Soldiers
Share the Devastating Tales of War
By Emily DePrang
Texas Observer
07/10/07 "Alternet"
--- 07/04/07-- Statistics are one way to tell the story
of the approximately 1.4 million servicemen and women who've
been to Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a study published
in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004, 86 percent
of soldiers in Iraq reported knowing someone who was
seriously injured or killed there. Some 77 percent reported
shooting at the enemy; 75 percent reported seeing women or
children in imminent peril and being unable to help.
Fifty-one percent reported handling or uncovering human
remains; 28 percent were responsible for the death of a
noncombatant. One in five Iraq veterans return home
seriously impaired by post-traumatic stress disorder.
Words are another way. Below are the stories of three
veterans of this war, told in their voices, edited for flow
and efficiency but otherwise unchanged. They bear out the
statistics and suggest that even those who are not
diagnosably impaired return burdened by experiences they can
neither forget nor integrate into their postwar lives. They
speak of the inadequacy of what the military calls
reintegration counseling, of the immediacy of their worst
memories, of their helplessness in battle, of the struggle
to rejoin a society that seems unwilling or unable to
comprehend the price of their service. Strangers to one
another and to me, they nevertheless tried, sometimes
through tears, to communicate what the intensity of an
ambiguous war has done to them.
One veteran, Sue Randolph, put it this way: "People walk up
to me and say, 'Thank you for your service.' And I know they
mean well, but I want to ask, 'Do you know what you're
thanking me for?'" She, Rocky, and Michael Goss offer their
stories here in the hope that citizens will begin to know.
***
Michael Goss, 29, served two tours in Iraq. He grew up in
Corpus Christi and returned there after his
other-than-honorable discharge. He lives with his brother.
He is divorced and sees his children every other weekend
while working the graveyard shift as a bail bondsman. He is
quietly intelligent, thoughtful and attentive, always saying
"ma'am" and opening the door for people. He struggles with
severe PTSD and is obsessed with learning about the
insurgency by studying reports and videos online. He is
awaiting treatment from the Veterans Administration. He has
been waiting for over a year.
Michael Goss:
I gave the Army seven years. It was supposed to be my
career. I did two tours in Iraq, in 2003 and 2005. But
during the last one, I started to get depressed. I lost
faith in my chain of command. I became known as a rogue NCO.
That's how I got my other-than-honorable discharge.
One night they said to me, "Sgt. Goss, gather your best
guys." I say, "Where we going?" They say, "Don't worry about
it, just come on." So we get in the car and go. We drive
three blocks away, and there's six dead soldiers on the
ground. They say, "You're casualty collecting tonight." I'm
not prepared for that. I wasn't taught how to do that. But
you're there. So you pick them up, and you put them in a
body bag, pieces by pieces, and you go back to your unit,
and you stand inside your room. And they're like, "You're
going on a patrol, come on." You're like, "Hang on a minute.
Let me think about what I just did here." I just put six
American guys in damn body bags. Nobody's prepared for that.
Nobody's prepared for that thing to blow up on the side of
the road. You're talking, and you're driving, and then
something blows up, and the next thing you know, two of your
guys are missing their faces. They just want you to get up
the next day and go, go, let's do it again, you're a
soldier. Yeah, I got the soldier part, OK?
It gets to the point where they numb you. They numb you to
death. They numb you to anything. You come back, and it
starts coming back to you slowly. Now you gotta figure out a
way to deal with it. In Iraq you had a way to deal with it,
because they kept pushing you back out there. Keep pushing
you back out into the streets. Go, go, go. Hey, I just shot
four people today. Yeah, and in about four hours you're
going to go back out, and you'll probably shoot six more. So
let's go. Just deal with it. We'll fix it when we get back.
That's basically what they're telling you. We'll fix it all
when we get back. We'll get your head right and everything
when we get back to the States. I'm sorry, it's not like
that. It's not supposed to be like that. All the soldiers
have post-traumatic stress disorder, and they're like, "Hey,
you're good. You went to counseling four times, you can go
back to Iraq. It's OK." No. It doesn't work that way.
I have PTSD. I know when I got it -- the night I killed an
8-year-old girl. Her family was trying to cross a
checkpoint. We'd just shot three guys who'd tried to run a
checkpoint. And during that mess, they were just trying to
get through to get away from it all. And we ended up
shooting all them, too. It was a family of six. The only one
that survived was a 13-month-old and her mother. And the
worst part about it all was that where I shot my bullets,
when I went to see what I'd shot at, there was an 8-year-old
girl there. I tried my best to bring her back to life, but
there was no use. But that's what triggered my depression.
