It’s the middle of November and I’m trudging through three feet of snow, because much to my dismay, bodies don’t just bury themselves.

Whoever said war was hell was right. It’s hell on earth twenty four hours a day. The battered and bloodied soldiers come through the aid station screaming, crying, begging. Some for relief, some for their mamas, some for sweet death to take them out of this hole.

We do what we can before we load them into an ambulance for the journey to the hospital. Clutching their dog tags or pictures of their girl back home, loaded up with morphine to dull the pain.

They are the lucky ones, they have been rescued. We continue to slog through it all. It never ends and the bodies of the boys that didn’t make it are stacked up in the barracks, snow drifts blowing against the cracked foundation, wind whistling through the gaps in the wall singing a song they’ll never hear.