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short. I wasn't fast enough, the fire already reached into the car and all that could be done was watch as the terrified children and their mother huddled together and burned alive right in the middle of the cloverleaf. They were yelling at me in an undecipherable language, but the message was made clear. I viewed this scene until the heat got too intense to be that close, by this time the bodies were nothing more than charred pieces of carbon. A Navy Corpsmen was attending to the body of the father a few feet away from me. The man had an IV stuck in his arm and was unconscious, fully ignorant to what just happened. The only good fortune this guy received was that he did not have to view this spectacle of carnage.

In due course, the flames overtook the whole tanker, luckily filled with diesel fuel that is non-combustible in a low pressure environment, so there was no huge Hollywood like explosion to top off this series of events. The fire kept eating this almost perpetual source of petroleum until an Iraqi fire truck came to the scene. It seemed like several hours before it arrived and by then all the ammunition in the cab had exploded from the heat, so it was safe to approach the spoilage. Being human, I had to go see the aftermath, so I motioned for my loader to mount the weapon in my place, we were still in the middle of Fallujah after all. I got to the sight and was shocked to say the least. I expected nothing to be there but a skeleton of a car and a fuel tanker, but what I witnessed was another grim reality. Although the flames were extremely hot, they were not enough to completely set the bodies on fire. I saw several blackened bones in the front seat, where the woman was sitting, and in the back, two almost complete skeletons of the children. A sense of dismal veracity sank into my mind when I saw that the arms of the kids were over their heads, as if they were shielding their faces from the fire in a vain attempt of survival.
I see these scenes every once in a while to this day. I wake up in cold sweats after dreaming what I saw, I'll see flames in a simple fender bender and sometimes when I hear a child throw a tantrum in a grocery store, the language sounds like Arabic. I will never forget what I witnessed and the memory will always haunt me, particularly what I could have done different to save the lives of those three. It almost seemed like we were trained to think that Iraqis were a lower form of human than Americans, but what I came to realize is that all humans experience fear, whether it be arriving in a new country ready for war, being encircled in flames seconds from death, or even seeing a spider in the shower. Trepidation is not unique to one set group of people, but those who rise above it for the welfare of others, even if it means failure, are heroes. Those screams will stay with me until the end, but I see them in a different light now, they are not telling me that I am a failure, but they are telling me to never give up and one day I will get the chance to redeem myself and save a life, an act that didn't happen that beautiful, sunny day in August.

Learn more about this author, Steven Groetken.
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