When I got out of the Army, I had 10 days to get off base.
There was no reintegration counseling. As soon as I got
back, nobody gave a fuck about anything except that piece of
paper that said I got everything out of my room. I got out
of the Army, and everything went to shit from there.
My wife ended up finding another guy. I'm getting divorced,
and I'm fighting for custody. She wants child support, the
house, the car, the boys.
I get three nights off a week. And I drink and take pills to
help me sleep at night. I do what I can to help myself. I
talk to friends. Soldiers who were there. Once in a while
one of my old soldiers will call me, drunk off his ass,
crying about the stuff he saw in Iraq. And all I can do is
tell him, "You and me both are going to have to find a way
to work this out." That's the only thing I can tell him.
I do martial arts, that's what I do. I go in a cage and I
fight. It helps take my mind off of things. I get hurt, but
I can't feel it. I don't feel it until after it's all over
with.
So let's put this in perspective now. I got two Iraq tours,
multiple kills, I picked up plenty of dead bodies, American
bodies, enemy bodies. I killed an 8-year-old girl, which
still haunts me to this day. I come back home. My wife finds
somebody else. I'm sleeping on my brother's couch while she
has the apartment, the kids, the car, everything that we
worked on together. I work as a bail bondsman making $432 a
week, which all goes to my brother. I have to fight just to
see my boys because she's at the point where she thinks I
don't deserve to see my kids because I haven't had help for
my PTSD. She's scared I might do something stupid. And the
VA won't help me out because of my other-than-honorable
discharge. What else do you want to know?
Every month the VA sends me a letter saying I'm still under
review. I'm like, I couldn't care less about the money. I
don't care about disability percentage. I want you to tell
me to go to this fucking doctor here and go get help. That's
what I want them to tell me. If they think I don't deserve
money because I got kicked out with other-than-honorable
discharge, fine. But don't tell me I'm cured all of a
sudden, because I'm not. I still have my nightmares, anxiety
attacks, panic attacks, I still see the glitter from the IED
blowing up when I'm going down the street. I still see the
barrette in her hair when I carried her out of the car to
the ambulance when she was bleeding all over me. I still see
all that. And there's nothing that I can do about that now.
***
Rocky, 26, prefers to remain anonymous. He joined the Army
shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and went to
Iraq in 2004 for one year and a day. A Houston native, he
lives alone now in a Dallas apartment, goes to community
college and works in construction. He's funny, playful and
handsome, and carries a pool cue in his trunk to be ready
for a game at any time. He doesn't tell people he's a
veteran. He doesn't like to talk about it. This story is an
exception.
Rocky:
I was one of those kids that could have been handed anything
on a silver platter. But I really worked hard for everything
anyway, because I wanted to prove myself. And my parents,
who would have given me anything, ruled with an iron fist.
And I was patriotic. So it seemed like everything in my life
pointed to the Army as the way to go.
I was 20. I'm sure I was different then. I don't know how. I
know how I am now. I assume that the character traits that I
show now are the core set of values that I left with. My
sense of pride, hard work. Everything I have, I made out of
nothing.
You get to see what people are made of over there. You get
to see how shallow people are, how weak they are. How strong
they can be in horrible moments. And then how the people you
should be looking up to are hiding, and you have to look out
for them. You get to really see what a person is made of.
And over there, I learned to read people. I know what
they're going to do before they do it. After seeing the same
movements before you get shot at or bombed, the same
symptoms of the city and the people around you -- it's a
fluid movement. Doors close, people disappear, and all of a
sudden you're like, OK guys, hunker down, it's about to hit
us. And all of a sudden, you're under fire.
People would pop shots at us and pop back. They'd have a
setup where they have a bomb in the road, and everybody sits
by the windows when they set off an IED. When we're looking
at what's going on, everybody's laughing and pointing and
smiling after your buddy's sitting there bleeding. So I held
them all responsible. Everybody that was in the guilty
range.
