Why we fight?

Someone once asked me if I had PTSD.  Why yes I do.  Have I sought therapy for it?  Nope.  Am I going to?  Nope.  Why?  Well let me tell you a story…

Afghanistan is a bad place.  I consider it a 5^th world country, none of that 3^rd world bull.  Yes, it’s that bad.  

So there I was in Afghanistan.  We were living in the basement of a medieval fortress.  (that’s called a dungeon)  I had been working a lot with a very good man named Gul Kareem.  I taught the local kids how to read maps and they would tell me where the mines were.  I taught Gul Kareem how to use a GPS and a video camera and I would send him out to disarm the mines.  The system worked really well.  He did a lot of good things.  We did a lot of good things.  As a whole, we helped a lot of people.

We ran the only “hospital” in the area.  One of our doctors used to joke about the monkey down in the bazaar being the referring physician for most of the problems we saw.  “Dr. Chimchim says rub shit on it!” was a common saying from him.  Most of the time we saw about 100 people per day.  Our Docs did a damn good job.  I just tried to not screw things up for them.   

I don’t remember how many mass casualty (more than 3 people) events that we had.  It was about every week and a half.  Sometimes I ran the radio calling in help.  Sometimes I talked to the families or the less injured.  I’m a pretty crappy medic.  Sometimes the male forgot to set the emergency brake on the car while he got out for a smoke.  The rest of the family would nose dive off a cliff.  Bad yes, but not my department.  When people would come in with shrapnel or gunshot wounds, it became my job. 

So one night the gate guards started freaking out.  They came running inside franticly screaming.  “His family!  His family!”  What?  Slow down.  Talk to me.  The Docs were all running to the clinic while the trucks came in the gate.  It was bad.  Gul Kareem was a good man.  The bad guys had tried to hurt his family before by planting land mines on the trail to his house.  This was his cousins family. 

At first I thought it was an attack but Gul Kareem showed me the pieces of the explosive.  An old rusted Soviet mortar round.  Buried for years.  The family had moved their cooking stove from one wall to another in the kitchen.  They built the new stove over the buried round.  It took a while for it to heat up enough for it to explode.  Dinner was almost ready.  The mother and the 15 year old took shrapnel to the legs.  The baby was shaken but was being held at the time.  The main force of the blast was 18 inches off the ground… into the three year old.

That’s where I came in.  The Doc needed help and I was there.  I tried to hold the three year old down while he cut off the bandages.  He jerked his hand right as the doc snipped a bandage.  I wasn’t holding good enough.  He cut off the tip of the kids finger.  Blood spurted out and we controlled it.  I got a dirty look but the doc kept working.  The things they did were amazing.  I don’t know how some of the people lived but the docs did it.  The weather was bad that night.  We took shifts calling for help and running the bag for the kid.  No one could get help to us with the weather.  He was dead when he got there he just didn’t know it.  The shockwave blew the lining off his lungs and he was drowning slowly.  It took 18 hours for the kid to die.  I don’t know if a real hospital could have saved him.  I know we did our best though.

So what do I take from this?  I still can’t cut fingernails.  My kids have claws.  I just can’t cut them.  I don’t want to ever forget about this though.  This was bad.  This was chaotic WAR.  That is why I do what I do.  To try to stop that.  There will always be bad people in the world that need to be stopped.  Firing off indiscriminate shots in the darkness without regard for the consequences is what most military groups do.  When I tell people where to shoot, it’s at a “very bad man” not like the Soviets firing at a village and leaving problems for generations.  Until there is no war, someone has to put focus in the chaos to protect the innocent.  Not everyone is good at controlling chaos.  The people I work with are.  That’s what we do and that’s why I fight.  I remember that kid every day.