Nightmare

Not sure if I should really post this, but I feel I needed to transcribe it for some reason. Beware, its kinda graphic.

I am sitting inside my makeshift aid station in a remote outpost.  Its a 20 foot Connex boxcar and one door is cracked slightly.  Even with an A/C I am still sweating pretty good.  I am thinking about home when suddenly I hear incoming.  I dive onto the floor and cover my head with my hands.  I can hear the “Karunk” getting louder as the mortars begin to land.  I don my body armor and helmet and wait.

The mortars continue to come in and I can hear small arms fire and the shouts of the men around me as they head for the HESCO barriers and begin to fire back.  Then the first one arrives.  He is still alive, but the lower half of his body is torn to shreds.  I barely have time to look as more wounded arrive.  They are coming in so fast all I can do is watch. The moans and screams of pain fill my ears.  I am hopping from one to the next, placing nothing more than tourniquets and checking for a pulse.  There is no time as the bodies begin to pile up.  Everyone is on the line defending the outpost against this onslaught.

Mortars are still landing all around my aid station and the CP building beside it.  The sand is drenched in blood and bits of my friends litter the ground.  I begin to mark foreheads with priority – 0,1,2,3.  More 0’s than 3’s.  I am overwhelmed and doing my best to keep them all alive until this comes to and end and I can get them out, but the more I patch the more keep coming.  Its an endless stream of bloodied and broken men.  The people bringing them in are tossing them into a pile faster than I can lay them out.  Dirt and mud streak my face and I can feel the unwelcome sticky warmth as it penetrates my clothes.

There is nothing I can do.  I can barely even keep tourniquets going.  As one person dies, I remove the tourniquet and apply it to someone still breathing.  One soldier looks up at me and whispers something inaudible.  I lean close and say “You’re gonna be alright.”  I dose him with my last morphine so he can die pain free.  I pray out loud to God to save me and let these men pass into His kingdom. 

The mortars keep coming.  Louder now.  All I hear is a deep ringing in my ears as the wounded keep coming.  The people running up are dumping babies and small children on my writhing pile of bodies.  I can’t do anything.  I am out of supplies and all I can do is watch as the mortars come in and the wounded scream, cry, and die horribly in puddles of blood and bits of meat.  I stand up and look down onto the carnage before me.

I wake up, heart beating and sweating.  That is my nightmare.  No more sleep tonight.