A HALF EATEN APPLE by KATHI HARRIS

A HALF EATEN APPLE by Kathi Harris - Sept 7, 2010





I used to love apples, but I don't anymore. They remind me too much of an incident that occurred during my tour of duty in Iraq.

I was two days into my deployment when we went on patrol. We were sweeping for dissidents in a small village of perhaps five hundred people . We met with an ambush.

The fire fight was fierce and an air strike was finally called in. There must have been a miscalculation on the coordinates, or we were just too close to the target. We were right in the line of fire when the bombs dropped. Then everything seemed to happen at once.

I saw blinding sheets of yellow-white light and heard loud booms! Then I felt the searing heat from the exlposions. It seemed as if the entire landscape disappeared in that instant. But no, there were some buildings left and people too. I could see this through the thick curtain of fire and smoke.

People ran out of the buildings - human torches - men, women, children. The smell was overpowering. I didn't think I would ever again be able to eat meat. There were shots behind me and two of the human torches fell to the ground twitching. Then someone yelled, "what the hell you doing, let them burn! Don't help them!"

Then there were screams all around us. Screams from the torch people, screams and curses from our men who had been hurt because of their proximity to the target.

I looked at these dying and wounded men around me, the broken, burned, mutilated bodies. I wondered how these so thoroughly damaged warriors would be integrated back into the society when they got back to the States. I was despondent for the families of the dead, and could imagine the depth of their grief when those knocks came on their doors. War is not pretty I started to realize. War was not at all what I had expected.

We did what we could to save the lives of our men. We applied pressure bandages and tourniquets, we administered morphine. We saved the lives of the ones that we could, and tried to comfort the ones we couldn't if we were able to speak to them before they died. We lost seven of our men in the fighting that day.The medevac helicoptors came and went, taking their eviscerated, burnt, mutilated, ruined cargo with them.

I duck-walked, bent over, dodging intermittent bullets from enemy snipers as I headed towards the buildings that were miraculously still standing. I entered the first building and saw what was left of a group of six people. It was a bloody, gut-wrenching scene.

There was a man, a woman, two small children, perhaps five and six years old and two teens, perhaps thirteen and fourteen years old. The older of these teens was the only one still alive - amazing. He held a half eaten apple in his hand. His hand shook convulsively as I approached and his fingers loosened, releasing the apple which rolled to my feet.

His eyes were huge and followed me as I neared him. The whites of his eyes stood out starkly against his bloodied, blackened face. His breathing was shallow. He looked beseechingly up at me. Help me! That's what his eloquent eyes seemed to say to me. I reached towards him. "let him die!" the private at my elbow spat angrily.

"C'mon man, he's just a kid! " I started to argue. He pushed me roughly. " You don't know that he's not a part of this ambush. This is how they're fighting this war. The enemy, and the people, have the same face, they'll use their children, their mothers, even their grandmothers to get the job done. That way they can inflict the greatest amount of damage on us. So don't you be taken in because he's a kid, they're conniving that way."

I walked away and left him there. I looked back. His eyes followed me, still begging.

We continued our search through that building and the others. But I couldn't shake the image of that face and those eyes. This went on for days, and at nights I had nightmares about him. It was a crisis of conscience really. It was one thing for an air strike to kill civilians. I would shoot to kill someone, if my position or that of my comrades- at-arms were fired upon. But to see a child in such urgent need, and not even try to help, to look him in the eye and just walk away, that brought me up short. That shook the very foundations of my morality, my ethics.

For the rest of my time in Iraq. I continued to be tormented by the fact that I had not tried to save that desperately, hopeless, pleading kid. I wondered who was right, me or the private who had said those words of condemnation. I conceded that perhaps I would never know.

But even now, five years later, I am still haunted by that kid's eyes and the sight of a half eaten apple.

- copyrighted by Kathi Harris




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