Posted on 04/20/2016 7:54:48 AM PDT by huldah1776
This was originally written for Deadspin's Blood Week, but shit happens and we're running it now.
A 20-pound jug of homemade explosives will take off one or both legs somewhere between the knee and hip, perhaps breaking the pelvis and shattering vertebrae as the shockwave travels up through the skeleton. After our first Marine was wounded this way—let's call him Patient Zero—he was stabilized by his squad's hospital corpsman and flown to the trauma center, a British base that abuts Camp Leatherneck, the hub for Marine operations in southwest Afghanistan. At the time I was running a forward combat aid station as a general medical officer to a Marine Corps infantry battalion. Standard protocol is to gather the casualty's disembodied limbs and tissue as best you can and place the material aboard the medevac helicopter with him so it can be destroyed in a dignified manner. But explosions have a way of defying protocol, as I learned later that day when Zero's cardboard box arrived at my aid station. The plan was to send the box to the crematorium at Camp Bastion, but I first had to know if the contents had been violated in transit. I opened it. Inside was Zero's disembodied lower leg retrieved—after he had been choppered away—from the roof of a house near the blast. There was a boot like mine and a sock like mine and an ankle like mine. That all made sense. But what followed from there was all wrong….
(Excerpt) Read more at deadspin.com ...
Corps is now training "tailored to the geographic area" and with 3D printing IEDs also taken into account.
see Marine Corps Times
The Marines have a new plan to combat terrorists' IEDs
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/military/2016/04/19/marines-have-new-plan-help-combat-terrorists-ieds/82948202/
Matthew L. Schehl, Marine Corps Times 6:30 p.m. EDT April 19, 2016
sorry about the paragraphs, preview didn’t pop up.
Why is it that Man seems to be at his best only when he's at his worst?
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