  One of the strangest things to see is a fractured human body. If you have ever seen someone with broken bone it evokes this morbid fascination to stare without feelings of guilt. What else is strange is how different it is from anything Hollywood portrays. There's not as much blood as you would think, when you find body parts they look exactly the way they do on the body, and people never die with their eyes closed.
I went to the sight of a car bombing recently that wounded or killed almost 50 and found a pile of human intestines just sitting in the road in the intersection, just laying there. Every car had been painted with the blood of its former occupant. It doesn't traumatize you but you can't help but stare or sometimes even touch.
The scene was what you think of when you think of war, real war. You always wonder if you can handle it psychologically and you're scared you might not perform as you hope. When the time comes you do, and that's when you realize that war does not affect everyone the way you hear. Every movie you ever watch tells you that Vet's are all basket cases from what they've seen. I have fired and been fired at and found it to be the most exciting thing I have ever experienced.
You don't think about the what-if's, "What if I had been closer or farther", or "Man, that could have been me". If it wasn't you it wasn't you, drive on. Watching guys ducking under fire is one of the funniest things you see here. Believe me, the wounds I have treated, no amount of ducking will save you. As fast as it happens ducking just gets you to the ground quicker. Man 's inhumanity to man is something we don't think about, he just tried to kill someone or set off a car bomb that killed no soldiers but 10 children, some men deserve inhumanity. No matter what you hear in the media there are scumbags here that don't care how many of their own people they kill as long as 1 American is wounded.
People are so dramatic for the most minor non-event. They all want the pity lay when they get home and start telling the "What I went through" stories. We all volunteered, I've found that's the main difference between this and all other wars. The only exception might be WW II where most Americans felt a duty to answer the call to conscription. You lose the right to bitch when you say "I'll do it" and smash your hand with hammer. Sometimes I feel that in 20 years it will all hit me and my wife will find me in a corner singing Mary had a Little Lamb while sucking my thumb.
Right now though the only way to survive is do your job, get home, and deal with what comes later. 
