Blast Victims
Acrylic on canvas, 90 " x 60 ", 2008-09

Lt.(N) Tobi Dwyer cleaning the tracheotomy of a jaw reconstruction patient on the ward of Role 3. This painting illustrates my immediate impression of the hospital ward with its multitude of wounded Afghan civilians.

IEDs just don’t care
by Tony Williams,
School of Music poet, Canberra, Australia
in response to Blast Victims

This world-class triage
deep in the desert
is no mirage.
Today
our patients are civilians
Afghans, mostly
IED victims, mostly
(their names not much mentioned
in global dispatches).
Oh, those IEDs just don’t care.
They are as brutal
as the desperate landscape
but with none of its honesty, none of its beauty
— with IEDs, there is no cooling breeze
from the Hindu Kush at dusk.
An IED takes away
with blind fair-mindedness
two arms and a leg
an eye, a jaw
— even genitals are fair prey.
IEDs are sneaky
hiding any place
buried beneath the sand
strapped to a donkey
— removing lives
with a random spray of nails and rocks.
Oh those IEDs just don’t care.
Civilians and soldiers alike
must not step out of line
in the world’s most deadly minefield
— leaving parents, siblings, friends
weeping, keening, shoulder-locked
in bent and ragged circles.
But inside Role 3
multinationals
doctors, surgeons, nurses, corpsmen
saving, not wasting
mending, not rending
cleaning, not claiming.
Because another of us
is lying there
needing our help.