The one who shall not be named

"MAKE WAY! MAKE WAY!  DIVA COMING THROUGH!"

Hamz called out as I descended the stairs into the sitting room where Karl and QT were busy playing a video game, I smiled, playfully pushing him away by his head then theatrically sashayed into the kitchen, Hamz continued,

"Kim...kim....kimmy!"

He yelled after me, taking repeated flashed shots of me with his phone acting like a papparazzo

" Who the hell is kim?"


Mom asked with food in her mouth from the dining table where she was having brunch,

"It's your son.. his new name now is kim adagiri-east"

He jokingly replied, Mom simply hissed, going back to digging into her meal, Hamz went further, asking her if she knew who kim kardashian-west is, she shook her head which got Hamz retreating his head slightly in mock shock,

 "You don't know who kim kardashian is?...Lolz, you are a bigger diva than mariah carey"

He said which got me laughing so hard it echoed around the house, Mom felt a little embarrassed, wondering if she was suppose to know who kim was and she didn't,

 " Is she a nobel peace prize winner?"

 She asked, this got all of us...including QT and Karl who were playing a video game in the sitting room roaring with laughter,

"Oh please you trolls, leave my kimmy alone and you can't all blame Mom for not knowing who kim is...am sure she's seen her pictures but might not know she's the one"

I said, coming into the dining area with a bowl of freshly washed apples in hand heading towards Mom who had quickly picked up her phone to google the name kim kardashian-west, she looked up to me, hiding behind my frame against my brothers, asked me in a whisper  how to spell the "kar-something" , I smiled and told her who kim is,

 "She's a reality tv queen Mom" ,

She simply hissed and dismissed the search. We had run out of basic foodstuff at home and as usual, Karl, Hamz and I were to go to the market to buy all that we needed, Mom was a bit low on cash so she called me to her, gave me the amount she had and said I should find a way to manage and get all that I needed, sighing dejectedly, I rose up to get set for the market, Mom smiled, tapping me on the shoulder in appreciation, she knew somehow, I make things work, I manage with the limited funds I have to get the things we needed at home,

 "What would I ever do without a son like you Maj? I love you pumpkin! "

She said after me, I simply nodded and told the boys to get prepared. Mom went out and in fifteen minutes, we were set to go to the market, I threw the car keys to Karl who nicely caught it and pronto! Hamz, Karl and I entered the car, leaving lazy QT all alone at home sprawled on the sitting room rug.

Whilst driving, all was quiet till we got under a pedestrian overhead bridge some meters away from the market, traffic was building up ahead of us so Karl slowly trailed along as we wondered what was wrong, afterall, it wasn't close of work yet but on the other side of the lane as we saw a pocket of crowd gather, it looked like an accident had occurred and the victim, a teenage girl had her left leg crushed, it was a gory sight and as officers from the emergency squad arrived with their siren blaring bus to pick up the victim, part of the girl's feet fell to the ground, it was so  graphic and gory to behold, sending goose bumps crawling all over our skin and tears rushing to my eyes but what shocked me the most was Karl's reaction, he suddenly went red and started getting lethargic then suddenly  shivering quite violently leading the car swerving in a zigzag which sent pedestrians who were trying to get a glimpse of what was happening on the other end running for their lives. Hamz grabbed Karl from the back and managed to maneuver the car to a halt while I jumped to the back seat and Hamz pulled Karl away from the driver's seat to the passenger seat where I just left and took over the steering wheels, speeding off before we got arrested by the approaching emergency corp officers.

Hamz, after a few meters and totally in the clear of the emergency squadron drove into a vast and empty green field for us all to calm down and demand what went wrong,

"What the fuck was that Karl?"

He barked, very calmly and looking straight ahead, Karl began to narrate an incident that provoked his action.

"There was a car bomb that... what happened was, there's an Iraqi police station and right next to it was, like, a coffee shop, and a lot of the soldiers would go there to get coffee in the mornings. There were a lot of civilians in that area and a car bomb just drove up and just indiscriminately killed everybody there... soldiers and civilians and these explosions that happen are just so enormous that body parts can fly up to a hundred meters away and so we got to the scene, we checked it out; we were trying to secure it. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of shit going on at the time. I was in my truck scanning from my machine gun, and I'm scanning for anything that could happen because that's part of the job, just sitting there scanning and then looking over and on the side of the street there was... there was a little girl's foot. Well, I think it was a girl because it looked like a little pink sandal, but there was a foot still in it. A little pink sandal with a little flower or something on it. The shoe was so small I'm imagining the girl was no older than 6, and just the foot was still in it, smoldered, you know, burned and smoldered and just sitting there on the side of the road. The body parts ... I don't know... It's not a video game. It's very real...you think about...this was a little girl, she was obviously innocent. No way you could accuse a child that young of being guilty and her life was snuffed out in a second just from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How did it come to this madness and chaos?"

 I sighed, trying to make sense of all these but mentally connecting the dots of the dead girl to the teenage girl whose leg got damaged, He continued


"The AAV (amphibious assault vehicle) we were in belonged to Charley Company and was racing away from their fight at the northern bridge with casualties for medevac. They had been hit hard and had headed through Ambush Alley looking for help from us at our position. We all knew it was very, very serious when a young Marine fell out of the back of the vehicle and he was on fire.

The vehicle came to a rolling halt right in front of us, not more than 30 meters away, and I saw the crewmen who were on fire but still moving. They were hanging out of the hatches or maybe trying to climb out, and the men that were in the back were falling out, and they were on fire. There were seven to nine Marines in there. ... Doc, my friend and colleague and I ran over, and I'll never forget how dumb we were because we didn't have our helmets or flak vests or anything...not even our weapons, just his medical pack.

The first thing I saw was the severed leg of a Marine lying on the ramp, so I picked that up, and I handed it to Doc. I said, "Lay this off to the side because we're going to find who that belongs to." I thought that if the Marine is still alive, the leg could be re-attached.

There was black smoke billowing out, and we could barely see, but we started triage, and I went to pull a Marine out of the back, and as I was pulling him, his upper torso separated from his bottom torso, and all I had in my hands was his upper body. I handed Doc half of a Marine and said, "Put this in the back of the Humvee because Marines don't leave our dead and wounded on the battlefield; everybody comes home."

Even if it's a piece of you, I have a responsibility to your mom and dad to bring everything back." So, the Marine grabbed it, and his eyes were wide open, but he did exactly what he was told to do. ... We went digging around and found a live Marine underneath two bodies. They were lying on top of him, so we pulled them off and looked down, and from the base of this guy's neck, all the way up to the top of his forehead, it looked like somebody had just taken a saber and cut his head open. We got him up, and Doc pinched the skin of his head together, and we started to try to pull him out of this vehicle, but we couldn't do it. We worked in there for what somebody said later was almost 45 minutes. Getting him out of the vehicle took about three or four of the Marines who had showed up. We yanked him out of there and put him into the back of my AAV, It's the cold, blunt truth....but again, there was a little girl that died. And guess what, the sad truth is that the whole explosion was a huge set up by somebody we all knew, someone prominent who you all probably know who was secretly trying to undermine the efforts of the marines" 

"George bush?"

 I asked, he smiled, continuing,

 "I have my reasons for choosing not to disclose this, it's someone everyone knows, someone powerful and vindictive. It's to protect you guys, he is someone who cannot be named...am so sorry to have reacted the way I did earlier, I hope you guys understand"

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