Chapter+25

Derek Burchill

Derek Burchill was getting in the National Guard to save up for his collge tution,but couple months later he end getting drafted to the army. They told him in his room to pack his stuff up because he was going to go fight in the Iraq war. They didn't even give a chance to make a phone call to his parents, to let them know that he had gotten drafted and that 1hr later he was on a plain going to Iraq. The first day he got there he saw a solder,6ft 2inches tall about 220 pounds, get killed by M-16 rifle, he got shot 24 times.

Derek Burchill is a solder in Iraq that has seen some nasty stuff through his life in Iraq he's had experience and some really bad luck his been in Iraq for about 2 years and 2months. he's seen a lot of things in those past couple months his exsperience in Iraq is brutal he's seen Iraqis blown up tham selves just because al qaida does not like Americans, but what al qaida does not know is that some of its people are working for the Americans.

So then the next day he saw the same things, but this time it was little kids doing little suicidal bombs. The whole night would hear "please help us" then after that all you heard was AK-47 shots "BRATT, BRATT" that's all heard all night, bombs and gun shots. In the morning it was the same thing all over again but we had to be braver than what we were at night because Iraqis were really sneaky during the day, thay'd pop out of nowhere, so you had to be very carefull.

The same day in the evening a jeep pulled up to our camp, and just stopped there until we heard a little beep noise, and all of a sudden a big explosion tore through the middle of our camp. We remained alert, our ak readied against our sholders next thing that happens about 10 of our American troops had died in that explosion my dearest friends died. Dear friends, we will always miss him, and he will always be remeberd as a great solde. I was in pain, because I had to tell his parents that their dearest son had past away 13 hundred hours ago in a car explosion in bagdad.when I finally wrote to them, I was in tears i didn't know what to tell them because I knew him since we were growing up through out our whole life, and that we were going to have a special ceremony in two weeks at camp mabry in texas we will be sending you tickts for the ceremony for your whole family we will be sending the body two days from now thank you and god bless.

A couple weeks later i had to do some more parent phone calls, even wife phone calls, to tell them that either there son had died or that there husband had just died in a combat, and that i was very sorry to be the one telling them this. I myself was combat in a Iraqi city when we heard the same beep sound. I and six other solders had to run as fast as we could to get away from getting killed. Only four of them died the other two are still in critical condition, but me I had to run fast, but i still got a 90 degree burn on half of my body. Now I'm trying to heal up because some American troops are heading over to afghanistan.



Well war is hard in afghanistan, so far we have 2,300 American troops have lost their lives in the line of combat. On the afghanistan side there have been at least 7,000 dead, that's not counting the suicidal attacks/bombs. More people die by the second, this war is crazy.I went from National Guard to be a Burchill, an Iraq experience and afghanistan experience also. This article is based on a true story.,

Jose Aguilar

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