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1. Organ failure due to dehydration
Marines don't often take it serious, not as serious as the Navy does. Sailors know it deep inside, some kind of generational memory: drowning and dehydration. The sea rises up and catches you, or the sea withdraws its favor and leaves you becalmed for days on end, begging for rain. Tim Bryan doesn't sail and he doesn't read shlocky maritime adventure novels and he really doesn't care for old fishermen's tales. But he doesn't fuck around with water.
Their prisoners are dehydrated, every one of them. Hard not to be, walking under the midday sun, malnourished in the first place. All of them smoke. Most of them have had nothing but liquid courage all day, and that's the wrong kind of liquid.
Tim moves among them, checking their distal pulses. "Stiney, can you get me more water from the humvee?" There's none of them prostrated yet, but that's a matter of time. They drink every drop they get, even if they puke half of it up immediately. Command seems unclear on the idea that even the most fanatical loyalist doesn't walk 30 klicks across the desert just to make sure the deserters are really deserters. You could shoot 'em after a half-mile. Fanatical loyalists don't give a shit, and that's the difference between them and the US Armed Forces.
Or that ought to be the difference. Tim has his hand on a sweaty forehead, calculating the moisture loss in this heat (probably a liter an hour, including respiration), and behind him he hears Godfather order the prisoners abandoned. Batallion commander, company commander, platoon commander: all three of them. Even Fick doesn't say no.
So the Geneva Conventions are just going to be, you know, fucking guidelines in this war, applied only if it's convenient. Stinetorf brings the whole flat of water bottles, and Tim hands them out, one per prisoner. It is literally the least he can do. They're exhausted, sore, hungry, and they don't seem fucking surprised. They should expect better out of the Marine Corps, better than the dictator they're fleeing, and then the Corps finds a new bottom limit without even trying.
They turn their prisoners out into the desert. If they aren't shot within the hour, they'll likely collapse some time tomorrow, and die in a day or two. Command is fine with that: they're only Iraqis after all. That night, in the desert cold, in their graves side by side, Stiney says, "I don't like it," and Tim doesn't like it either. They've been in the war one whole day.
2. Bronchial edema, with elevated CO-Hb levels contributing
They don't see a lot of fire up close. Even in the desert, incendiaries are uncalled-for, especially the kind of incendiaries modern armed forces carry with them. When there isn't a lot of water, starting a fire is a fucking bad idea. When there are civilians just trying to get out of the goddamn way, fire is a fucking bad idea.
It's not clear why the company is slow-rolling this particular stretch of highway. It looks like all the others, and being the rearguard of the platoon means Tim's victor in particular doesn't have a lot of answers. All he knows is that people don't burn to ash like that, still in their seats in their ruined minibus, without the help of some serious ordnance. Even an ordinary car fire couldn't do it. Humans aren't pine needles or cardboard: they're moist tissues and nerves and skin that blisters to try to protect its inner layers. Humans fight and cower. Humans try to crawl away. They don't sit still and burn.
Somebody mistook them for soldiers, although what kind of soldiers drive around in a goddamn minibus. Somebody thought they were a legit target, and hey, once you drop your ordnance, you don't want to know any more whether they're a legit target.
If the fire was fast and toxic, they asphyxiated on the smoke or had their windpipes scorched shut: a minute, maybe 90 seconds, before they passed out from hypoxia and were free of the pain. They barely had time to reach for the windows. There's no sign they turned on each other or fought over the last gasp of cool air, although there are a few with their arms up, hands in fists. They look like extra drivers in the back of the bus. For the tendons to seize up like that, the fire kept on burning, unchecked, for a good while. Long enough to cook the tendons till they shrank and bent all the joints.
To even tell whether they were men or women is no longer possible, not from a moving vehicle, not while they drive on by. These bodies at least are definitely dead. Even if Command would let them pull over and check for survivors: there aren't any survivors here.
