Ex-Soldiers Share Horrifying Experiences - AskReddit

the feeling of not feeling anything after killing someone is crazy it's like you're stone-cold no emotion warning this content may be upsetting or disturbing to some audiences retired soldiers on reddit what was something that you saw or experienced that you never shared with anyone my very first patient in Afghanistan was a 10 month old girl the father brought her to our gate asking for help we checked her out and she is literally missing all of the skin from shoulder blade to waist on her back left side burned to the bone dad tells that she tripped and got cut up by gravel clearly she is burned I can smell it still today I can remember the screech she made the charred skin I had to remove and that a-hole just sat in the corner nothing I can do to right the situation other than do what I can for her that single moment definitely set the tempo for the following nine months not a retired soldier but a naval hospital corpsman with a Marine unit who deployed to sang-hee Feli Afghanistan in 2012 I've seen a lot of casualties in my short time in the Navy but no amount of love tissue training could prepare me for my first no crap trauma patient it wasn't even one of my Marines who got hit I was chilling at the battalion aid station with a group of other corpsman getting our crap together and talking about who would survive a zombie apocalypse when we got a call that we had a patient coming in this was about one week into the deployment we had just gotten to the Forward Operating Base and the majority of us were pushing out to patrol bases the next few days I was one of the most senior corpsman there HM 3/4 so I was in charge of leading the team in treating this patient we had a PA there but he was more interested in sleeping and trusted our medical knowledge to be able to treat this patient properly when the Vic came in I ran outside to get a good look at the patient before he came in and I was not expecting what I saw he was an older gentleman probably around 70 hard to tell and he had stepped on an improvised explosive device and had bilateral above the knee amputations tourniquets had been applied and bleeding controlled by the time he got into the basic allowance for subsistence my team attached monitors applies secondary tourniquets and got IV access while I secured the airway after what seemed like seconds we had finished our first and second assessment and we're waiting in the bird when the pro pack stopped reading any vitals I remember looking down at the man and seeing that there wasn't any life in his eyes we attempted CPR for a few cycles but without blood products it was useless I called it we were removing all of the interventions we had done when we rolled him over and I noticed a small incision below his buttock and above where the Turner K was applied there was a small slice where some shrapnel had flown up and severed his femoral this was my team I was supposed to lead and I killed this patient because I couldn't get level-headed enough to remember the simple things I learned in CTM /t CCC I have had many trauma patients since that day but this one sticks to me the most I have stumbled upon shacks full of dead and dying people had friends get shot and blown up but my first casualty haunts me every night I have since used this particular patient his learning mechanism now that I am a seasoned instructor of T CCC so that hopefully my students don't make the same mistake I served in the military here in Finland as required by law and there was this guy who changed smoked a lot and we called him score Sten Swedish for chimney his father had killed his mom and then hung himself while score stan was young score stan was always depressed but he got along and we were good friends then five years after we got out I get a message from an army friend who says that score Stinnett hung himself because his girlfriend had left him for another guy I've accepted that there was nothing I could have done but it still haunts me sometimes when I go out for a smoke I still remember how he would ask me for a cigarette because he had misplaced his own so a light a cigarette for him and placed it on the side of the ashtray that's my way to remember him I lived in a safe house in the Kabul Green Zone a couple of years ago working on ice fhq but moving throughout Kabul every day the street from my compound to ISIF was filled with pedestrian traffic and these kids who would try to sell foreigners whatever trinkets they could I got to know them since I was there every day I got them closed for winter random snacks from the chow hall and we played Angry Birds together they spoke with me brought me scarves I asked for and little gifts every once in a while they also kept the other peddlers away one day a kid 12 - 14 years old from elsewhere came to the area with a bomb in his backpack he intended to kill foreigners moving in the area or target one of the compounds the local kids noticed him and apparently told him to get lost and he detonated his bomb four kids were killed along with the bomber and a couple of adults a dozen or so injured maybe I knew each one of the kids kushi a little girl who was learning to skate Nawab who in my view of things look to have a hard crush on one of the other girls who was killed another boy had a brother a year or so older who looked just like him I saw the one killed and