Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

AFTERMATH

By U.S. Army First Lieutenant Sangjoon Han



Qasim was only a few paces from the road when he caught his first glimpse of the approaching vehicles. His heart jumped into his throat as he dropped the clump of soil he'd been examining. He knew something was about to happen. The town on the far side of the road was suddenly empty.



The three trucks drew steadily closer and were soon just a hundred meters away. From this distance Qasim could make out the faces of the individual soldiers. It was the closest that he'd ever come to them, he realized, and he was still studying their expressions when the explosion engulfed the last truck in the convoy.



The noise was deafening, and the old farmer felt the ground shake beneath his feet, but Qasim stood fixed in place, observing the aftermath. He wanted to see what the Americans would do. The answer was not long in coming. The Americans started shooting.

He turned to run.



Sergeant Price was kneeling just a few meters away from his humvee, taking aim with his rifle.

“If they’re running, they’re guilty.” The credo had been drilled in their heads over and over again, and it was what went through the sergeant’s head as he knelt to take aim. He desperately wanted the man to stop running before he squeezed the trigger.

The rifle kicked back against his shoulder where it was braced, and Price could see a small puff of dirt rising a few meters ahead of the man. There was no way the Iraqi could have missed it, and yet he kept on running.

“Stop!” Price shouted at the man’s back. He gave the man another second, then skipped another round in front of him.

It would be so simple for the man to stop, Price thought, as the silent anger rose up inside of him. Just stop running, his mind screamed at the man. The son of a bitch was going to make him shoot. Price hated the man at that moment. He wanted the man to die for the sin of forcing Price to kill him.

“STOP!” he shouted only a half-second before he fired again.






Qasim kept his jaw clenched tightly shut. He refused to look down at his abdomen for fear that the sight would fill him with horror and he would cry out or weep. He was less than two hundred meters from his house. Inside, his wife would be huddled in the far corner—the smallest children gathered around her while the older ones hid elsewhere in the field.

He saw the outlines of the Americans when he opened his eyes, though the world had taken on a terrible brightness. There was something about them that made them soft, almost pudgy. They were people used to luxury, and soon they would go back to their old lives while he would be dead and his children left fatherless. At last, he could feel anger cutting through the pain.





Sergeant Price knew it was hopeless the moment he saw the ground under the man turning into dark, bloody mud. Still, the Iraqi was alive and conscious, and the only alternative to trying to save him was to return to their humvee and watch him die from the side of the road.

About the only thing he could do was to give the man an IV to try to keep up his blood pressure. It was absurd, he thought to himself, that he was holding a little plastic bag over a man whose vital organs were sitting in a pile on top of him. But he simply didn’t know what else to do.




Qasim could feel the American helicopter taking off. How would his wife and sons ever be able to bury him now? He didn’t even know where they were carrying him.

He silently cursed his own stupidity. He also cursed the Americans for their guns and the young men who attacked them with their bombs. He almost cursed God, but just barely caught himself. He was going to die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He looked around the helicopter once more, trying to catch a few last glimpses of his surroundings. On the far wall was a window, the blue Iraqi sky beyond.

Across from him there was an American soldier clenching his eyes shut and shaking slightly. Qasim could see that for all the fabulous technology that his country had sent with him, the soldier was still filled with terror. He is a boy, Qasim said to himself.



It will be over soon, Qasim thought as each breath grew more labored than the last. He took one final look at the soldier and closed his eyes.



http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_operation_homecoming_writings.html