Some Best and Worst Aspects of Service

I guess probably one of the best ones would have been up in the platoon house was seeing the locals, you’re treating them and then you’re going up to the local school and delivering kids with toys and bunnies, rabbits whatever up to the kids and see their faces to have this stuff again and doing that kind of stuff. One of the platoons I was working with also in the local hospital cleaned up the top floor of the hospital and turned it because it had all been shot up and everything destroyed. So we went up to help them with that and they did a really good job cleaning all that up and turning it back so to be able to witness some of that stuff being done and helping the locals with things that weren’t being done, that was a really good feeling.

Some of the worst probably would have been you go up in the hills and some of these people that aren’t out of beds very much. They don’t have very much; we tried to get wood stoves into them, wood, food. You hear reports on the radio the night before that someone came in and stole the roof, actually went out and stole the roof off another house, all the shingles. Burned houses right beside them and the realization that wasn’t our job to go in and stop this. Our job was to stop local trifle type problems like that. So you feel kind of handcuffed because one thing you were there the day before and you’re helping these people, you’re feeling good then to hear over the radio the houses around them were all burnt, they’ve lost everything, people came in at night, held them at gunpoint and went through the whole house and took everything that they had and stuff like that. That was just common place. Very much poverty. They didn’t have a lot of food. Like I say, very sick and malnourished kind of thing, not anorexia or nothing just not eating very well to the standards that we’re compared to.