Beautifully Broken

the other tales but mostly thankful that Josh was telling them with such pride and honor. As he spoke, I not only learned a lot about the men he served with, but I also learned a lot about him, too. Josh completely defaulted to his training when the bullets were flying, but when the dust settled and the conflict ended, his mind and emotions were forced to catch up to what had happened. Each guy had a different way of coping. Josh took up smoking cigarettes and writing down the day’s events. Other guys played cards or lifted weights, all with the same intention of decompressing. Externally, he was focused, steadfast, and confident. Internally, his emotions were back and forth like a pendulum. One day he felt guilty for doing his job; the next day he didn’t. Some days he wanted to open up about his feelings; some days he hardly had anything to say. Some days it’s just a job; other days it’s your life or someone else’s.

JOSH’S JOURNAL ENTRIES

02 APRIL 2012

We went on our first patrol today. It was pretty nuts. We were on foot the whole time. We took contact about 1.5 hours into the mission. First, we took indirect fire. Then, I am not sure what happened. I just hit the ground and started firing. I saw rounds impacting in front of me. I couldn’t say if I was scared, excited, or what. It just happened. I didn’t even think about it. Then, when I got behind cover, I was pretty juiced up. When we took contact, we were in the middle of a field. It was probably the craziest thing that has ever happened in my life. We used every weapon we had with us: .50 cal, 240, SAW, 204’s, 320’s, and M-4’s. I’m just glad none of us were hurt.

07 APRIL 2012

We are on 72-hour ground lock right now and it is miserable! We have five people in a Stryker and we just sit in an area and “control it” for 72 hours. Being here and watching the kids makes me think though. These little girls make me so sad. They all remind me of my little sisters. I wish I could help them. The one I have been seeing today has been herding goats with her little brother. She is probably 11 and he is probably 7. They both just push these goats around the fields all day long. They do it with such ease. The little girl uses a stick to get 1 or 2 going then the rest follow. If there is a straggler, they throw rocks at it until it realizes it’s time to move. These people are completely different from us. They work so hard just to live. While in America, we can sit around and do nothing and still somehow make money.

The fighting season is starting to pick up significantly. More and more Taliban are coming from Pakistan every day. Not as many of the village elders are coming to the meetings with our leadership anymore. There are reports that the Taliban are threatening them and scaring them off. Hopefully we can get them back since they are an essential part of our mission.

I miss home pretty bad most days. I miss my wife and I can’t wait to see her again. Time is going by pretty quick though. It has already been a month since we left. That means we have about 8 months to go.

08 APRIL 2012

Things got a little more personal today. Our group that went out got into a firefight and when they were getting everything set up to go back to the base, the truck with my squad leader hit an IED. We were literally 150 meters from it. We couldn’t see it because it was behind a wall. I don’t understand why I wasn’t in that truck. It was my truck with my squad leader in it. I do thank God for my safety though. Nobody was hurt but the Stryker was disabled because the blast blew the two front wheels off. The craziest thing was we drove right over that spot on the way to our new ground lock location. [As I think about this now, it was very likely the bomb was there, and it did not detonate because placing it there between trips would have meant the Taliban pulled people out of a firefight to plant a bomb in broad daylight. The trucks must have barely missed it on the way out.]

09 APRIL 2012

I honestly thought we were going to go outside the wire today and not take any contact. I was wrong… The road we were on winds through a village. It starts out in a heavily populated area. Then, the buildings became abandoned and crumbling with poppy fields all around. It looks like a prime place to make HME [homemade explosives]. I am going to expect contact every time we go there. We keep taking fire from this grape hut in the middle of the fields but there is no safe way to get to it so we can’t assault it. Yesterday, the guys who were out got intel that the area was an ambush site… These Taliban seem to be getting braver as the fighting season drives on. I want to take the fight to them so bad, but rules make it hard. Most of the reason they fire at us is to get us to move into a certain area. Usually that area contains a bunch of IED’s. I wish the ANA [Afghan National Army] would search houses more. That way we could find the HME factories and maybe slow the IED’s down.

We also got intel that the Taliban leader is shipping a package of 500 RPG’s, 200 feet of detonation cord, 100 blasting caps, along with AK-47’s and ammo for them. The fight is about to get real.

11 APRIL 2012

Today we were out on patrol and took contact. We were on our way