Fiction

His heart is pounding in his chest, his breathing shallow and rapid. Doc was going to hyperventilate. "Get a fuckin' grip man," he thought to himself, "slow your fuckin' breathing down and get your fuckin' bearings." Doc quickly scanned his surroundings, unable to fully comprehend the maelstrom of action swirling around him. The young medic found himself totally engulfed in a choking cloud of deep brown dust. The air was thick with sand and grit that blurred his vision and filled his mouth with sand that crunched between his teeth. He couldn't make out faces, but he could see silohouttes moving through the storm of chaos, like the flitting apparitions you sometimes catch in your peripheral vision. Like lightning, realization struck him. There had been another explosion, very close to him. Toth, that had been her name. She was an engineer. The only people in this AO were his guys and some engineers building a school, so Toth must have been on of theirs. Women don't serve in the infantry so she definetly wasn't in Charlie company. The engineers had been working in Jisr Di'yala, a little slice of heaven just north of Sadr City. JD, as it was referred to by C. Co, was a death trap. It was a nightmarish labyrnth whos walls were the high roofed two to three story houses typical to that area, and whos streets were treacherously narrow. So narrow in some places that if a humvee were to drive down it, the sideview mirrors would scrape along the khaki, clay covered brick walls hemming them in. The whole city stank, the whole country stank as far as Doc was concerned, but the streets were especially bad. Outside Baghdad proper and the other major cities, people were lucky to have electricity let alone plumbing. In some towns, the denizens had enough room to build outhouses but not here. Here, you shit in a bucket. Once the bucket was full, you dumped it in the street in one of the two ditches that run parallel along all the roads through the town. The strip the engineers had been ambushed in was thankfully one of the bigger streets. You could fit two humvees down this one if it weren't for the sewer trenches. Docs platoon had been on patrol a few blocks over and heard the explosion. Felt would have been more accurate, Doc had been sitting in the back of one of the humvees marinating in his own sweat when he felt the concussion of the explosion pass through him. Experience told him that it was going to be bad. Experience told him right. From what Doc could tell when they arrived, the improvised explosive device had exploded beneath the lead humvee in the engineers convoy. The explosion had flipped the five ton armored vehivle onto its back and set it ablaze, dark black pillar of smoke rising angrily from the inverted vehicle. Painfully, Doc recalled that there had been survivors in the vehicle. He could hear them screaming as the burned alive, could see the imprint of their kevlar and nomex gloves pressing futiley against the windows. The hands were framed by hazy images of faces, twisted by screams and pain and terror. Doc and a few others rushed forward to help but stopped short as ammunition inside the vehicles began to cook off in the fire. Some dark but realistic part of him had hoped a stray bullet would put an end to the suffering of the men inside. He got his wish as a grenade inside the vehicle exploded, blowing the doors off the vehicle and both silencing the screams and momentarily deafening him. From beyond the burning hulk of ruined metal, Doc heard someone screaming "Medic!" and he was off running. Toth had been in the turret of the second vehicle, she had caught a piece of shrapnel in the neck from the explosion. Her comrades had pulled her out of the turret and laid her on the ground while calling for a medic. Doc rushed up, swiftly shrugging his dusty brown aide bag from his shoulders. With hands tragically skilled in the art of trying to mend broken young peoples sundered bodies, Doc opened his bag and pulled out a scalpel, cutting the chin strap on Toths helmet. While Doc was cutting, his eyes met hers. Her eyes were a haunting grey, and filled with a chilling clarity that caused Doc to hesitate momentarily. She had round, high sitting, tan cheek bones that were speckled with light brown freckles and a peanut nose. Her mouth was big, and coughing up blood. Her lips trembled and her mouth moved spasmodicly, silently trying to mouth words. The shrapnel wound to her neck had missed her arteries but had severed her windpipe. He had been about to insert a breathing tube into the hole when his world turned to light and pain before waking up on his back. Doc felt the second explosion for sure. The concussion had torn through his body, jarring his bones and moving his internal organs. With the thick and heavy ringing in his ears wearing off, Doc hears the chatter of gunfire. Bullets whizz past like angry and deadly wasps. The still thick haze clears a little more and now Doc can make out his guys taking cover behind their vehicles and returning fire. The thunder of the .50 caliber turret mounted machine guns join the cacophony, along with shouted orders and the screams of the wounded. Docs feels dizzy and tries to control his breathing again, feeling for the first time the stabbing pain in his chest. Looking down at his body, he can see has shrapnel wounds. Shards of metal have torn into his left arm and chest, a particualrly large, jagged, fire-blackened, piece jutting obscenely from his side. The digital grey of his uniform are now dripping with his blood. Docs breating is getting harder, tighter. He has tension pneumothorax, meaning his lung has been punctured and now is leaking oxygen into his chest cavity, filling up more and more with no where to go, crushing him from inside. He tries feebly to call out, but barely manages to make a croaking sort of gasp. Toth! The name tears through Doc's agony-wracked mind with searing clarity, temporarly banishing the the pain and fear, replacing them with a sense of duty. Scanning the wreckage-strewn road, Doc finds her. The second explosion had thrown her against the side of a building like a rag doll, leaving her in a heap in a shit ditch on the side of the road. Laying there, every second feels like an eternity, Doc laying there dying in the midst of battle. A lucky shot from a roof top strikes Carter, a Charlie company man in the face. A brief look of shock captured on poor young Carters face as the back of his head explodes out painting a terrible red mural on the building just behind him, before his body crumples like a marionette puppet whos strings suddenly vanish. An enemy fighter wearing khaki pants and a red pinstriped button up shirt with the sleeves rolled up appears in a doorway and raises an AK-47 with a broken butt only to be hit by the .50 cal, his body jerking as his left arm explodes like some nightmarish firework, a second round disintigrating his body, leaving an angry red cloud in its stead. Doc lays his head back slowly, his helmet resting on the ground. The sky begins to break through the stifling dust cloud, and somehow amidst the angry chaos surrounding him, Doc finds peace. Closing his eyes, a smile creasing his face, he comes to terms with the fact he may die, and hes ok with that, a life filled with so much death wouldn't be such a terrible thing to leave behind.