Why rain, and mud bother me.

Even when I remember this I do get sickened.
But it weighs on me- -I can't tell you how hard it is for me on rainy wet days, or even when there is just mud from a hose around.

This happened sometime in November of 2005, we had not been there for that long.
We were in a town in our sector, and I remember hearing a huge explosion, I look toward where there was an overpass and there a huge plume of smoke rising in the air.

We responded to the explosion, and I remember getting there and seeing the body parts everywhere.
A torso here, a torso there, legs strewn in random places, arms mangled and separated from their bodies -

Heads of these soldiers were not even recognizable. You could not even tell if they were human. When you are torn apart by a bomb your body gets pulverized and mashed into hamburger from the concussion and then in a split second torn b y the shrapnel.

There was one soldier alive, barely alive when we got there, and his friends from his unit that had gotten there also were trying to tend to him.

I remember that guy asking for help from the Medic in my platoon, Doc. Scott, and he went up there and then came back to us saying there was nothing he could do.
I remember how mad that other guy got, he was rushing back and forth, I knew how much he wanted to save that soldiers life, his name was pope, but our Scott, told me he was taking his last breaths.
I hoped that was so,
I truly hoped that he would die soon,
he wasn't even screaming, despite how destroyed his body was,

I looked toward his arm that was hanging to the side of him, and there was a stump at the wrist from where his hand used to be, and right beside him was his hand inside of a glove.


Back to why wet weather and mud bother me.
This day had been kind of wet, there was mud around.
I had been walking around, taking a survey of the scene, and I noticed there was something on the bottom of my boot, I thought this was mud.
So I start trying to scrape it off of my boot on the ground,
it won't come off.

I then pull my boot up,
what was on my boot that day was not mud,
not anything you could scrape from your boot nor anything I have ever been able to scrape from my mind.
It was a chunk of flesh.