Free Liam's List by Haleigh Lovell Page B

blinked just when the bomb
     detonated.
    The air shook, the ground erupted beneath me,
     and I was thrown off the tank.
    Pitched forward by the blast, I was suspended
     in the air for a fleeting moment before I landed with a loud thud.
     My chest slammed hard against the earth, cracking my SAPI plate,
     and pain exploded through my ribcage on impact.
    The right side of my face smacked onto the
     ground, snapping my head to the side.
    Spots burst before my eyes and pain shot
     through my brow, clouding my vision.
    Through blurred eyes, I saw flashes of fire.
     A dry wall of dust.
    Heat boiled under my skin and I began
     coughing up blackish-brown mucous.
    I heard shouting. Men yelling. Orders being
     screamed. Boots on the ground.
    The rapid-fire sounds of enemy guns and the
     concussion of grenades.
    A piercing ringing in my ear. Sharp cries
     filling the air.
    More shots rang out. Bullets whizzed by
     me.
    Another explosion. The blast was so loud it
     shot down my sternum, and behind my eyelids, the world went searing
     bright.
    I tried to get to my feet, but a sharp pain
     sliced through my knee. My head felt like it had split apart and
     then my vision went dark.

Chapter Nine
     
     
    Liam
     
     
     
     
    In the days that followed, I learned more
     about what had happened. The bomb that was strapped onto the Iraqi
     woman was powerful enough to destroy a Humvee, but not a tank.
     Still, my tank had felt the brunt of the explosion. The blast
     lifted it off its treads momentarily and pitched it forward.
    After that bomb went off, a group of
     insurgents had mounted an attack on our convoy, firing AK-47s and
     RPGs from a rooftop. Then they detonated another explosive, one
     that was powerful enough to obliterate a Bradley.
    Though my tank had withstood the blast, two
     other tanks did not. Five men from my battalion had been killed,
     along with the suicide bomber and the little girl who was holding
     her hand.
    The blast that had catapulted me into the air
     left me with a wounded arm, mild TBI (traumatic brain injury),
     ruptured eardrums, and a knee injury. Thankfully, my Kevlar
     protective plate had done its job. My ribs, though badly bruised,
     were not broken.
    But my friends, Brian Merrick and Jim Shelby,
     did not fare so well.
    The blast peppered Merrick’s legs with
     red-hot fragments. Shelby had serious head injuries. Both men
     suffered severe nerve damage and fractured bones. After they’d been
     stabilized, they were airlifted to Germany to undergo further
     surgery.
    Compared to Merrick and Shelby, I had escaped
     with relatively minor injuries and was Medevac’d to the
     Intermediate Care Unit at FOB Anaconda.
    While I recovered, I had plenty of time to
     reflect. I could have been killed.
    And I didn’t understand why I hadn’t
     been.
    Part of me wished I wasn’t alive.
    Part of me wished I had died in the
     blast.
    While my surface wounds healed, the other
     wounds inside me festered and deepened. I sat alone in the darkened
     recovery room and stewed until dawn, replaying in my mind June
     eighteenth. They day I had ended the lives of that innocent Iraqi
     family.
    I didn’t know where they had come from, I
     didn’t know their names, and I likely never would. I only knew
     because of me, they were dead.
    And because of me, five men in my unit were
     dead.
    I should have known the Iraqi woman was a
     suicide bomber. She was completely out of place in that ghost town,
     and she had no reason to be there, no reason to be wandering down
     that dirt road. There were no villages, no towns in sight for
     miles.
    I was the first to spot her, and I should
     have been the one who stopped her.
    Now I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to. Every
     time I closed my eyes, panic clawed at me, threatening to fill my
     head with bloody images. I saw children dressed in blood, babies
     dressed in blood, soldiers dressed in blood, women dressed in
     blood. I felt stained.
    Every night I saw ghosts. Every night I