Collateral damage has a face

 We were just outside the NATO camp last week when a local family came up to us and asked us for help getting medical care from the hospital within the camp.  We honestly have no contacts with that hospital, so there was nothing we could do.  The woman showed my wife her bandaged arm, and said she had been shot during a joint-military operation 5 nights ago.  The woman appeared about 20 years old and had a 3-year-old child beside her, and the man must have been at least 60 years old.  We understood them when they spoke in the language we know, but they would also drift into their village dialect that we don’t understand.  What we did understand, from looking at their eyes, was that they were exhausted, scared, and just plain sad that they were going through this.  The woman had been wounded in her home village, 2 districts away.  Since she was wounded by soldiers, she was entitled to medical care at one of the army camps. 

I hate war.  The longer I am here, the more I hate it.  I hate what it does to humans. 

I hate when life is reduced to a tolerable proportion of loss, in the achievement of a stated mission.  I hate that people like this 20-year-old woman are nothing more than a statistic.  Where was she supposed to go, when soldiers descended on her house in the middle of the night?  How is she to know who the “good guys” are, when they storm into her house and she is accidently shot?  How should she feel when she has to accept medical care from the very men that shot her, even though it brings great social shame on her to be touched by these strangers.  They tell her to come and get follow-up medical care at the army camp.  Is she supposed to be relieved by that?  Now she has to choose: does she risk infection in the wound if it goes untreated, or does she risk her family’s safety traveling a full day, outside of her tribe’s land, to reach the army camp?  If she can reach the camp, does she really want to face the foreign soldiers again, remembering their faces when they burst through the door of her house?  Would her family even let her get this medical care at the camp, knowing that the insurgents are hunting and killing anyone that associates with the army? 

Next time you hear about civilian casualties in this country, think of this girl, and think of the amount of courage it takes for any of the common, neutral people of this country to just live here.