As a few more weeks passed, I was able to have small windows of clarity. The fog would lift for a moment, just long enough for my mind to drift. I was thinking back to the day I failed that run during Q Course. I could have run that in my sleep. I’d been in the course for fifteen months, and I was dropped for failing a run? How had I let this happen? I remembered my concern and embarrassment when I had to tell my dad. And then telling Paige was like icing on a cake made of failure. I had so many people pulling for me, and I felt like I had let so many people down. Not only did I fail out of the Q Course, but suddenly all our plans changed, and I had to prepare to deploy, something I had thought was way down the road.
Then my thoughts drifted from that horrible run to being in the big meeting room on post during a Family Readiness Group meeting before deployment. FRG leaders are typically the wives of the company commanders, who act as liaisons from family to deployed soldiers. I couldn’t help but notice the age range. Some guys were right out of high school, and some were older than my parents. All were preparing to be foot soldiers in Afghanistan. I remember thinking, This is the group. These are the people I’m deploying with.
During the meeting, the first sergeant showed us a slideshow of maps of where we would be and the dos and don’ts of a deployment. I listened to the information, but thinking about it now, I can’t say that I was really absorbing what I was hearing. I obviously had no prior experience with deployments. I just knew they were hard, and I assumed we wouldn’t get to talk to our spouses much. The piece of information that struck a nerve with Paige was the only reason I could leave the deployment other than injury: death of immediate family. Immediate family means mother, father, wife, or child. So, if one of my sisters passed away, I would not be allowed to come back for the funeral. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins wouldn’t count. For this small-town Alabama man, that was hard to comprehend.
I am not one to express my feelings very much, but on the inside, I remembered being terrified of what to expect. I had done a little research on the area where we would be deploying, and that didn’t help my fears. Everything I read pointed to this being one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan, an area the enemy would fight for with relentless abandon. I was hoping to keep this information to myself so I wouldn’t worry Paige, but I knew this FRG meeting would spark questions that I would inevitably have to answer. I’ve been told numerous times that I do not have a healthy fear of anything, and I would have agreed until I was asked to go to Afghanistan. Fighting an unconventional enemy scared me. The Taliban has no rules, and they wanted to die for their country. It’s like in sports, when you travel to play someone at their home field. We were literally going to fight an enemy who was undefeated on their home field.
I also thought of how I felt later that evening after the FRG meeting. I was trying to decide which terrible thought to start discussing with Paige, but then suddenly my mouth started speaking before my mind could catch up. I began telling Paige what I had heard about Afghanistan, and then unexpectedly I was crying—my mouth and my eyes really needed to get their act together. Paige was on her way to the closet when she suddenly froze in her tracks. My choking sob, her looking back at me, and my swirling thoughts of deployment—it was like I was viewing the scene from above. Now, I’ve been known to cry during sappy movies and when babies are born, and I will admit to glistening eyes on our wedding day, but I have never cried out of fear.
Ironically, once I got to Afghanistan and the action began, something changed about my fear. Afghanistan wasn’t like what we had prepared for—it was worse. But I didn’t lock up when I heard bullets flying for the first time or the dozens of times after. The fear became motivation. I never froze. The minute I heard us taking enemy contact, I would hit the ground and start unloading my M240 in the direction of the bad guys while my platoon got to cover. All I could think was, If I don’t get after them as hard as they are getting after us, somebody on my side is going to get hurt. Suddenly, I didn’t really care what happened to me. I only cared about what happened to my friends. That thought broke the reservoir of adrenaline that I had been missing for so long. I was going to make sure nothing happened to my friends.
Now I was on the other side of the world, out of harm’s way, and I could do nothing to help them. I was so thankful it was me that got hurt. I knew I could take this. But I didn’t know what I would do if someone else became an amputee or got killed. I could have kept everyone else safe—I found over thirty IEDs after I volunteered to be the minesweeper. I gave up being the 240 gunner to volunteer to carry the
