The blast was incredible. I heard nothing. I felt everything. I was looking at the observation point (OP) outside of Kandahar, about to drink my first cup of coffee just after daybreak in December of 2001 then there was a flash, and suddenly we were physically not there anymore. The shockwave was like being hit by a wave in the ocean. It took our breath away. We were only sixty meters from the impact point. No one could hear anything after the explosion.
My sergeant major was standing to my left outside the building in front of a door. When the blast occurred it blew him through the door and on the pile with the rest of us. To put it in context, that amount of explosives was approximately one quarter to one third of what was used in the Oklahoma City bombing.
There were people standing close enough to the explosion to get flash burns on their eyes and second-degree burns on their chest from the actual heat and flash of the explosion but were otherwise relatively un-injured. Yet people far away were literally cut in half. There were people well within the lethal circle that were not killed. When the OP was hit directly, one soldier was simply gone and another was blown forty feet and only had a few scratches. The disparity of who gets the worst injury and where they were in relation to the explosion repeated itself over and over again.
It defies what we would assume to be logical. We think all those that are inside the lethal circle should be dead or seriously injured but that’s not the case at all. It’s very diverse what happens to people.
What we don’t understand about explosions is related to what we don’t understand about life. There is a time and a place where each person is going to die. At that point they’ll be accountable for what they’ve done in this life.
Lord, lead us to the conclusion that we have just one life to live and that life will soon pass. May we live with the understanding that only what is done for you during our lives will be of lasting importance. Amen.
“Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27)