What happened next....

I recently attended the opening night showing of The Women of Lockerbie- a play written by Deborah Breevort, and performed by the talented Twin City Players. I’m definitely not a critic or playwright reviewer, but I do highly recommend seeing this performance. It evoked emotions in me that I haven’t faced in quite some time.

When I say it evoked emotions in me, I mean this in the best of ways. In my humble opinion, a great performance should do this. The actors, the script, the stage, all of these areas come together to bring the story to life. By doing so, sometimes the audience finds things to relate to and this means the show has done what it set out to do.

The Women of Lockerbie did just that for me. The play had nothing to do with my time in Iraq, yet the emotions the characters shared with the audience were some of the same emotions I too have dealt with. The play made me think about the days after the explosion. Over the years, I have shared what happened to me on May 25^th, 2004 repeatedly in an effort to make it not so traumatic to me. I have always been open about these events in a way to help break the stigma around soldiers and PTSD. But I never have shared what happened after May 25^th.

After my battle buddy was flown out of Iraq to Germany, I was in shock. The first night back, I sat in my camping chair and just stared straight ahead as fellow soldiers and my roommate tried to talk to me. I couldn’t tell you one word they said, or if I said anything back to them. All I could think about was my battle buddy, lying in my lap, repeating over and over again that he would never see his unborn son.

The very next day I set out to clean our uniforms and gear. I found a Tupperware bin that wasn’t being used, and grabbed a case of liter sized water bottles. My uniform was completely covered in blood. In hindsight, I don’t even remember when or where I removed the uniform, or showering after the attack. But I must have, since I was now sitting behind our tent, soaking this blood covered uniform. Within minutes, the water was red. I dumped the container, rinsed it out and repeated the process.

Over and over again.

Looking back, it was definitely a bio-hazard, dumping bloodied water into the rocks and sand, but we were also inhaling filthy air from the burn pits, so what’s one more hazard?

I digress.

I scrubbed our gear and turned in what I had left of my battle’s gear. A few days later, the KBR truck driver that had taken my battle to the medevac site, returned my battle’s Kevlar helmet to me. It had a huge chunk missing from the front of the helmet, and I believe to this day, that a large piece of shrapnel must have carved out the Kevlar, and then continued to strike his face and scoop out his eye.

Receiving the helmet was a piece of closure, but it didn’t stop the overwhelming feelings of survivor’s guilt. I went days without knowing if he was okay. I had been pulled from driving, since my own injuries did not allow me to properly wear my helmet. My right ear had been pockmarked pretty good and I had some annoying wounds behind my ear at the base of my skull that were infected. Due to these issues, I was assigned to guard duty in the towers.

Guard duty was a solid distraction, but even though I had a fellow soldier with me, the guilt never left my side. On top of the guilt, I was on edge 24 hours a day. Every noise, every distant explosion, every very close mortar attack pushed me more and more on edge. For lack of a better term, I was literally a ticking time bomb.

When my week of guard was just about up, I was informed that my Lieutenant had been able to connect with my battle buddy in Germany. For a few brief minutes, I was able to hear his voice and tell him I was sorry. He couldn’t say much since he was still swollen in his face, and I’m sure full of pain killers. He was flown to Walter Reed in Washington D.C. shortly after that call, where he would recover.

I continued my deployment in Iraq. My week of guard duty was complete, and the military psychologist had cleared me to go back to my primary mission- driving trucks in Iraq. My first mission back would be the same route we had taken a week earlier. My only request was that I would now take my battle’s position as an M-249 machine gunner and be able to assist the .50 caliber machine gunner on gun trucks. My battle had trained me on how to use his weapon and all I had to was prove that I could lift the .50 caliber machine gun up and over my head and into the gun truck.

I was nervous, but I knew I had to squash those feelings if I was going to survive this war. I loaded up the gun truck and took my place in the back as the assistant gunner. I needed to be in this position to honor my battle buddy and to prove that I was solid.

The mission went off without any issues and we continued, day in and day out, driving supplies across Iraq. Days turned into weeks; weeks turned into months. My head and ear healed, the pain in my body slowly went away, but the guilt never faded.

It would take years of me telling my battle how sorry I was, and him forgiving me time and time again. But what I finally realized is that I had to forgive myself in order to begin the healing process. In some ways, my healing process has been similar to the day after the explosion when I was rinsing the blood off my uniform. It’s a process that had to be repeated over and over again. But eventually, the stains faded, both on my uniform and in my heart.