RETURNING FROM WAR:Kirby dodges death in Iraq, opens local practice
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He has served in two branches of our military forces, the Air Force and the Army. He got his medical degree as an officer in the Army, eventually serving 10 months in Iraq as an Army Battalion Surgeon and participating in the “shock and awe” invasion that captured Saddam Hussein’s palace in April of 2003. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery in battle and met President Bush during an awards presentation.
His military career has taken him around the country and the world. He has lived as far north as Caribou, Maine, as far west as California, and as far south as Miami, Fla., where he attended medical school. And then there is his time spent in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait.
But now, Kirby says, he is coming home. The Warren County native is opening a practice here in McMinnville as part of the River Park Hospital family of physicians. Kirby said it was an easy choice to make.
“I knew that I always wanted to come back home to practice,” Kirby said. “I wanted to raise my family in the same small town where I grew up.”
A board-certified family practice physician, Kirby is relocating from Dothan, Ala. He is the eldest of five children born to the late Homer and Sue Kirby.
Kirby began his medical career as a lab technician and joined the Air Force after being told they would pay for medical school if he got accepted. When that promise failed to materialize, Kirby switched services and joined the Army when they offered to give him a full ride to medical school if he agreed to serve one year for each year of school the Army paid for.
“That’s how I wound up going from the Air Force to the Army,” Kirby said.
Kirby was eventually deployed to Iraq as part of the 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade, 464 Armor Battalion.
“I was their Battalion Surgeon,” Kirby said, “but I’m not a surgeon. That’s just the Army’s name for that job.”
While there, Kirby was part of an invasion that was seen around the world on TV in April of 2003.
“I went to Baghdad,” Kirby said. “I was in about the fifth tank that knocked the gates down of Saddam Hussein’s palace during the war.”
Kirby had his own mobile medical unit which followed the larger tanks into battle.
“I had my own tank with a big red cross on it,” Kirby said. “I was sandwiched between an M1 Abrams and a Bradley.”
Kirby said the power of the M1 was a big part of the “shock and awe” aspect of the invasion.
“Every time the M1 Abrams would fire, it would pick up my little tank. Just, ‘Whoom!'” Kirby said.
Kirby’s battlefield duties were daunting.
“I was the first physician that a battlefield injury encountered,” Kirby said. “My job was to keep them from dying. My job was to put a chest tube in you, to put an IV in you, to stop the bleeding, to call in a Blackhawk helicopter and to get you out of there.”
Kirby actually had a medically equipped Humvee and a tank at his disposal.
“I stayed in my Humvee until about 10 kilometers this side of Baghdad,” Kirby recalled. “Then when a mortar hit about 30 yards from my Humvee, I decided it was time to get into the tank.”
Though he came home relatively unscathed, Kirby’s battlefield experience wasn’t without its frightening moments.
“Honestly, I should have been killed four times,” Kirby said. “Once I got a Frog Missile hit about 150 yards from my tank. It killed four instantaneously and injured 17. It literally blew me off the tank. I was laying on top of the tank in my Kevlar and the percussion blast just picked me up and threw me off the other side.”
Kirby said the battlefield experience is hard to explain.
“It was just 24 hours a day of adrenaline,” Kirby said. “It really was. Because you just didn’t know from one moment to the next if it was going to be your last moment or not, literally. We were the front. We were the very front.”
Kirby says he attributes his survival to a higher power.
“My Christian faith got me through it,” he said. “That’s what really got me through it. I knew I was in good hands and where I’d be if I left this world. That got me through it.”