It was the last evening of my time in Norway. I had decided to make it easy on myself and rent a flat instead of living out of a hotel for two weeks. I had made it three quarters of the way through my relatively uneventful third deployment to the middle east and was allotted 14 days of leave to get a break from combat. At that point in my holiday from Hell, I was already past the point of appreciating a hot shower and on my way to silently complaining about a poor choice of a glass wine for dinner.
The last time I left combat for anywhere in Europe I was being transported by military aircraft to the Army Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. I was unconscious and only able to breathe thanks to a nice young private who wasn’t old enough to have a celebratory beer with me afterward, but was old enough to squeeze an inflatable pouch (and, coincidentally, my makeshift lung) every few seconds to keep me alive. The injuries I sustained were severe enough to warrant spending many thousands of dollars to immediately evacuate me out of country, but had not endangered any of my limbs or my eyesight. The last thing I remember before the explosion is taking off my helmet to get a brief respite from the smothering heat and slug back some water. The next thing I can recall is waking up to the sounds of two German health professionals discussing the sutures that I later found out were more or less the only thing holding my guts in my abdomen. To put it plainly, I had been blown the fuck up.