Warning: Gross Photos Below

BOSTON - This has nothing to do with the foreign service, but since I have to spend all day looking at these kind of pictures (and much, much worse than these) as well as surgery on the eye, I decided I pass along a little of the gore.







Those images are just some gratuitous gore.

But the truly horrifying, yet also moving, images I saw today came from Iraq. Some of the military ophthalmologists were presenting on severe eye conditions, and one woman was showing pictures of soldiers who suffered such severe burns, their eye lids had melted away.

What she was presenting did not look human. They appeared as red lumps with white gauze wrapped all over the place. And she told stories about these soldiers taking years to recover, then showed the recovery picture, and they still looked very bad off.

The pictures were bad, but being there in real life was worse. She said when she first encountered one of these burn patients, the first thing she had to do was to walk away and recollect herself.

While this is an eye surgeon conference, she said reminded us that their eye injuries were only a minor injury in the grand scheme of their suffering, which included brain damage and amputations.

It was a major victory for her to get one patient able to see and make his own decisions after three years of surgery.

While I don't think the images I saw would be appropriate for the 5 p.m. news, I do think they should be made available to remind us what sacrifices are service men and women are making.