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'There was a lot of death'

May-28-2005 » Filed Under: TF Olympia

Soldiers from Maine's 133rd reflect on their time in Mosul.

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BY NICK SAMBIDES, OF THE NEWS STAFF

John Nelson has a small hunk of shrapnel that needs to be cut out of his neck, and it probably will be in a few weeks. Other flecks of ball-bearing-gauge metal float in the flesh on his shoulder blades like tiny steel pins, so numerous and difficult for surgeons to find and remove that they'll probably stay in him for the rest of his life.

A torn tendon aches in his right shoulder, another painful reminder of the terrorist detonation that threw him and a lunch table he had been sitting at about 10 feet. His ears continually ring, and he has lost about 40 percent of the hearing in his left ear.

But the small, blood-red scar dug into his forehead?

"That's just running into something and not having hair. It's really a pain in the ass, not having hair," Nelson said. "I used to have hair, but then I had children."

Sitting earlier this week behind a desk at his compact, neat real estate management office on West Broadway in Lincoln, Nelson, a major doing detached service with the 133rd Engineer Battalion, had come a long way from the battlefields of Mosul, Iraq.

The Maine Army National Guardsman was just sitting down to his favorite lunch - a chili and cheese hotdog with onions - in his unit's mess tent on Dec. 21 when a suicide bomber wearing a vest laced with ball bearings and plastic explosives set himself off.

Nelson was about 30 feet from the human bomb.

"There was no bang. You never hear the one that gets you," Nelson said. "I saw this huge red flash, but it stayed there in my eyes. I felt this heat on the back of my neck, and I thought to myself, 'We've been hit.'"

When Nelson came to, he found himself under the lunch table with his ears ringing and his left ear in pain. Although he might not have realized it at the time, he was about to see just how well the mass-casualty medical response plan he helped devise actually worked.


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