IT ONLY TAKES ONE TIME

Hello everyone. Sorry that this is so long since the last entry. I suppose that I should probably write a little more than I do. I am probably the worst blogger out there, at least so far as prompt posting and the such. But hey, its my blog so I guess I can do what I like with it, and if you don’t like it… well, too bad. Nough’ said.

Well I guess it’s been about almost ten days since this happened but one of our good friends over here was injured. Actually it was, yet again, right in front of us. I can’t go into to much detail because I believe that the investigation is still ongoing, but the long and the short of it is that during a controlled detonation of an IED that was discovered one of the EOD guys, the team we work closely with, was hit with shrapnel. The craziest part was that he was in an armored vehicle well away from the blast. The piece of shrapnel just happened to find that one in a million flight path and found a small weak spot in the armor of the vehicle. When the shrapnel passed through the skin of the vehicle it must have slit in two because he was hit twice in the leg and there was only one hole in the vehicle. The shrapnel passed through both his calf and his thigh. We were shocked and confused when it happened, and as per usual it provided a bit of a grounding effect to all involved. This type of detonation is something that we have participated in probably over a hundred times, literally happening daily if not more. After an IED is discovered it is sometimes safer to destroy the explosives on site rather than to disturb or try to transport them. So as you can imagine with bad guys planting all kinds of IEDs it isn’t a rare occasion that we are present for these explosions. It is rare, however, that someone is injured during one. Sitting in our vehicle 10-20 meters behind the vehicle that was penetrated we were the first people to become aware of his condition and respond. Luckily it all turned out about as well as it could have, considering the circumstances. Our buddy had a small piece pass through his calf and a larger piece pass through his thigh. We never recovered the actual frag but from the hole in the vehicle it seems the piece as about 7-10 times larger than a .50 caliber bullet, which by the way, is huge. For all that he didn’t have any broken bones and having only nicked the artery in his thigh, his blood loss was manageable. I actually remember being so amazed as I watched the medics work on him as he lay on his back with his hands tucked behind his head, smiling. I guess he must have understood at that point that he had brushed shoulders with tragedy and came out with a “million dollar wound”. It’s a funny expression, not to down play getting shrapnel fired through your body at 2700 feet per second, but it means he gets to go home, and will still fully recover. Recent reports confirm this telling us that he underwent a couple exploratory surgeries and that they expect him to fully recover in 6 weeks. So, as I said, sounds like a pretty good outcome to what could have otherwise been tragic. I hear that he is headed back to the States, which is good news under nearly all circumstances. Now I think I know why he was smiling… J It is just so crazy the sheer odds that had to be overcome for that round to reach out and bite him like that. Looking back at the trajectory and distance traveled its astounding to think two inches lower and it probably wouldn’t have penetrated the vehicle. Then again, two inches higher and our buddy might not have been so lucky. Pretty much no matter how you slice it this occurrence just backs up what the SMAJ told me later that day when he said, “well, you guys have a pretty damn dangerous job”. Lately it’s been becoming harder and harder to ignore that fact.