3. Arterial blood loss
The girl doesn't have any legs below mid-thigh. There isn't another mark on her, just the basic fact that the bottom half of her is missing. She's a fresh corpse, still flesh-colored, not yet drained gray though the pavement underneath her is vivid red. She'll bloat, once the heat of midday kicks in. The entire batallion drives past her, in neat platoons of five victors apiece.
Tim Bryan rides past her, watching from the rear passenger seat to make sure her chest is still. She doesn't move, not even a little bit. There isn't any breeze. It's not clear how she got where she is: she's pretty far from the nearest burned-out vehicle. It seems unlikely a single blast could have thrown her a full ten yards, not without blowing a crater in the road as well, and tearing her to pieces. Tim rides past her and thinks: something spun away from the car at top speed. A piston, a brake disc, a fragment of the hood. Something small spun away when the car exploded, small enough to whip out ten yards and slice a pair of legs clean off. At that speed, it doesn't have to be sharp.
The men in the victor don't ask, don't talk about it at all. So Tim doesn't have to tell them that getting your legs lopped off like that doesn't kill you instantly. She dropped, probably got gravel in the palms of her hands, and had time to moan a few times before the femoral arteries emptied her out and she lost consciousness. She bled to death on the side of the road, maybe for twenty minutes or more, and if someone had been there to administer a pair of tourniquets, she might have lived.
Espera comes and bugs him, a couple days later, in case the kit on Tim's back includes downers. Because yeah, sure, they leave mind-altering, addictive substances within reach of addled Marines, that's a glorious plan. Lilley's wound too tight to sleep? Too goddamn bad. Tim's a Corpsman, not a psychiatrist.
4. Hypovolemic shock
You get zipped with a .556, it hurts, of course. It's a hot metal jacket and a slug with enough mass to tumble once it's inside your body, tearing up the soft parts while it bounces around. You get zipped with a .556, you might not die, if you get adequate medical attention quickly enough, and if the guy shooting you can't aim for shit.
A ten-year-old boy gets zipped with a .556, he'll scream if he can draw breath. If he can't, because his diaphragm is perforated or partially paralyzed or just hurts too goddamn badly to let the lungs expand properly, he'll lie there panting through the pain, his body determined to keep going as long as possible. His eyes will glaze over in agony and the blood in his abdomen will pool near his spine and he'll slowly go into shock while his mother screams on his behalf.
Tim can do nothing for him but recognize the signs and seek better help. One two three four, from right hip to left ribcage, right in a row. There are only two exit wounds. The holes are swollen, histamine responses to trauma, and all it's doing is keeping the blood inside. That ten-year-old body fights to live, using every tool in its kit, and if they were within shouting distance of Shock Trauma, he might make it. Maybe with only half his intestines and a permanently warped pelvis. The kid doesn't even cry out when they lift him up on a stretcher, though the boneshards kicking around in his flank are surely adding to the blood loss.
Tim yells at everybody, because they all goddamn well know better, but he yells the most at Colbert, because Colbert fucking prides himself on knowing better. It hurts his little feelings? Good. Doesn't hurt as much as a bullet does. Doesn't hurt as much as being slow-walked across a camp of indifferent Marines, losing time and blood in equal measure, because grown men don't give enough of a shit about saving a child's life.
They can't save him, and Tim knows it. But he can goddamn well shame Godfather into pretending that's not true, and sending him off south to better help. Because Marines may not have any morals, but they've got their fucking pride.
5. Blast overpressure
It's on batallion tac less than a minute before splashdown. Fick jerks like he's been slapped, mouth open, and all the men that can see him can guess the radio's told him something bad. Tim is up and running without waiting to find out what. He's overtaken by an F-18 scream in the sky and it's not a mystery any more.
The ground shakes under their feet. Fick stumbles and throws a hand out, that furious surprise still on his face, and Tim dashes right past him without asking permission. Fick's the one who sent his men off to scope out a tiny village and put them unknowing in danger-close range of Godfather's ego.
The dust is high in the air and thick in Tim's throat and there's the victor, Corporal Person sprawled beside it cursing and covered in peanut butter. The rest are on their bellies on the berm beyond, asses in a row, the men still with their field glasses up as if they don't believe their own eyes and aching eardrums. Tim skids to a stop and sits on the back of Colbert's knee and recognizes how close they are to the destroyed village. 400 meters, if they're lucky. That F-18 could have blown them to kingdom come as easy as mis-timing bomb release by a microsecond.
