It was the middle of the night when the call came. There had been an explosion. Master Cpl. Alannah Gilmore, a Canadian Army medic, grabbed her pistol, rifle and medical bag, jumped into an armoured vehicle and told herself what she always did in Afghanistan in 2007: assume the worst, but hope for the best.
But this was bad. A Canadian had stepped on a landmine on the outskirts of an Afghan village. One of his feet was blown off, the other shredded by shrapnel. He was covered in mud and debris and in pain, but alive, but Gilmore knew they needed to get him to an extraction point, get him on a helicopter and get him out of there. Fast.
They carried the wounded man by stretcher to an ambulance and, as the ramp at the back of the vehicle came down, a green light illuminated the soldier’s face. That is when Gilmore realized it was Master Cpl. Jody Mitic, her army sniper buddy. In the days before the blast they had sat in a mud hut in the middle of an Afghan nowhere, watching old episodes of the Family Guy, talking about life.
