When a man detonated a suicide vest at the morning bazaar in Khost, Afghanistan, more than two years ago, Staff Sgt. Andrew Braxton and Sgt. Benjamin Bullard were unscathed. Their fellow North Carolina National Guard soldiers were not as lucky.

The storm had deposited 37 inches of rain, felled trees and caused power outages on the tiny Pacific island. Now, they watched in horror as the floodwaters swirled around them, overtaking the building and rising quickly inside.

More than four years after zipping down a steel cable to provide medical care to a chopped-up platoon of soldiers, Master Sgt. Roger Sparks still labors to make sense of that day in November 2010 when four men died in his arms.

The alarm sounds and the Coast Guard takes off, even when its rescue teams aren’t sure what lies ahead. Petty Officer 2nd Class Jonathan Kreske and three other crewmembers knew only that one man suffered a leg injury and another man might have been hurt when their MH-60T Jayhawk helicopter took off from San Diego around noon Jan. 18, 2013.

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Frank Troiano had two injured men with him, was taking fire from insurgents with a superior position and was trying to get out of a village in Afghanistan’s Tagab district.

No U.S. forces had reached the area in eight years of war in Afghanistan. Marine Corps Cpl. Ethan Nagel, an embedded trainer, along with his platoon of Afghan National Army troops, another Marine trainer and a small Special Forces team, were moving up the Uzbin Valley to meet with village elders.

Jerry Giefer doesn’t recall much about what happened Dec. 30 at his office at the Army Corps of Engineers compound in Seoul. One moment he was working and the next, everything went black.

The view from the A-10 cockpits was troubling — low cloud cover and uncertain terrain below. The view from the ground was just plain grim.

The wounded U.S. servicemember was not far from Kandahar in Afghanistan. Three others were with him, but they could not get the injured man to safety because of an insurgent ambush. Nearby U.S. Army soldiers could not engage the enemy, and a close-air support coordinator on the ground was panicked and inexperienced.

A basic rule of warfare, known by everyone from generals to video game enthusiasts, is to fight from behind something. A rock, tree, building — anything that stops a bullet will do. U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Ivan Ruiz ignored that rule Dec. 10, 2013, when insurgents opened fire on his position.