To save lives of U.S. troops abroad, small company in Va. thinks fast

By JACK DORSEY
The Virginian-Pilot

ORDINARY - In this rural hamlet near the York River's northern shore, where watermen and farmers ply skills they've honed since English settlers first came in 1607, there is a small factory that seems out of place.

Here, far removed from the Washington Beltway and the metropolis of South Hampton Roads, engineers are inventing first-aid products to save the lives of wounded troops a half-world away in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of their instruments have become medical marvels, battl ing the wounds caused by the notorious improvised explosive devices. Others are improvements to medical field kits, some of which had been unchanged for 60 years.

All are making their way to the war fronts through H&H Associates Inc., a family-owned business that markets such items as combat dressings, tourniquets, first-aid kits, compresses and even an inflatable stretcher that floats.

Trade names include Cinch Tight and Tourni-Kwik, both fabricated to be applied fast with just one hand in case the other is injured.

There's Dual-Ice, a chemical-activated instant cold compress and refreezable ice pack. Conversely, there's Instant Ember, a hot pack, perhaps for a frost bitten foot. Another invention, Water-Jel, eases the pain from burns and cools the skin.

A trauma kit - called an Individual First-Aid Kit, or IFAK - provides immediate first aid for excessive blood loss. All the Marines in Iraq wear them on their belts.

The Air Force and Army use different, smaller kits manufactured by other companies.

H&H received an initial $750,000 contract last year to begin sending the kits to the field. It got another $2 million Pentagon contract in February to supply more.

The products are packaged and shipped from the 12,000- square-foot warehouse off U.S. 17 near Gloucester. There is an antique store on one side of the building and a restaurant on the other .

Bob Harder, president and founder, likes the location far more than where he had been - the pressure cooker of Alexandria in Northern Virginia. He moved H&H here in 1993.

This is where 71-year-old Harder - along with one of his four sons, Ted Harder, 42, and 10 other employees - would rather be. Life is simpler, and the workday ends at 4:30 p.m.

Originally from Montana, where he worked in coal mines while studying for an engineering degree, the elder Harder became a metallurgist, then a Washington lawyer at the U.S. patent office.

He formed H&H Associates in 1974. Initially, it was called Harder & Harder Associates, until some of his military clien­t ele questioned the overtone of such a name.

The company previously worked on airport weather information systems for the Federal Aviation Administration, "b ut we decided that was not the way we wanted to go, and we cut back," Harder said.

He spoke from his modest office and dilapidated swivel chair, its arms wrapped in silver duct tape. He said he bought the chair at a bankruptcy sale for $15 about 20 years ago and doesn't plan on getting a new one.

"I take a lot of grief from the office about this chair," he said.

Such frugality is a trait of Harder's company.

"I like a very simplistic approach to things," he said. "We don't have a lot of bells and whistles here."

Harder said his company grossed about $4 million last year and expects that to grow to between $5 million and

$6 million this year. The firm also produces equipment for police and fire departments, emergency medical services and other first responders.

Harder joins other small businesses in southeastern Virginia involved in improving combat first-aid devices.

"Down here is a real hotbed of six to seven little outfits that are really pushing the envelope in developing pre hospital care," he said.

Retired Master Chief Petty Officer Tom "Doc" Eagles, who spent 30 years as a Navy hospital corpsman and the past 12 as a civilian with the Marine Corps Systems Command developing first-aid products, has worked with Harder on some inventions. It was after Eagles asked Harder to develop a dressing that would soothe white-phosphorus burns that Harder created Dual-Ice. It was used during the Gulf War in 1991.

"There are all kinds of new ideas coming out, little companies throughout the country," said Lt. Cmdr. Carl Manemeit, a medical administrator at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, where concepts are researched and tested.

The company's Individual First-Aid Kit, he said, "is a new idea that is making first aid more trauma-related, geared to saving lives in the first 15 minutes."

Harder, who claims engineers "just love to fiddle," said that's how Cinch Tight was born. It's a compression bandage engineered for use with one hand to stop moderate to severe hemorrhaging.

Although it was judged in a Navy study of six similar one-handed tourniquets to be second in efficiency, the $1.87 product was far cheaper than the first-place winner, which cost $35, according to an evaluation by the Naval Sea Systems Command.

"We shipped 600,000 of those to the Marine Corps," Harder said. "We developed a way to compress gauze, and we've shipped about a million of those." That product sells for 89 cents each.

Harder points to another of his products, Big Cinch, a sterile pad for the abdomen with a 5-yard-long elastic wrap and Velcro attached.

The Army had used a similar-size pad but with cloth ties. It was susceptible to mud and dirt getting inside.

"The Army and everybody else has been carrying this since 1942, and it costs $14 ," Harder said. "We developed ours, and they are now using it for four bucks."

In the factory's "clean room," where products are assembled and vacuum-sealed, employees crank out as many as 1,500 of the Big Cinch bandages a day.

The company's latest invention, a device to help plug chest wounds, may owe its success to a modern coffee bag.

Current chest seals on the market don't stick well, so H&H engineers looked for a better one.

"One of our guys, with a background as a corpsman, was walking with his wife in a grocery store on base," Harder said. "She was looking at coffee bags and squeezed one which let air out through a small plastic valve, but not in."

The corpsman grabbed 20 bags off the shelf, Harder sai d.

"His wife said, 'Are you crazy?'

"He said, 'No. We just solved a way to save lives.' "

After tinkering with the valves "over a couple of beers," Harder and his partner found the company that makes them - about 15 million a year - and are acquiring some.

"We put a little gauze pad over it and, working with Dow Corning on the adhesive, and a company for the disc, we think we've got something," he said.

It is to undergo tests at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.

Sealing small bottles of disinfectant in plastic on a recent workday, H&H employee Karen Yeo, whose brother served in Desert Storm, said she knows what it's like to have family members in combat.

As she works, Yeo said, "I'm thinking, 'Oh God, I hope not many are having to use these things.' But it is good we are able to do this, because it is keeping them alive."

Employee Melissa Bush said she fights a temptation to write notes of support to the soldiers and slip them in the packets.

"Before I started working here, I knew what the military was doing was difficult," Bush said. "But you don't realize it until you start doing stuff to help them."