It was 2:09 a.m. in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on Oct. 3, 2015, when Lajos Jecs was woken from his sleep by a loud explosion. It was the first in a series of bombs a US plane was dropping on the hospital where he worked. Jecs, a nurse from Hungary with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), had been living and working at the MSF trauma center in Kunduz for close to five months. The fighting around the health care facility had been growing worse in the past few days. It was so bad that Jecs and his international colleagues had been unable to leave the hospital compound. They’d been sleeping in makeshift quarters in the hospital’s safe room. It was in the safe room, a building separated from the main hospital, that Jecs went to sleep at about 10 p.m. on Oct. 2. Four hours later, he was startled awake. He had heard bombs in Kunduz before, but never this close. The office was rattling and he could hear dirt and debris from the explosions hitting the walls. Jecs took shelter in his room and began tryi...
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