Will a Wounded Girl Be Saved?
"Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal."
BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan----Keyan Riley answered the phone and reached for his green, clothbound notebook. He began scrawling notes about the two Afghan girls whose lives had just fallen into his hands. "5 yr." the doctor wrote of the younger girl. "40 mm grenade."
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
On the other end of the line was a surgeon from a Special Forces outpost in the Afghan hinterlands. The girls had accidentally detonated a discarded grenade. The younger one had chest wounds; the second, a six-year-old, was pierced by shrapnel in the abdomen.
"I don’t know----I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you."
Could Dr. Riley send a medevac helicopter, the surgeon asked, to take the girls to the U.S. hospital at Bagram?
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