If I had to do it all over again I would. In the field you see a lot of pain you can’t do anything about. War is not a pretty thing. You just try your best to stay alive while the guy next to you gets blown to pieces. I was a medic with the Canadian Peace Corps. Now I’m a resident of the Detention Barracks in Edmonton.

It happened a couple of months after Canada joined the efforts in Afghanistan. My squadron was on the way to an outpost fifty miles outside of Kabul. We were maybe thirty miles out when we were attacked. Someone drove a car bomb into our caravan. No one was seriously hurt except Bernie. He’d been driving one of the Humvee’s that the car bomb smashed in to. Putting out the fire and getting him out of the driver’s seat took a good hour. He was real messed up. There were third degree burns covering his face, arms and chest and they had to perform a field amputation on both of his legs. The only thing I could do for him was shoot him full of morphine and make sure he was comfortable.

The Med Evac should have been there long before we would have sorted out the wreckage and been able to get on our way. Something happened and it never came. I sat with Bernie for four hours and that had to be the longest four hours of my life. George, a lieutenant of mine, came up to me as everyone was packing up.

“Still no sign of the ‘copter?”

“No. Are you sure the Med Evac is coming?” I asked.

“Irene talked to them a half-hour ago and was told they had already sent out their only available ‘copter. It’ll be a few hours until they can send us another.”

“Any idea what happened to the first?”

“Probably got shot down.”

I wasn’t quite sure how he could say that so casually.

“We need to get Bernie to a hospital soon. He’s stable for now but I don’t know how long that will last.”

“Do you think he’d make it if we moved him ourselves?”

“Probably if we were to drive slowly.”

“Alright, I’ll go talk about it with the Captain.” He rushed off and left me alone with Bernie.

“Bernie?” I asked tentatively. “The Med Evac’s not coming. We’re going to take you to the Base ourselves. It’s not going to be as smooth a ride, but I’m going to give you some more morphine, okay?”

I wasn’t sure he heard me until he rasped out, “No. Just leave me here.”

I gave him some more water, knowing that the morphine made his mouth dry.

“Don’t be stupid. No one gets left behind no matter what.”

“I don’t want to keep going.”

“What do you mean?” I figured he wasn’t lucid due to the drugs and assorted things pumping through his veins at the constant drip-drop the IV provided.

He chuckled a bit, and that frightened me. I didn’t like where he was going...

“Life’s never going to be the same. I’m just going to be a burden on my family. I don’t want this for my wife.”

I couldn’t say anything for a minute or two, afraid of the answer to the question I felt I had to ask.

“So what do you want me to do about it?” I think I held my breath, waiting for him to answer.

“I want you to do what I can’t.”

My eyes shuttered closed at what he was asking of me.

After about two minutes, there was no doubt in my mind that I would go through with it. The mother in me cried out at seeing anyone in that much pain. I couldn’t let Bernie suffer anymore than he already had. So I filled a syringe with an over dosage of morphine. The beauty of spending every waking hour with your squadron was that you developed the ability to know what your peer was doing before they actually did it. Everyone gathered a couple feet behind me to watch as I tested the needle and then gently mixed it into the fluids he was already receiving with his IV. He thanked me quietly before falling into the sleep he would never wake from. I watched his chest rise less and less frequently until he finally stopped breathing.

“Is he…?” Someone asked, perhaps John, the youngest of us all. I nodded, answering the question he couldn’t complete, covering Bernie’s face with a blanket. For the first time I can remember, I wasn’t able to look my squadron in the eye.

“Why did you do that?” Bruce, a soldier who you’d think couldn’t be afraid, asked uncertainly. It sounded as if he may cry. I felt like I may have cried too.

“He asked me to.”

No one ever mentioned what happened that day. Most people assumed it was too painful to talk about. In reality, my squadron, my boys, were covering my ass. However one of the doctors investigating started to get nosy. Bernie wouldn’t have died strictly speaking and we had never accounted for that missing 10 cc’s of morphine. Eventually the truth came out and I was arrested for murder.

It was an open and shut case. I told the truth from the start. I’m not ashamed of what I did that day. Hell, his wife was glad he had friends that would do something like that for him. I was sentenced to ten years in prison, and I’m up for parole in five. Funnily enough, I was honorably discharged from the Peace Corps. Prison’s not so bad anyways. I get to catch up on my reading and I’ve met some interesting friends.

The law sees me as a criminal but I know no one else does. If I had to do it all over again I would, and my squadron, and Bernie, who’s sitting with God now, knows it too.