Hasser and Garza offer faint justifications, still staring at the clouds of dust in the sky. In front of them, rocks or cobbles or some damn pieces of house lie scattered like dice on a board. Tim can't see any body parts: they don't have the mass to fly this far. None of them, not even Colbert, suggests going to check for survivors. They watched it land. They don't have to understand the mechanics of high explosives on flesh to know that nobody survived that: crushed, or ripped apart, or their insides shaken to pudding from the shockwave alone. Espera glares around him and doesn't say how many people he observed before splashdown.
It's not ever clear whether Fick mentions up the chain of command, Hey, what the fuck are you doing. He does it often enough that they've stopped listening. His voice drips disgust as he keys the radio and summons them back to base. He's not cynical enough to wish his own men dead to teach Godfather a lesson, which is probably why Godfather is never going to learn that lesson.
1. Butterscotch
Baghdad is a fucking enormous city, four times the population of Chicago, and the only parts of it Tim spends any time in are the miserable parts. Mud-and-cinderblock shacks with tin roofs, animals dead in the street, not even pirated electricity to keep everyone's tempers cool. Tim sets up a clinic in the only halfway green open space he's seen in the whole slum, some kind of plaza with scraggly fruit trees for shade. The mothers line up with their children before he's even pulled out his kit. They've been waiting for him or someone like him, maybe for days. Maybe since before the war even started.
Ten of the first 15 kids have dysentery, and no wonder: the public tap is paltry, shit brown, and stinks. Espera paces by and mentions that some of the women are gathering water from open rivers of sewage to take home and boil. Their kids are stunted, underweight, a few of the poorest malnourished.
Stiney makes an okay assistant, even though he got pressed into it by luck of where he happened to be positioned in the victor. He follows Tim's orders and goes and fetches rehydration kits, water, extra disinfectant for all the crusty sores and infected burns Tim is cleaning up. They might use up all their supplies in this single clinic, and need resupply before tomorrow. It can get to be automatic, so you stop thinking about it: just one burn at a time, you don't realize that people are trying to cook their dinners over open fires, and have no idea how to do it safely. Even the poor weren't this poor, till the Americans came and bombed the city infrastructure to shit. Tim puts his head down and changes his gloves and inspects the next weeping blister.
When the shouting breaks out, Tim isn't even surprised. Frustrated young guys fucking it up the world over, Marines not excepted. They want jobs, sedatives, a goddamn reason to expect anything better. They cut in line and shout over the kids' heads and none of their elders dare tell them no.
If it turns into a riot, the kids'll die first. Tim picks up the child right in front of him, just to get him out from underfoot. He's maybe six, in a neon shirt too big for him, and doesn't speak a single word of English. Tim slings him on one hip and gives the young guys what-for, and in the middle of all that, the little boy bursts into tears.
Well, why wouldn't he. He scrubs his face like he knows he shouldn't, and all Tim can do is hang on and mutter gently in his ear. He puts his free on the little boy's face, and tells him it's all right despite the open sores on his legs Tim hasn't even treated yet. Stiney is beside him, alert as for combat, and Christopher too. They'll have to withdraw in another minute.
But before that, Tim carries the child with him back to the shade where his mother is waiting, fearful and hopeful both. He puts the little boy down in his mother's lap and tells her it's all right too. Christopher offers her candy, her and the kid both, and gestures at them to eat it now, so it can't be stolen from them.
The little boy sucks on a butterscotch and winds down his sobs while Tim dabs ointment on his shins. It's probably a fungal infection, and it probably wouldn't kill him even untreated. He'll go back home tonight, and drink his contaminated water, and eat whatever his mother can cook him without burning the house down. Maybe he'll grow up into a frustrated young guy, yelling at Marines, and the sores won't even scar on his warm brown skin. Tim Bryan will never see him again to find out.