.
The former Army physician, who became chairman of colorectal surgery at the Cleveland Clinic last year, served 25 years in the military, including two combat deployments to Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
Steele admits that initially, he didn’t know anything about the military or medicine, but decided to give both a what-the-hell shot.
Fortunately, things worked out pretty well for Steele, 44, of Shaker Heights.
Former Army surgeon recalls deployments
Raised in rural Wisconsin, he graduated from high school with the sole ambition of tackling something challenging.
The military seemed to fit the bill, so he applied and was accepted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where the Army trains its officers.
Steele was considering studies in engineering, the traditional West Point career path. But when his roommate said he was going to be part of the two percent of cadets who go into medicine, Steele impulsively signed on, too.
“It was kind-of on a whim,” Steele recalled.
After graduating from West Point, he served is internship and residency at various military medical facilities, then was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas, at the height of the war in Iraq in 2003.
A Fort Hood colonel took one look at Steele’s last name and said, “Steele, huh? Get ready to deploy.”
That wouldn’t happen until 2006 when Steele made the first of his four deployments, each lasting about six months, to a variety of assignments in combat zones.
The randomness of war
“War is interesting, because depending on the location and the tempo of what’s going on, you can go for long stretches of boredom where there’s nothing going on, faced by stretches of extreme busyness,” Steele said.
The Army doctors treated both U.S. military personnel, and Iraqi or Afghani soldiers and civilians.
He recalled the first time he was faced with an influx of mass casualties when 31 people, mostly Iraqi soldiers, were injured when their bus was blown up.
“The first time I saw some of these just incredible injuries come through . . . Your initial thing is like oh my God, then you have to take a step back and say OK, here’s my training.
“I’m going to go through the ABCs of medicine, and stop the bleeding, stop the contamination, massive resuscitation, fight the fight another day, damage control surgery.”
Though Steele had done previous work with civil trauma victims in the U.S., he said, “There’s nothing that prepares you for the injuries in war . . .where you have multiple amputations come in.”
The work also posed some unexpected ethical, cultural and geopolitical dilemmas, according to Steele.
Should you risk performing a surgery that isn’t your specialty but no other surgeon is available?
How do you treat female civilian patients in a culture where such contact between sexes is taboo?
Should you do an operation on a civilian, knowing that needed after-care may not be available?
Do you operate on a civilian as a goodwill gesture, but risk losing that goodwill if the patient dies?
And what do you do if you’re operating on a civilian and a wounded U.S. soldier is brought in for treatment?
“These are the things you have to take into consideration,” Steele said.
And do all that in a war zone where the threat of danger can come at almost any time, any place, in the blast of a rocket, mortar shell or improvised explosive device.
“There’s a randomness that occurs in the combat theater,” Steele said.
Coping with that potentially lethal randomness is hard, but “you have to, and there are times that you do it very well, and also times that you don’t do it very well,” he added. “You have to learn to live with it, or it will consume you.”
“Doc, I got kids”
But there are also rewards.
Steele remembered one particular wounded U.S. soldier, hit by shrapnel during a rocket attack, who looked up from his hospital gurney and told Steele, “Doc, I got kids.”
The surgeon simply replied, “I got you.”
“I realized at that moment that this is why I’m here,” Steele said. “To take care of this person and whoever else is coming through the door after this horrible experience, so we can make sure that they can make it home for their family.”
The soldier did.
Not all do, and that’s one of the hardest parts of being a combat surgeon, according to Steele.
“On the professional side, I always say the hardest part about it is always the why? Trying to understand why did this particular person not make it,” he said.
“How is it that this is a guy you saw that morning, who went out on deployment, and they come back and I’m the one who pronounces him dead,” he added. “Could I have done something different? Could I have helped?
“That’s tough when they don’t make it. That’s a tough thing that you have to get used to.”
Also challenging is doing more with less – when the scarcity of equipment or personnel necessitate innovation, such as filling empty water bottles with rocks to use as weights for patient traction.
In those cases, you have to let the best ideas come forward, regardless of rank or ego, according to Steele. Just because he’s a surgeon, or the highest-ranking officer in the unit, “doesn’t mean I have the best ideas,” he said. “You’ve got to step outside of yourself and grow as a person, grow as a leader.”
Coming home
In 2015, Steele decided to leave the military as a lieutenant colonel with a Bronze Star, Combat Medical Badge and Legion of Merit medal.
Raising his daughter, Marianna, now 11, was one consideration in that decision.
Steele said he noticed that after his first deployments, when he came home his daughter “kind-of struggled with me. She didn’t know who I was.”
That changed, but Steele doesn’t want to miss any more of her growing up.
He credits his wife, Michele, and all military spouses, with shouldering the burden of deployment.
“She’s the real trooper in all this. We talk about the heroes being the ones that deploy, but we oftentimes forget the true heroes, the ones who are left behind, those who take care of all the stuff that push the family forward,” he said.
“My wife made sure that when I was gone that my daughter had the absolutely most normal life as possible, so that I didn’t have to worry when I was gone,” he added.
Steele said that on each deployment he didn’t write his daughter any letters, but instead recorded every day’s events and his thoughts in a leather-bound book that he plans to give to her when she’s older.
“So one day she’ll have some insight into what that experience was like for me, that I was thinking about her every day, and that I loved her from afar,” he said.
When the family came to Northeast so he could accept his post at the Cleveland Clinic, Steele said they’d “heard nothing but negative things about Cleveland.”
But now, “I can honestly say, we’re all in. We love where we live. We really enjoy it.”
One of his patients is also pleased with the decision.
When Yefim Fridman, 78, of Solon was referred to Steele for surgery, he first did his homework on the surgeon.
He learned about Steele’s military background, “so I understood that he was a doctor who was on the battlefield and had a lot of experience with wounded soldiers,” Fridman said.
“So I said, OK, I’m going with him. This inspired me to believe he’ll do the right thing for me, and thank God, it’s true,” he added. “I wasn’t disappointed. He’s not only a great doctor to me, but a great human being.”
Looking back on his military career, Steele said he sorely misses the people he served with, and the bond they had in trying circumstances.
Those years also changed him. Steele said he became more patriotic than ever before in his life. “Professionally, I would say I became a better surgeon,” he noted. “It allows you to expand your boundaries and grow as a surgeon.”
Plus, “those combat deployments helped me evolve as a person,” he noted.
Steele said he learned that he didn’t have to be the tough military officer/surgeon who never showed weakness, never admitted he was scared or tired or wrong.
Now, “I think it’s fine, perfectly OK, to admit that I’m wrong. I had a hard time with that when I was younger,” he said.
“I guess the military was great to me, it really was,” he added. “I look back on those years as incredible.”
Sometimes a whim just pays off.
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