Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29709755-20160912085610

Death is cold.

I felt it once. I was a turret gunner in a M-ATV that ran over a pressure plate and set off an old Soviet artillery round. Even if you don't get hit with the shrapnel the shockwave, the pressure, can crush your skull. You see gunners with their heads squeezed flat like tubes of toothpaste, their organs liquefied. I was lucky, my heart just stopped.

There was a feeling like you get on a swing set, where you're at the very top of the swing and for one moment you're just floating, and it seems like forever, and when it ends it was just an instant again. Falling, and blackness, and numbing, freezing cold.

I've seen it in other people too. Another IED, a complex ambush this time. Cinching down the tourniquets on the bloody stumps of my Marine's legs, cowering under a mud-brick wall while the rounds snapped overhead. He was delirious, gazing around with eyes bright from the loss of blood, crying out for his mother, asking when the Helo was coming. As time went on though, he quit speaking, and he just stared at me for a while, then he repeated the same words over and over:

“I'm cold. I'm so fucking cold.” 