At about 7:30, the Taliban set off a car bomb in the local national parking lot right outside the base. Some of you may have seen something about it on the news, it briefly made the headline stories on Yahoo and Google (my main sources of news over here). Until the news went back to the Afghan civilians killed by the US airstrike. The initial reports said 7 local nationals killed in the explosion and 21 injured. A couple US soldiers were slightly injured at the front gate when they were knocked over by the concussion from the blast.
The paving contractor's employees were just arriving to go to work on base when the explosion occurred. One of their employees was killed in the blast and 16 others were injured, two severely. The employee that was killed was an older gentlemen, and like all of the contractors, a very nice person, always waved or shook my hand when I was on the job site. I went to the hospital, on base, yesterday morning to check on those that were injured. I found the paving foreman and he had many cuts and bruises, but in good shape, considering he just survived a car bomb. He wanted to find his workers, so I walked with him around the hospital trying to find them. It was pretty hectic, but we got a list of names of those the hospital was able to identify. He helped us by identifying a couple of the patients that had no form of identification. Many of the injured were sent home yesterday, but four of the paving employees were in over night, two will be in the hospital for weeks.
This morning the paving contractor's manager called me asking me to help locate the cook. He is a younger guy (21) and his mother was at the office trying to find him. She had not heard from him and he had not come home last night. I told him there were still a couple patients that were not identified at the hospital and that I would go check. I checked and this morning they had names for all the patients. I told him that, but he said the family still wanted to come out to the base to check.
This afternoon, I signed the cook's brother onto the base and took him to the hospital. We checked and they told us there were no patients by his name. We asked if he could just walk through the ward and look at the patients. When we walked in, I could tell by the look on the brother's face that the first patient we came to was his brother. The hospital had the wrong name on his chart. He had been unconcious since coming in and someone told them the wrong name. He had been through surgery today, he had a piece of shrapnel that had punctured his heart sack, he was lucky (and not so lucky). It looks like he will be OK, but will be spending some time in the hospital. He opened his eyes when he heard his brother and was able to shake his head when his brother asked him questions.
This was a very good ending to a dismal day for me. I decided to post this story because the locals that work on the base are putting their life on the line and there is not much news at home about the work of the Taliban and the support we get from the locals. Also, not much is said about the work the US military hospitals do to save the lives of Afghani's injured, both the enemy and innocent civilians. But, we do hear plenty about the civilian casualties "caused" by the US military. I'm sure we have saved more lives than we have taken.
Here are some pictures, taken today, of the local national parking lot.
I think the pile of wood is the shack for the parking lot attendant.
The next posting will back to my usual style, at least I hope there won't be more like this to write about.
That was pretty close! I hope you don't have to experience that again.
ReplyDeleteI was sitting in my CH-47 getting ready for a mission when that blast went off
ReplyDelete