The Good Soldiers by Finkel David

Author:Finkel, David [Finkel, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-02-18T18:30:00+00:00

Inside:

A soldier was howling. He’d been the driver. Part of the EFP had gone under the Humvee and sent shrapnel up through the floorboards, breaking the bones in one of his feet and slicing off the heel of the other. As Kauzlarich made his way through the aid station, Brent Cummings, who’d also come, went to the soldier, took hold of his hand, and told him he would be all right. “How’s Reeves?” the soldier said, and when Cummings didn’t answer, he asked again. “Tell me how he’s doing.”

“Just worry about yourself right now,” Cummings said.

Joshua Reeves, a twenty-six-year-old specialist, was the one at the end of the blood trail, and he was who Kauzlarich went to. He’d been in the right front seat when the EFP exploded, much of which had gone through his door. He had arrived at the aid station unconscious and without a pulse, and doctors were just beginning to work on him. He wasn’t breathing, his eyes weren’t moving, his left foot was gone, his back side was ripped open, his face had turned gray, his stomach was filling with blood, and he was naked, with the exception of one bloodied sock—and as if all that weren’t enough with which to consider Joshua Reeves in these failing moments of his life, now came word from some of the soldiers gathered in the lobby that he’d begun this day with a message from his wife that she had just given birth to their first child.

“Jesus,” Kauzlarich said upon hearing this, his eyes filling with tears as he watched another soldier dying in front of him.

“Let me know when it’s three minutes,” the doctor overseeing everything that was going on called out loudly, so her voice could be heard over the rumble of some machinery. The room smelled dizzily of blood and ammonia. There must have been ten people around Reeves. Someone was holding an oxygen mask over his face. Someone was stabbing him with a dose of Adrenalin called epinephrine. Someone, maybe a medic, was pushing up and down on his chest so violently it seemed every one of his ribs must be breaking. “You need to go harder and faster,” the doctor in charge told him. The medic began pushing so hard that pieces of Reeves’s shredded leg began dropping to the floor, and Kauzlarich continued to watch in silence, as did Cummings and Michael McCoy and the chaplain, all of them in a row.

“It’s been two minutes,” someone called out.

“Okay, check for a pulse, please.”

The CPR stopped.

“No pulse.”

The CPR resumed.

More of Reeves dropped to the floor.

In went a second dose of epinephrine.

“Someone feel for a pulse in his neck.”

“Three minutes.”

“Continue CPR, please.”

In went a third dose of epinephrine as someone who was trying to clean up what had been falling accidentally kicked something small and hard, which skidded across the floor until it came to a stop next to McCoy.

“That’s a toe,” he said quietly.

He was fighting back tears now. So was Cummings. So was Kauzla-rich.

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