March, 2004.  We all heard it.  I like to think that that one particular explosion, a few clicks off to the west, stood out in my mind.  I always tell people it did, but the reality is probably closer to the fact that in Baqubah, in the spring of 2004, there were a lot of explosions.  There were big ones and little ones, gunfire, car horns, music.  Just a general cacophony of third world noise.  We got to where we could distinguish, by ear, five or six different American weapons and of course an AK-47 is totally distinct.  We even got pretty good at judging distance based on those sounds.

That day, maybe that one was different.  Maybe, if I thought about it, I knew somehow that the boom came from the vicinity of main Forward Operating Base in town.  Maybe I had some subconscious inkling that we had a convoy on the road.  Probably though, I didn’t think anything of it until a three vehicle convoy came through gate of our little outpost an hour later.  I might not have given that a second thought either, until our first sergeant got out of one humvee, and the battalion chaplain got out of the other.  You never want to see the chaplain and the first sergeant together unannounced.  It only means one thing.  They gathered us in the auditorium and told us that B had been hit by an IED and killed.  One week before we left that town and drove south for Kuwait.  Twenty-five meters from the gate of the FOB.  He was in his early twenties.  A gentle giant with a big mouth and a bigger wad of chew in his lip.  He was from Ellsworth, Wisconsin, loved brandy, and had a seemingly endless library of Ole and Lena jokes.  He was also in my squad.  B was our fourth fatality from enemy action.  

On April 6th, we rolled into the small town that is home to our reserve unit.  We had a brief ceremony, there were some cameras and hugs and happy tears, B’s parents were there, and we got into cars and went home.  That is one of the challenges for reserve component Soldiers.  When you come home from Iraq and Afghanistan, you come home.  There’s no military base or hospital, no built in support network.  Your buddies aren’t in the bunk under you or down the hall.  They’re across town or in another state.

Over the course of the next six months, I moved in with my fiancé, broke off the engagement, moved out of our apartment and into a one bedroom by myself, and didn’t leave the house much.  When I did leave it was to play two or three consecutive rounds of disc golf alone.  The rest of the time was spent online, surfing aimlessly.  In September I was with one of my Army buddies on a long car trip.  He described his symptoms and I realized that we were doing a lot of the same things and feeling the same way.  He said that he was to the point where he felt like he could have just curled up under a bridge and waited to die.  That’s different from being suicidal – more like extreme apathy.  His wife told him if he didn’t seek help she was leaving, and he went to the VA hospital.  Said it had helped him a lot, so I did the same thing.  

My assigned psychologist gave me the usual battery of questions.  Are you suicidal? Have you lost pleasure in normal activities?  Are you eating and bathing regularly?  Were you ever afraid for your life?  Was anyone close to you killed or seriously injured?  Did you witness the event?  I was still functioning, but the mindset was “Hey, I’m still here, right?  I made it back in one piece, right?  What do I have to complain about?”  So we lost four people, so we had twenty-odd Purple Hearts, so your relationship disintegrated.  So what?  You’re still upright and ambulatory.

He told me I had seasonal affective disorder and gave me a happy light.  Really?  I was so confused and angry that I didn’t know what to do.  I know they saw a lot of guys from my unit because we used to see each other coming in and out of the mental health department at the hospital.  A happy light?  You have got to be kidding me.  I also saw a psychologist who put me on anti-depressants, but even that was pretty nonchalant.  “Umm, why don’t you try these?”  OK.  Thanks.  

The pills helped, and I am once again a functioning member of society, but it was hard.  I have a lot of friends who still haven’t come all the way back.  A is probably in prison now, if he’s lucky.  The lure of meth was too much for him after we got back.  J has been battling with the VA to get rated for PTSD for three years.  He pulled B out of that humvee.  B also asked him to switch seats before the convoy left.  If anyone deserves it, he does.

The good news is that the learning curve is steep.  The briefings we are getting as we prepare for this deployment are light-years better than what we got the first time.  I work with veterans in my government job and I know VA is making strides to correct these problems, but there is a long way to go.  The key is to keep talking about it.  Thank you OS for inviting these stories, and thank you all for reading and caring.