saw the other a week later trying to sell things again it freaked me out I was at the site of the bombing not 30 minutes before I felt it while in size F seeing the bodies after was a mistake I didn't need to be there I walked by the side every day until I left that base the night of the attack I could still smell blood and the damn smell of wet cobble dust mixed together every day I went by I could see their bodies and the surrounding gore in my head I have seen the aftermath of beads in Iraq where hundreds were killed but something about knowing those faces so well kids that would have done well if not born into such a backwards crap hole it didn't help that right after my ex told me I deserve to see those things since I chose to be there again I haven't told anyone this entire story as it isn't something I'm comfortable talking to people about face to face but I feel it's probably something people should know and think about at least I was deployed to a place called the triangle of death in Iraq in a little town called yeah Sofia we had been there for six months with a lot of intense fighting and were set to rotate to southern Iraq in a much less active spot we were set to be replaced by the 502nd I are part of the 101st airborne they had been a large part of the initial invasion of Iraq against Saddam's forces but this was 2005 and was a much much different war when you transition units in the military there is a period where you integrate front seat / back seat rides where you show they incoming unit your current operations I happened to be at an outpost by one of two remaining bridges across the Euphrates River when this started we tried to caution them show them the ropes but they didn't want to listen to any of us they kept saying we have Destinee along with other hyper-aggressive statements they didn't even seem to see the Iraqis as human beings they were just like we're gonna have this place up in etham rape kill pillage and burn whooa across the street from this particular outpost was an Iraqi guy and his family who owned the small farm around outpost they had been really good to us pointing out IEDs on roads as well as running and grabbing us food and supplies when we couldn't get any for example our supply truck was destroyed by an IED one time so all we had were MREs to eat we talked to the farmer and gave him a shopping list and money and he bought us food at the local marketplace he was a great guy and did stuff like that for us all the time we took the 502nd guys on a foot patrol and the farmer came out of his house greeting us as he usually did making his way towards us we waved and started talking to him when he went to shake the hand of one of the 502nd privates the private just hauled off and punched him in the mouth shouting offense and n-word our platoon sergeant restrained him and sent him back to the outpost with my sergeant tonight to escort him while he tried to placate the farmer we took that private to a sergeant who congratulated him when our platoon sergeant got back he tore them a new one but they didn't seem to care I wasn't privy to the conversation between my platoon sergeant and his but it didn't seem to have any impact either their attitude persisted until we finally left to our new location turns out these same people were these guys as the momma deer rape and killings they murdered that farmers family a few months after we left and raped his daughter as if this wasn't enough a few months prior to this I had been injured when my truck rolled over during a firefight I was the gunner maybe 200 meters from where the killings took place I had to be medevac to Baghdad where I recovered for a few weeks when the truck rolled over I lost my wallet and the dirt out there in what we called Iraqi moondust which is a powdery sole type soil you find all over flash-forward to a week or two after the killings took place I receive a package from Sergeant green it's my wallet mailed March 12 2006 the same day as the killings I recognize it's highly unlikely it happened just like this but I can help but wonder if they found my wallet on their way to commit the murders or even if they mailed it just before it happened I'm not a religious person I'm an atheist but I like to think that it was perhaps the universe's way of trying to remind them of the front seat back seat period with our unit where we had a simple message for them treat people with respect and like human beings it is all they want I still have the wallet I've had it since high school old Calvin Klein leather wallet my sister gave me it reminds me of the farmer and his family I can't help but wonder if maybe we had been more focused on getting our message across to that 500 second group if this could have been avoided maybe we were in too much of a hurry to leave to safer territory that we neglected something that might have made a difference we even had the option to volunteer to stay in yeah Sofia with the 502nd if we wanted but I declined not out of fear of combat as I was comfortably numb to it at that point but because I just wanted to go relax and was homesick it makes me think that I could have made a difference but didn't because of something simplistically selfish it's probably silly to think that and perhaps a bit cliche but it is what I think the feeling of not feeling anything after killing someone is crazy it's not like you're stone cold no emotion