Afghanistan: former cc injured in attack, ‘so I escaped death, but I would start again’

He can still smell that stench of burnt blood mixed with dust. The smell of death Emiliano Asta brings it with him. As if the nine years that have passed since the attack on the Adraskan base in Afghanistan, in which he, together with Chief Marshal Dario Cristinelli, was injured and the chosen carabiniere Manuele Braj lost his life, were just a whisper of existence. “For years I felt a deep sense of guilt – he says in an interview with Adnkronos -. I should have been there instead of Manuele, but at the last minute, climbed on the lookout tower, Salentino, this was his nickname, he said to me: ‘I’ll go to the machine gun, you take the binoculars.’ The explosion hit him in full. ” On June 25, 2012, Emiliano was 29 years old and he had chosen that life. “I’ve always done what I liked, I chose departments where I could grow professionally”. No one in the family had followed a military career. Papa Pietro was a municipal employee in Alcamo, in the Trapani area, now retired. “I lost my mom when I was just eight.” Then there were the years in boarding school in Palermo, the return home and the first jobs. “I enlisted when I was 19”. Being behind a desk was never his dream and Emiliano arrived at the 7th Regiment ‘Trentino Alto Adige’ after a long ‘apprenticeship’. Auxiliary Carabiniere in Lampedusa from 2002 to 2005 (“where I was confronted with the emergency landings”), the actual entry into the Arma, the course in Sardinia and the years in Milan at the 3rd Lombardy Battalion (“I made public order in around Italy “). Finally, the missions abroad. The first was in Kabul, from April to November 2011. “The right time, because the first months are used to settle in – he says -, then from the fourth that life begins to seem normal to you, you learn to live with the tension. The sixth month is dangerous, routine brings with it a decrease in physical and mental attention “. The first impact with that completely new world remembers it as if it were yesterday. “We left the base with armored jeeps, in the villages on the outskirts of Kabul many children followed us. They ran through the mud and dirt, pumped water from the ground and transported it with canisters, there was dust everywhere and wind. It was hard even to breathe. Unable to stop, we threw them candies, chocolates, everything we could have brought with us from the windows. ” The women wore the burka. “Underneath there could have been anyone, you understood that she was a woman of stature. The first time I saw that reality I thought I was lucky: I was born in Italy and I had the opportunity to choose my future”. But Kabul was also a beautiful starry sky for him. “In the dark, those stars seemed to touch them …”. In his spare time there was little to do. “I was training, I was always trying to keep myself in perfect physical shape. Once, while I was running, there was an explosion. A container vibrated next to me and, instead of going straight into the bunker, I climbed up the wall to see what area they had hit. : I saw a huge mushroom of black smoke and gave the alarm “. He was running with the gun and the radio Emiliano. “We were always armed – he remembers -. When we came out of the base we were wearing at least 20 kilos of weapons, helmets, radios, flak jackets. You have to be ready for any emergency. The fear? life, but we had been trained to keep it under control and turn it into attention. At night we never slept soundly. One morning we had just arrived at the shooting range – he says -. Marines were also with us. After a few minutes they received a message of alarmed and they got back into the armored vehicles to return to the base. We decided to do it too, along the ‘Violet’, the road that connects Kabul and Jalalabad. A road usually very busy, similar to our highways: that morning, however, it was deserted. C ‘it was just us and the Americans, I thought we would be victims of an attack “. It wasn’t like that. The rendezvous with death came on his second mission in Afghanistan. “I had returned from Kabul in early November and after four months, in April, I was back in that country, this time in Adraskan. A base in the middle of nowhere where the Afghan police trained.” Emiliano was a supervisor at the shooting range. “Some time before there had been attacks, the Taliban had infiltrated the students of the Afghan army and had killed some Spaniards. I thought: ‘Ok, we need to be even more careful and keep an eye on all the movements'”. The morning of the attack, June 25, 2012, was one of many. “A day like many others – he remembers -. I went up to the turret, an observation point from which it was possible to monitor the area outside the base and, as was my habit, I checked to make sure everything was in order. I took my position. Salentino (Manuele Braj, ed.) arrived shortly after and said to me: ‘I’ll take the position with the machine gun, you go to the binoculars.’ So I positioned myself behind him. A few weeks before the attack they had hit one of our warehouses which as the crow flies was not far from the turret. Attention was maximum “. The rocket hit the front of the sentry box. “I was thrown back and in the dark I saw a beam of light.” The exit door. It was necessary to escape before the Taliban struck again. “I tried to get up, but I didn’t have the strength. So I started crawling on the ground, among the torn remains of poor Manuele. I still remember the stench of the burnt blood, of the dust. down, one leg got caught in a stake, I unleashed it and went on “. The young soldier did not feel the pain. “My only thought was to save myself.” Emiliano’s ordeal begins from that moment. First the ride to the infirmary on a pick up and then the transfer by helicopter to a field hospital in Shirabad. “I was full of morphine, I greeted my comrades with the gesture of the thumb up, as if to tell them to hold on. I was going away, I was lucky. That day there were other attacks in the base”. In the field hospital the diagnosis is hasty: the right leg needs to be amputated. “Thanks to the top management of the weapon it was possible to avoid it”. And so Emiliano, back on a stretcher and flying again, reaches Kandahar. “When I woke up from the operation my legs were safe, but attached to machinery, which sucked up the liquids my body produced.” There in that hospital in Kandahar, two days after the attack, the young Italian chosen carabiniere finally has the first telephone contact with the family. “A few minutes, just enough time to reassure my father. ‘I’m in good hands, everything is fine’, I told him.” It was fine because he was alive, but too weak to face the return to Italy. “They took me to the American base of Bagram, where all the wounded were taken, and they gave me blood transfusions. Next to me was an Afghan interpreter with the body torn apart.” Germany, in Ramstein, remembers it as “the heaviest of my life”. “They had set up the plane with compartments, as if it were a warehouse, before embarking they had given me morphine, but the pains were excruciating”. The arrival in Rome aboard a C-130 takes place after a few days, on 1 July. “At the airport I also found my father waiting for me, it was a very strong emotion, I burst into a liberating cry”. After his return to Italy, the long months of rehabilitation at the Celio Military Polyclinic followed. “It was a very difficult path, a virus contracted in Afghanistan slowed my recovery, I came to weigh 68 kilos”. Before returning to his Alcamo, just discharged from the hospital, Emiliano wanted to ‘close’ his mission. “I passed by the command of Laives, to greet my colleagues and the flag”, he remembers, still moved. In the following months, the appointments at the Celio hospital continued. “I used to go to rehabilitation in day hospital”. In 2016 Emiliano received a gold medal and in the same year he took leave. Today he is married (“I met my wife at Celio, she was employed in the Orthopedics department, she too in the armed forces, first corporal chosen. She gave me the strength to go on in the long months of convalescence”) and father of two children: little Beatrice and the eldest son Pietro Manuele, born a year after the attack. “I wanted to honor both my father and Manuele Braj. Thanks to him I am alive”. The voice is broken with emotion. “He was a golden boy, we understood each other with our eyes. It was a great loss. He had a baby of a few months and he always told me he couldn’t wait to go home to take him to the sea, he imagined the first baths together. He dreamed of moments of freedom, those that we could not experience in Afghanistan … “. Looking back, he has no doubts. “Every morning I need a crutch to get up. I don’t run anymore, I can’t walk long distances. My life has changed. Some days the pain is unbearable, but I’d start again, I’d do it all again,” he says. News of the taking of Kabul is a punch straight to the heart. “They reopen a wound that has never healed, but the sacrifice of our soldiers in Afghanistan has not been in vain, it has allowed many women and children to experience a different life. Now we must not abandon them”. By Rossana Lo Castro