War Flashback

Like a lot of grim occupation,s in the Army there's always black humor to try and break things up. At our entry control point a truckload of Marines that were on their last convoy to Fallujah teased us as they were passing through, Home in 10 days- how long you got left- 10 months? Ha! one of them called out. I hollered back, Don't worry I'll open the gate for you when you come back from getting blown up! Somebody else hollered, Don't get killed.
I thought I was going to vomit when about 20 minutes later there was an explosion in the direction of Fallujah and tracer rounds started flying all around where I knew their route to be.
They would have been closer to Fallujah so would have plowed through to there to get any casualties treated and recover and didn't come back to our base.
I intentionally avoided any opportunity to learn about the fates of those Marines.