but think of it as you're a waiter at a restaurant and you serve your customers you don't think anything of it when it's happening you just do and carry on it doesn't hit you until later and you're like mother effer I just did that the emotion of everything is so bland when it happens but so raw when you take a step back whenever you have a buddy that gets killed yeah it's scary but it doesn't hit you until later every moment in that person's life had led up to that moment it's concluded over done every first kiss every Friday night football game every person that he ever had any contact or a relationship with everything that he ever said every plan that he ever had her memory they had created came to a conclusion in a single moment that ended their entire existence I took part in 78 separate attacks from hostile forces around Mosul in 2005 lots of bad crap but the one thing I near share is that one time I was in the turret of an M 1114 hmm WV behind a m 2.50 machine gun doing convoy security and I looked in a vehicle as we cruised by and there was a little girl probably eight who had a healed up gunshot wound to the face she was missing an eye she was smiling broadly at me and waved at me and fatica Lee I just waved back that little girl had the weight of the world on her shoulders and was smiling I've never had a bad day since there was also a kid that was cut deep to where his thumb was barely hanging on to his hand I was in the turret again the day and the kid ran alongside the truck making a rapping motion with his hand I tried to get my first-aid pouch open so I could throw him my sterile bandage to wrap up his hand but the old button vietnam-era piece of crap wouldn't come on snapped the little dude ran next to us for about a minute while I effed with it finally I just slipped the sliced clips tugged it off my vest and tossed the whole thing to him he was smiling the whole time too and was very happy for the packet it's like half man we really effed crap up over there why couldn't we have done more really good stuff instead of escorting commander douchebag in the whole F&P our team to a school just so they could get some effing photo ops with the poor kids to put in the newspaper back home the thing that will stick with me forever is this back in 2010 northwest of san gan Afghanistan I was the corpsman for my group of four Marines we specialized in JTACs guys who call an aircraft and were supporting the Georgian army and creating a new patrol base we get to the area where the base is going to be build sand walls for the win and camp out in our trucks until the bulldozers finish building the walls and filling up Hesco barriers around the second day near noon we hear an explosion and see in the distance a large smoke cloud we radio to see if there were any friendly forces near that area but no coalition forces were near us we then mount up to go check it out and as we near the site we see two adult figures running around a van that hit an improvised explosive device as we pull up there as a six passenger Afghan van that looks like it hit an improvised explosive device this van was demolished charred and the engine was on fire as we dismount the to make adults run to us this freaked us out cuz they might be insurgents but our interpreter was there and told us that they were brothers asking for help because one of the brothers had four daughters in the van with them when they hit the improvised explosive device we rushed to the van and there is still smoke we're but we start pulling on the rear driver door and I can hear one of the daughters still screaming inside as we pry the door open we look inside and I will never forget what I saw inside was all charred smoke was still coming out of the van and in the seats was what remained of the four daughters three of the daughters were torn apart by the explosion with limbs and body parts everywhere the fourth was still holding one of her sister's amputated hand while her other hand was pressed on her side the blast had amputated her lower left leg going up to her pelvis she was trying to scream but she was already losing too much blood making her lose consciousness we pulled her out and I got to work trying to stop her from bleeding out but I could only keep her alive for fifteen more minutes the father and uncle held her hand as she never woke up from losing consciousness me and my Marines started collecting the body parts of the other daughters so the father and brother could bury their remains their ages were four four five and six F Afghanistan thanks for listening to radio TTS this was a very tough episode to make especially the last story got to me it shows how cruel war can be please let me know if you want me to continue to include such stories as they are very brutal and dark find the original post in the video description below and check the song linked in the center box

Channel: Radio TTS

Views: 86,636

Rating: 4.9440331 out of 5

Keywords: askreddit, ask reddit, reddit, reddit best, reddit stories, reddit story, reddit top post, reddit stories 2019, reddit comments, best of reddit, reddit creepy, reddit cringe, Military Veteran Stories, soldiers of reddit, soldiers story, War stories, r/askreddit soldiers, askreddit soldiers, reddit stories soldiers, reddit war stories, reddit war veterans, askreddit war

Id: oj-WQs2efT4

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019