Near Fallujah, Iraq, August 2004.

It was 120 degrees in the shade. And at high noon, there wasn’t much shade to go around.

But in the Graves trailer, it was at least cool 55 due to the leaky doors on the Wall of The Dead - the morgue cooler of chilled metal drawers for remains.

The tattoo on his left bicep said ‘Unit, Corps, God, Country’ above the USMC logo and below that Semper Fi- Always Faithful. That was Daniel Cho.
Or at least it was when he got inked so many months ago. He’d signed up to be a corpsman, hoping to continue on to medical school when this was all over.

Instead, after medic training, they’d made him a corpse -man.’Put him in Graves,’ said the Sergeant with typical military sense of humor.

And so they did.

‘Yo, Cho-man grab your med kit and lets git,’ Corporal Arden said kicking in the door,’We need you on the flight line in five for dustoff, slick six. Doc got hit and they need a replacement pronto.’

‘But Corporal, I’m in graves, I haven’t treated a live person in six months,’ Cho said, shrugging out of the green scrubs like a snake shedding skin while reaching for his medkit.

‘Don’t much matter Doc Cho. We’re pushing into a huge cemetery and it is one hell of a mess. All you gotta do is stabilize them.’

They sprinted across the tarmac toward an idling ‘hawk. Corporal Arden ran around the chopers nose to the far side and Cho ran up to the open door.

The blast hit him in the face full force and almost knocked him down. Cold and wet.

‘What the fu-’ he yelled, wiping wetness and bits of something off his face. He grabbed the door edge and the Crewchief grabbed his other arm and puled him aboard. Cho put on a headset. The floor was slippery wet.

‘You’re supposed to load-up on the other side, Corpsman!’ said the Chief, pointing at the ground crew Marine retreating with a high pressure hose.

‘Thirty seconds to dustoff,’ the pilot said in his other ear. He knew that voice from somewhere.

‘-because the ground crew washes out the blood and remains between trips with a hose. You should see yourself, Doc. All covered in blood and God only knows. You look like Death Himself.’

‘I hear we’re flying into Hell, Chief,’ Cho strapped in as the medevac leapt into the air and banked right. ‘Fallujah’s got the oldest cemetery in Iraq, if not the world. Corpses on corpses, going down a few thousand years. If we’re landing on Deaths doorstep, I want to look the part.’