Josh began telling war stories every chance he could. These stories really seemed to mark a high level of awareness despite how he was feeling or how under the influence he was. His face lit up every time he told about the great things his men had done. Although these stories were not for the faint of heart, they kept him going. It was also eye-opening to read all the things that happened to Josh, not just in front of him. With his newfound friends, Josh continued to open up about his time in Afghanistan. I would play along with the presumed humor of his stories even though they all sounded terrifying. Yet all of our new acquaintances had similar “funny” experiences. It was awesome to see Josh having real conversations with people. I stayed quiet during these interactions and just enjoyed watching him talk to another veteran. As I read Josh’s journal on nights that I stayed at the Fisher House, it was nice to read the same stories he was telling the other amputees. It confirmed that all the drugs and anesthesia were not stealing his memory. However, I quickly learned that the questions about his anxiety and outbursts had to be read between the lines of this journal. If any story had an element of humor or something presumably “cool” Josh would talk about it nonstop. It was the stomach-turning entries that contained all the things he couldn’t say. For every funny entry, there was a bad entry that was more intense than the last one, which already put me in a cold sweat. The new rule for the journal was that it had to stay at the Fisher House. I did not want to be tempted to ask Josh about a certain incident, and I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to him reading it. What once seemed like a book of great stories from my husband’s service soon turned into a bitter medicine that I had to take. I had to read it if I wanted to understand, but it would no longer be several pages at a time. I could only consume what I could stomach. Some days that was one or two sentences.
During the time of the following journal entry, Josh was on a weapons squad, which is the team that handles the weapons that can be carried outside of the issued M-4. However, the line squad had lost their team leader. Josh was the weapons squad team leader, so he was the choice for the move.
JOSH’S JOURNAL ENTRIES
03 MAY 2012
We have been so busy it’s nuts. We are extremely undermanned because of injuries. I am about to move back to a line squad as a team leader in training. Our rotation has been patrol, ground lock, patrol, and Force Pro classes. Every now and then we have a maintenance day… In four days, I have had ten hours of sleep.
We went on patrol today and took contact for the first time in almost a month. It was actually a really fun firefight. We were moving toward “Taliban Hill” when we took small arms fire from somewhere on the hill. We returned fire and dropped two mortars. Then we bounded up and found fighting positions in a grape field, but we didn’t really have to fire much at that point. We continued and found casings from an AK-47. When we were moving from the first village to the second village, we took fire again. Our bounding element (a.k.a. the moving element) was taking fire while we were support by fire. The problem was the bounding element had moved out of our site and we couldn’t see where the shots were coming from. SO… my element pulled the sickest flanking maneuver in the history of the Army (led by me). We moved through a poppy field to a wall covered by trees. We saw the attackers and decided to move in closer. We hopped over the wall, jumped down into some five-foot-deep grape rows and moved toward the enemy. We popped up out of nowhere and shot an RPG and the LAW while rocking the 240. After that, the firefight was pretty much over. The funniest part was when the ANA guy forgot to warn everyone, he was about to shoot an RPG and the back blast knocked Doc right on his butt. I thought he had been hit by a mortar round. I had a blast though. None of our guys got hurt.
07 MAY 2012
I never expect to get in a firefight while on ground lock. Today, I got into two. I had to move to the other two ground lock positions to fill their radios [syncing radio codes to each radio so everyone can communicate]. Everyone who wasn’t on ground lock was participating in clearing ops. This time we were clearing all of the obstacles that created dead space for the ground lock positions. When I went up to the other two positions, the rest of my platoon was to my truck’s 12:00. Me, [CPL] Navarro, and SSG Murphy had just walked up and said hello to the guys doing the clearing when we took our first contact. It was just pop shots at the bulldozer, but we unleashed the fury. I was laying down cover fire
