The world is still hearing news about the devastating earthquake plus tsunami that left 12,000+ dead and more missing. Even those rescue workers have seen this kind of situation countless of times before are still hit hard emotionally.

The sites have been ravaged and devastated and members of the Ground Self-Defense Force try hard to rescue survivors, since survivors were their top priority. They remember seeing bodies everywhere but they strove to find people who were still alive.

Now, however, their focus has shifted to find the bodies of missing people so that those missing bodies can be returned to their families for some type of closure. According to Col. Yoshinao Moriwaki, their duty is to return the bodies to their families. No matter how hard or rough the work it, they want to honor that duty.

But shifting through seas of debris, collapsed houses, overturned cars, and just awful smell has been quite tiring for the Force. The images of those who perished in the disaster still burn bright in their minds. They would find the occasional mother and child, a newborn baby. One member even recovered the body of a boy with a helmet along with his bicycle. “That was really painful…He must have been engulfed by the tsunami on his way home from school.”

To those who are helping out with the rescue force, some of them have trouble sleeping, often crying themselves to sleep after thinking about every horrifying scene that befell them that day.

With disasters such as these, officials are concerned about the mental well-being of the personnel, citing the need for perhaps long-term mental care to help relieve them of these moments.

I teared so hard when I read this. And kudos to those who are helping in the force. It must be a very difficult job and one must be mentally prepared to do this.

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