The Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2018 57 case that was immediately on top of me. It dislodged, displacing everything that covered me, and I popped up like a cork in water. I was freed, and I could feel my legs. (Later I learned that it was the CLO’s husband, Gunnery Sergeant Kimble, who had used Herculean force to remove the debris covering me. My other rescuers were Chargé d’Affaires John Lange, RSO John DiCarlo and WAE Consular Officer Jon Edensword, who pulled me out of the rubble and moved me to safety.) Getting out of the building proved to be even trickier. The stairwell was badly damaged; walls were at angles. About half- way down we found one of our local staff members sitting on the stairs. “We must get out of here; it’s not safe,” I told her, but she refused to move, saying only, “I can’t find my shoes.” I took off my shoes and gave them to her so she would come with us. As we reach street level, the chaos and devastation is surreal, it seems like everything is in flames: the vehicles, a massive tanker truck, the buildings. People are trying to decide which way to go. My gut instinct is to get far away from the front of the building, where I now know a massive bomb has just exploded. I start shepherding people around the side of the building. We come across someone who appears to be skinned alive; he is barely breathing. I know I cannot help himmedically, so I keep moving, leading our dazed group to the rear of the compound. I freeze when I see another tanker truck around the back, hoping that nothing bad will happen. Other people climb down the back fire escape, and I approach to ask if they are okay. The first person I talk to backs up, screams and runs away fromme. That is when I realize that I have some serious facial injuries. A ladder materializes, and we start scaling the perimeter into a growing crowd on the far side of the wall, where people are being whisked off in waiting vans. Before I manage to get inside one, a news reporter has his camera trained on me. My immediate instinct is to hold up my travel voucher and cover my face—I don’t want my son to see me like this. It turned out to be a blessing for my siblings, who did see me on the newsfeed. For the second time that day, “She is alive” was repeated, this time with a sigh of relief. We were all taken to the safe haven at the chargé’s residence, where I was immediately assessed by the medical team. The end of my nose had been ripped off and was dangling like an old broken door barely hanging on its last hinge. It was nothing life- threatening, but it needed attention, along with the hundreds of head wounds I had sustained that were still pumping blood. I could wait. I knew we needed to have communications with Main State, so I checked to see if we had set up a command center to con- nect with the Operations Center in Washington—we had. The nurse was now dragging me back to get my face attended to. She sat me down and said, “I don’t know what to do with your face, let’s irrigate it.” Sometime later, another nurse stopped by and looked at my face. She said and did the same thing, at which point I started laughing and said, “I see the headline now: ‘Bomb Victim Drowns.’” That lightened the mood in the room a little. I was covered in blood, dust and grime. Everyone agreed that I needed to have a shower, as I had wounds covering my entire body. A kind spouse waiting in the safe haven offered to accompany me in case I passed out (everyone was worried about concussion); so I showered, but now what clothes to wear? Mine were shredded and filthy. I was given shorts and a T-shirt belonging to the chargé; I joked that I was ambitious, but thought that I would be trying to fill his shoes, not his britches! Finally, the French embassy doctor was free to fix my face. He gently started removing the hundreds of pieces of glass embed- ded in my face, head, neck and shoulders and suturing the wounds, quietly reassuring me that I was going to look beautiful when he was finished patching me up. When he got to my nose, he hesitated before saying, “Close your eyes.” He smoothed out the skin that was torn from the sides of my nose, and it felt like he flipped up the nose to reattach it. I was done and headed out to find Vella, the outgoing IMS. The next several days were a blur. We turned the public affairs officer’s residence into our new embassy building, where Vella and I, along with a RIMC [Regional Information Management Center] team sent to assist, worked day and night to get com- munications back up and running. The local telephone company managed to bring new 50-pair cabling to the house over the weekend (that took several miles of cabling installed down the road from the nearest exchange), giving us the ability to get our normal embassy phone numbers working at the new location. As we reach street level, the chaos and devastation is surreal, it seems like everything is in flames: the vehicles, a massive tanker truck, the buildings. —Elizabeth Slater