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General News    H3'ed 4/16/13

Jeremiah Goulka: Shell Shock Lite

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No big deal, I thought. It was well known that the insurgents' aim sucked. 

KaBOOM.

Even closer. I felt the compression in my chest. I couldn't believe that, just the previous day, I had been running the numbers to see whether it was worth extending my stay to get a bump in danger pay.

At least their aim did suck. The vastness of Camp Victory was so full of manmade lakes, dry marshes, and empty expanses of dirt, brush, and asphalt that the insurgents rarely hit anything. We were, however, close to one obvious target, the big palace that the U.S. military had colonized for its headquarters.

KaBOOM!

The trailer shook hard, and someone yelled, "Hit the deck!" I was already rolling. I dropped to the hard cold floor and slid under the bed. The guy from the top bunk squished in beside me, his feet in my face.

Officially scared now. Out in the distance, the weirdly thin, flat voice of the warning horn finally woke up: INCOMING! INCOMING! INCOMING!

And my brain was shrieking, too. What protection would these flimsy walls and mattresses provide against rockets and mortars? I should've run for a concrete bunker. I had missed my chance.

Someone had said that lying flat kept you safe from the blast angle, so I tried to mimic a pancake.

KABOOM!

Furniture-rattlingly close.

My adrenal glands started pumping faster, flooding my blood and " time slowed " I felt a sort of clarity. Not moral clarity or wisdom, but sensory clarity -- a readiness to act, to survive. So this was mortal fear. Not very nice to meet you.

KA-BOOOOOM!

They'd found us. It felt like the explosion had occurred right outside the door, like lightning striking the neighbors. Any closer and we'd be dead.

Somehow, we went even flatter. All I could do was lie there and hope that the next one wouldn't get us, hope that there weren't people out there right now with twisted metal driven into their flesh.

We lay there, waiting... waiting... and then... nothing.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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