Saving Corporal Reyes.
- Adam Spencer
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
A US Marine's Osprey crashed near Darwin. Doctors combined hyperbaric oxygen with ECMO in a world-first treatment to beat deadly fungi.
Fire in the sky, fight in the chamber.
On August 27, 2023, a US Marine Osprey crashed near Darwin during Exercise Predator’s Run, killing three marines and leaving Corporal Travis Reyes catastrophically injured. What followed was not just a rescue story but a medical moonshot, as doctors in Australia and the US improvised new ways to keep him alive while a rare fungus tried to finish what the crash had started.
Smooth take-off, violent descent.
Reyes was a 21-year-old crew member from Maryland, working aboard the MV-22B Osprey as it lifted out of Darwin with 23 marines on board. He later recalled the eerie normality of the opening moments.
“I remember take-off was smooth, and as soon as we got over the water, it was all so smooth. I just started eating my McDonald’s in front of those grunts and they were so jealous of me.” — Travis Reyes abc.net
Then came the crash into the Arafura Sea, a fireball, desperate rescue efforts and battlefield-like trauma. Reyes survived burns, near-drowning and major internal injuries, but the swampy water and wreckage had delivered another enemy deep into his lungs and wounds.
He was about to be overrun by invasive fungi that standard treatment could not control.
When sick became sicker.
At the crash site, doctors had to restart Reyes’s heart, and once he reached intensive care his condition kept deteriorating despite extraordinary support. One of the clinicians involved noted the doses of life-supporting drugs were the highest he had seen in two decades.
“He was very ill, and then he became even sicker.” — Dr Sean McCreary abc.net
The organisms identified in the medical literature were Saksenaea and Fusarium, two aggressive fungi that can tear through damaged tissue and are notoriously hard to treat. By then Reyes was on ECMO, the last-ditch system that oxygenates blood outside the body when the lungs and heart are failing, and even that was not enough on its own. pubmed.
Into the pressure cooker.
That was when The Alfred team in Melbourne decided to try something no one had previously done in a living patient: put a patient on ECMO into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
Hyperbaric oxygen can help starve certain fungi and boost damaged tissue, but ECMO machines are not built for those conditions, so the staff first had to validate whether the equipment would even function safely under pressure.
The radical procedure is described in the paper “Novel use of hyperbaric oxygen treatment for treatment-resistant disseminated Saksenaea and Fusarium in a patient on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).” (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih)
But that dry journal title does not fully convey the sheer madness of the idea: a patient hovering near death, attached to an external life-support circuit, being rolled into a pressurised chamber because every ordinary option was running out.
Over 15 days Reyes underwent 13 hyperbaric sessions while on ECMO, a combination the journal case report and process paper describe as a world first.
One tough bugger.
Today, Travis Reyes lives in rural Maryland with his wife Jasmine, legally blind and walking with a brace after multiple strokes during recovery. The 21-year-old marine who once moved freely around Osprey aircraft now navigates a quieter world of coffee on the porch and careful walks through the woods.
But he is one tough bugger. In July 2025, he competed at the Department of Defense Warrior Games, winning a powerlifting medal and shooting arrows blindfolded in adaptive archery.
In March 2026, he and Jasmine joined a virtual reunion with The Alfred team, hearing for the first time the full scale of what happened to save him. The couple hope to visit Melbourne soon, to thank the doctors face-to-face.
Why this matters.
This matters because medicine often advances not in neat textbook steps but in frantic moments when clinicians decide that impossible has become the safest available option. The protocols developed around Reyes’s care, including how to validate ECMO devices for hyperbaric conditions, now give hospitals a roadmap for future cases involving catastrophic trauma, resistant fungal infection and complex retrieval medicine.
Desperate times, as they say, call for desperate measures. But that desperation, twinned with some brilliant doctors, saved the life of Corporal Reyes.
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REFERENCES
Grant McArthur. "This Australian medical first from The Alfred saved US Marine Travis Reyes life after fatal military aircraft crash". ABC News. May 3, 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-03/australian-medical-first-us-marine-life-saved-beat-odds/106629884
"Novel use of hyperbaric oxygen treatment for treatment-resistant disseminated Saksenaea and Fusarium in a patient on ECMO: a case report". Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine. December 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41364853/
"The process, logistics and governance behind a high-stakes novel intervention: the use of ECMO in the hyperbaric chamber". Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine. December 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12823154/
U.S. Marines. "Marine Rotational Force - Darwin MV-22B Osprey Tiltrotor Aircraft Crash". August 27, 2023. https://www.marines.mil/News/Press-Releases/Press-Release-Display/Article/3507817/
"ECMO: The historical mission to save U.S. Marine Cpl. Travis Reyes". Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. August 10, 2025. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/915273/
"Marine Corps Investigation into Aug. 27, 2023 MV-22B Osprey Crash in Australia". USNI News. August 9, 2024. https://news.usni.org/2024/08/09/marine-corps-investigation-into-aug-27-2023-mv-22b-osprey-crash-in-australia
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