Invisible Wounds
“I didn’t fit in too well in training. I came back from drinking one night and I was three minutes after curfew. My senior drill sergeant told me that he was going to punish me because a few medics had noticed I was late. So I asked him: ‘Do you decide what kind of leader you are based on who’s watching?’ He didn’t like that. He screamed at me and made me do a bunch of pushups, and me being a drunk-ass, I was calling him a ‘pussy’ and ‘motherfucker’ the entire time. So he reported me to the company commander, who reported me to the battalion commander, and I end up at this formal hearing where they make me listen to all this awful shit about myself. And then they asked me if I had anything to say. I’m pretty sure that I was supposed to keep quiet, but I had typed out this whole speech about how my senior drill sergeant didn’t embody Army values. So I read my speech, and when I finished, everyone was pretty mad. A command sergeant major started screaming in my face. He looked like Clint Eastwood if Clint Eastwood was only five feet tall. After he was done yelling, he ripped my insignia off my uniform, escorted me from the room, and with a mix of disgust and pride, said: ‘You’ve got some balls.’”
“We had a company commander in Iraq—let’s call him Captain Johnson. He was in charge of all the medics. He set the rosters, scheduled the convoys, and coordinated with other units. He was also fucking his secretary but that’s less important. We were nine months into our deployment, and Captain Johnson decides to go out on a convoy with us one night. That wasn’t his job. His job was to stay inside his office. But that night he decided that he wanted to go. And during the convoy one of the trucks hits an IED. And guys are screaming ‘go, go, go’ over the radio, and we’re trying to push through the hot spot, and small arms fire keeps bouncing off our vehicles: ‘plink, plink, plink.’ It sounded just like the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. I hate that movie because they got that sound so perfect. And as soon as we were out of the area, Captain Johnson has us stop on Samarra Bridge to repair the vehicle. And it was so stupid to stop there. Because that bridge was getting blown up every other week. And we’re sitting on that bridge, pointing our M-16’s into the dark, and people are whispering ‘do you hear that?’ And we almost shoot at our own infantry because we don’t know it’s them. And I asked Captain Johnson why he came with us. And he told me: ‘I have two sons at home. I need stories to tell them.’ And I hated him so much in that moment. Because I didn’t want this shit. When I signed up, they told me I’d be working in a hospital. I wanted to be safe, but I wasn’t allowed to be. But he had a choice, and he chose not to be. Just because he wanted war stories.”
“I know guys who look back on the war as the best time in their lives. They’d love to go back. They only see themselves as a soldier and I want more for them than that. I want them to be OK with being home and finding new and better ways to be themselves. What happened to being a good person? Or being the best version of yourself? I think at the end of the day, everyone just wants to feel good about what they did. And so do I. But I don’t. I don’t want to wave the flag and say we killed those motherfuckers. I don’t want to be thanked for my service. I don’t think it made anything better and I don’t think we won any hearts or minds. For a long time after I got back, I isolated myself in a cabin and drank all the time. Then at one point I decided that I was going to try everything possible to feel better. I was going to try acupuncture, chiropracty, therapy, and if nothing worked, I was going to kill myself. Recently I’ve been experimenting with femininity. I’ve never been feminine. My father put me in mixed martial arts when I was nine. I became a blackbelt and a kickboxer. I was always the tough chick. Now I’m trying to go in the opposite direction. I'm being very cliche about it. I’m doing yoga. I’m wearing dresses everyday. I’m wearing make-up. I even joined a woman’s group. Every month we have a sacred circle on the new moon and do guided meditations, set intentions, and eat chocolate. God, this is harder to talk about than bombs.”
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