Invisible Wounds

“My brother went to Harvard. He’s ‘Good Will Hunting’ smart. I lived with him in Cambridge for a while, and I visited the campus chapel, and up on the walls they had the names of every Harvard man who’s died in war. The list was so long for World War I and World War II. It went all the way to the ceiling. But the list got thinner and thinner as time passed. The best and the brightest didn’t show up for Vietnam. And I understand. I get that it was an unpopular war. But they chose to not show up and there was a consequence for that. There were leadership failures. Standards were lowered and people were killed because of bad decisions. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going to happen whether I chose to participate or not. I was a fortunate son of this country. I had a good family. I went to a private school. I graduated from a great college. A lot of the guys who served under me didn’t have those advantages. They relied on me to make tough decisions in dangerous situations. And I’m glad I was there to make those decisions.”

“The 2nd Battle of Fallujah began on November 8th, 2004. The plan basically called for the entire 1st Marine Division to form a giant line and advance through Fallujah from north to south. The city was overrun with insurgents. My company commander ordered the platoon that I led to establish a forward position. Forty- six of us snuck across a highway at 3 AM to seize a building 150 meters in front of everyone else. It was a candy store. The guys were excited at first because the place was filled with chips and soda. And we were starving and thirsty. But all hell broke loose when the sun came up. RPG’s started slamming into the side of the building. We could see guys in black sneaking up all around us. My platoon sergeant was shot through the helmet and knocked unconscious. Another of our guys got shot in the femoral artery and his blood covered the floors. And we couldn’t get out. Every exit was dialed in with machine gun fire. You couldn’t even poke your head out. We were pinned down all day. And suddenly my company commander is on the radio saying that we’ve got to advance. And I’m shouting into the radio over the gunfire that we're probably going to die if we leave the store. I’m shouting so loud and for so long that I lost my voice for four days. But he’s saying that we have no choice. He’s being pressured by his commanders, all the way up to the generals. And the generals are being pressured by the White House. And all my guys are looking at me because they know if I lose that argument, we're going out there. And I lose the argument. And I tell them that we have to go. But instead of running out the door, we piled a bunch of explosives on the back wall, and we blew it out. And we ran. And everyone survived. Twenty-five guys were wounded, but everyone survived. A lot of that was luck. And a lot of that was our platoon and how good those guys were. But I also feel that my decisions mattered that day. And if I had decided not to serve, and stayed home, it could've ended much worse. So no, I don't have any regrets about going to Iraq.”

“You see this really fucking horrible stuff. You see guys blown to bits. You see dogs eating people. And the whole time there’s this little voice in your head that says: ‘That’s not normal, that’s not normal.’ And the longer you stay in that place, the quieter the voice gets. That voice is like your anchor. If it gets too quiet, it’s hard to come back. If I’d stayed in Fallujah for two years, maybe I’d be fucked up. But I left after a month. The experience profoundly affected me. But it doesn’t haunt me. I don’t think I’m sick. I’ve had complete strangers tell me that I’m in denial. There’s this tendency to pathologize the entire war experience. And recently ‘PTSD’ has become a catch-all to describe every veteran with a mental illness. I’m just not comfortable with that trend. A lot of good Marines have PTSD. But a lot of us don’t.”

“I never thought Iraq was a good idea. I thought it was a stupid war. I remember getting into an argument with my Dad about it. But the war started, so it became a question: ‘What am I going to do about it?’ Was my best choice to stay in Cambridge and hold up a protest sign? Or was it to deploy and try to create a better outcome for the guys who were going to war no matter what? It’s complicated. Did I kill people? If I did, you paid me to do it. You didn’t have to pay your taxes. Our military may have fought the war, but our whole society went to war. All of us were part of what happened.”

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