The 336th Night of Memory-3

Sardasht Chemical Bombing

Compiled by: Sepideh Khulusian
Translated by: Fazel Shirzad

2023-02-07

Note: The 336th Night of Memory was held on Thursday, June 23, 2022, with the presence of a group of chemical warriors from Sardasht region and the treatment and health staffs of chemically injured and veterans in the Surah Hall of the Arts Center, with the performance of Dawood Salehi. In this ceremony, General Ali Sadri, Dr. Hamid Salehi, Dr. Mohammad Hajipour and Dr. Khosro Jadidi, witnesses of the chemical bombing, shared their memories.

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The third narrator of Night of Memory, Dr. Mohammad Hajipour, born on April 23, 1956, was a nurse in the dialysis unit during the holy defense, who volunteered to serve the chemically wounded for the second time. He said about the nursing of chemical veterans of eight years of Holy Defense: I worked in the nursing department from 1979 to 1996, and from then until yesterday, I have been in the education department; but I consider the best period of my service to be the period of service in the war. At that time, there was a directive that we had to go to war zones for one month a year. The first time I went to the region was Bostan operation. In Ahvaz, a hospital train belonging to the Red Crescent delivered the injured to us, and we adjusted their medicines and hospitalized them. Some of these veterans were also distributed in different cities on the way from Ahvaz to Tehran according to their addresses and delivered to the emergency room. I was in the dialysis unit the second time I was deployed, but when the chemical bombardment started, Dr. Sohrabpour told us not to go to the front for another month and to be treated at Lebafinjad Hospital.

      I had just been accepted to university at that time. I worked the night shift in the dialysis ward and during the day I went to the chemical veterans ward. First, in the eye section, we poured drops into the veterans' eyes and bandaged them. But one day a nurse told me that you should come and take over the chemical dressing of the ward. When the chemicals came, the conditions were such that we didn't know what to do at first. Just like a while ago when we didn't know what to do for corona patients. We knew neither medicine nor treatment. Based on experience and Dr. Sohrabpour's instructions, we used a white ointment - the name of which I have forgotten due to the passage of time - and vaseline gas. We gradually categorized the patients. Sometimes we would go to the bathroom in the morning and by noon we would take care of all the blisters of these chemically injured patients one by one and send them to their ward.

      When Mr. Dr. Salehi came, the supervisor told me that a force has come that is very bad-mannered and aggressive. It is your job to go to him. We were from dialysis ward and one of the most difficult ward I know is dialysis ward. Because the patient is dependent on the device and hospital three days a week. Now, the needles used for dialysis are of a type that makes injection a little easier; But at that time, we had to treat the patient with jokes and jokes and such things in order to make the patient willing to undergo dialysis. With the same spirit, we went to Dr. Salehi and finally forced him to come for dressing.

      At that time, my main sport was climbing and I went to the mountain every Friday. One day, when I came back from the mountain, I saw that this man's legs were terribly swollen and he had a very severe infection. The only solution we found for him was to put his feet in a bucket of diluted serum and betadine for hours. In this way, both the Vaseline gas and the infection was opened. After three or four months, he recovered and his eyes were able to see after one and a half months. The fact that we see him back to life now makes us proud.

      Bitter and nice memories were and are together. We used to get used to patients. Sometimes when they were martyred or something else happened to them, we were also very affected and sometimes even had physical problems. But the happiness of those days is felt when we see our loved ones come back to life and actually 18 years of nursing were the best years of my life.