Weird Day (Disturbing Post Read at on peril!!)

Well today marks the weirdest day that I have experienced so far during my deployment, and probably the most mentally stressful day as well. Unfortunatly, it fell on my oldest daughters birthday. Happy Birthday baby girl!! My day began at 0100 local when we got an urgent medivac call to pick up a soldier who was shot in the leg during a gun fight with some enemy soldiers luckly it was relatively close to our FOB. There are two upsides to this, we were able to get him out and back to our FOB for treatment he is doing fine and on his way to Germany. Secondly, our Apache brothers were able to put about 100 rounds of high explosive depleted uranium 30mm rounds into the building killing all three enemy insurgents inside. They showed me there gun camera footage, and the footage of their ISLID which is their thermal camera. I was able to watch their bright temperatures leave as they cooled down. After finally being able to get to sleep around 0500l we were awoken again at 0700L for another urgent call to one of the Afghani border observation posts. Apparently, there were 2 wounded Aghani's, with two KIA. Our medivac bird landed at the LZ and evaced the two wounded. Unfortunatly, one died later of his wounds. The IED basically turned both of his legs into chopped liver, and they couldn't put enough fluids back into him fast enough. Once we landed we were told two dead, it turned into seven. My crew cheif said that he didn't think that we could fit that many on board with liters. I told him to stack them if the Afghani's didn't have a problem with it, they didn't. There was an SF medic who spoke Pashtun so he was able to coordinate for us. They would bring a body on a liter under a blanket lift the liter into the aircraft, pull the blanket off and dump the corpse onto the floor, then go back for another corpse. So all in all there were seven dead. We landed to off load the corpses and my door gunner was helping. He got a lot of blood all over his uniform, and he was literally taking pieces of bodies and putting them in the back of a truck. Please pray for him, he seems to be playing it tough, but we all know that it has affected him the most. I now know why they always say don't look back. I was also disturbed by what I saw. The most morbid thing that I witnessed today was when we landed, and got out. The crew chief ran off to get the chemical stuff to spray on blood, and they were also rolling up with the pressure washer. This is because there were lakes of blood and poop in our aircraft from the corpses. Leblanc's gloves were laying in a pool blood, and just under his gloves was a fully bloomed rose, half in the blood and half out. It was one of the sadist things I have ever seen and I will probably never forget it. I don't seem to be overly affected by seeing 7 dead bodies loaded and unloaded from my aircraft like fire wood, this is because Afghani deaths just don't effect me the same as U.S. KIA's. What I keep asking myself is why is one person's life more important than anothers. Shouldn't all human life be valued equally? So I think I feel guilty for not feeling as bad about it as if it were a U.S. kill. I came up with my own name for it, I call it "Battlefield Rationalization". I think that most people in the military develope this callus in battle. My way of couping with this ordeal is writing it out. I am sorry if you read this and are disturbed, but it I feel better when I do this. I hope that I won't have to use battlefield rationalization again, but I fear that with the nicer weather that I will have to depend on it more often than not. Also pray for those Afghani soldiers, and their families. Most of them don't even get paid, that is true patriotism, or maybe for most its just plain revenge.

Be Safe,

Morgan

I will obviously not be posting any photographs with this blog entry.