An incredibly tough story. Imagine this multiplied by thousands.
Via NY Post:
Of all the soldiers in battalion 2-16, Staff Sgt. Adam Schumann was the one everyone wanted to be like.
He was a hard and strong 26-year- old from Kansas, now on his third tour in Iraq, stationed at a forward operating base near Sadr City, the locus of the counter-insurgency.
On May 7, 2007, after Sgt. Michael Emory took a bullet to the back of his head, it was Schumann who carried Emory, nothing but dead weight now, off a rooftop and down a flight of stairs, telling him he’d be all right.
“I remember the blood was coming off his head and coming into my mouth,” Schumann said later. “I couldn’t get the taste out. The iron taste. I couldn’t drink enough Kool-Aid that day.”
He’d felt so differently on his first deployment, in the earliest days of the war, calling it “a front-row seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”
His second tour was even better: “I loved it. Anytime I get shot at in a firefight, it’s the sexiest feeling there is.”
He was no longer feeling that way, and he was not alone.
Most of the men in his battalion were over this war, knew it was unwinnable, felt that each day was nothing more than piling into Humvees to leave the FOB and go back to the FOB and hope not to get shot at or blown up in between.
“Sometimes I wonder what type of world the chain of command is living in,” said one soldier. “To think we’re winning?”