If there was gunfire coming from a window, I shot into that
window and made sure nothing was coming back out at me. One
time, there was an RPG shooter shooting at me. He hit a
Bradley in front of us, and we were in a Humvee. He hit the
Bradley in front of us, and the round didn't go off. It got
stuck in the mud. So the Bradley rolled back, and we rolled
back. And I had to shoot the position-caller before I could
shoot the actual shooter. He didn't have a gun, but I knew
what he was doing. He was the one calling out what's going
on. He was on the phone. So I sent a shot up 20 feet above
him and below him and to the side of him. And he just stood
there. On his phone, talking the whole time. Innocent people
run. The bad guys stay and fight. If they're not running,
they're going to be calling. That's the way I see it. So I
shot him. If you freaked out and stood still, I'm sorry. I
cannot take this chance again. You have to start making
these moral decisions. Better to be judged by 12 than
carried by six. You're caught in the fucking middle of it.
After that, now I think, well, now I'm damned. Now I've done
the worst thing. There's not much more worse you can do than
shoot an unarmed person. It's not just, man, now I got to
fucking deal with this. It's like, man, I hope nobody saw
that, because I'll go to jail, too. You feel so horrible.
You kind of die inside. There's really nothing beneath me
now. I'm at the bottom of the barrel. You're worried about
salvation and people finding out these dirty little secrets.
It's not something that you wanted to do. It might be
something that you had to do, that you accidentally did.
Things happen. And then there's the whole fear of going to
jail for trying to do what's right for your country -- it's
bad. Sometimes you think people are shooting at you, and
you'd rather just chance it because you're hoping they don't
have an armor-piercing round.
But I'm not going to bow down. I know what I'm made of -- do
you? Most people have no idea what matters. When I'm
standing at the gates and I see St. Peter, I'll say, lemme
in. I try to do right now. I don't want to hurt anybody's
feelings. I go to school, maybe I'll earn a midlevel job.
Just fly under the radar. I don't want any attention. I just
want to be away from people. Not many people call me still.
I keep it real dim in my apartment. I like it calm and
quiet. This is what life's made of. Being able to relax and
be safe. Watch a movie, play some video games. Just to sit
back and have fun with your friends. That's beautiful.
***
Sue Randolph, 39, grew up in Saudi Arabia and earned her
master's degree in Arabic at the University of Michigan.
After her service in 2003, she moved to Houston with her
husband, a geologist. She now works in satellite
communications and raises her 3-year-old daughter, a
self-identified "princess," and a 2-month-old kitten named
Sparkles. Randolph's family goes kayaking and hiking on
weekends. She is clever, quick-witted, passionate and kind.
She still struggles with anxiety while driving and when
she's near crowds. She finds news about the war upsetting
and frustratingly inaccurate.
Sue Randolph:
I joined the Army because I had $65,000 in student loans and
didn't know how I was going to make payments. Since I had a
master's in political science -- Middle East studies and
Arabic -- I ended up doing translation as part of the search
for weapons of mass destruction. For a year, my team drove
around behind the 3rd Infantry getting shot at, getting
mortared, looking at warehouses of documents, chemicals, and
parts of things that could be WMDs. I mean, you name it, we
did it. We talked to people. We went into people's houses.
The technological level of the things I saw wasn't anywhere
near anything [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell
talked about. The buildings we went into, wiring was on the
outside of the walls. I didn't see anything like the
equipment you'd see in a fifth-grade science lab. The most
technically advanced thing we saw was a 12-volt car battery
hooked up to bedsprings for torture. But not anything on the
chemical or biological level.
Iraq looks like it's straight out of the Bible. It's mud
brick, it's falling down. It's kids with sticks herding
goats. There's like three high-rises in all of Baghdad, and
those are the only ones you'll ever see on any newscast. The
rest of it is mud brick falling down.
At the time, I would see little girls on the side of the
road, and I felt like I was part of a big machine that was
going to help them have a better life. At the time. Now,
looking at all of the lack of evidence for us being there
except GW throwing a temper tantrum, frankly I feel -- not
used, because I signed up for it -- but I feel like we were
there for no good reason. Eventually Saddam would have been
overthrown, either by his own people or through Iran or
someone else, and change would have come. It wouldn't have
been on our timetable, but it would have happened. I don't
think it was worthwhile at all.
When I went back to my base in Germany, it was like a bad
dream. It was like nothing happened. Then I got out of the
Army and came back to the States. Once you leave the Army,
there's no reintegration help of any kind. Unless you went
looking for it, there was nothing. And even if you went
looking for it, you had to dig.
The military says that they're giving exit counseling and
reintegration. What they're calling reentry counseling, in
my experience, was, "Don't drink and drive. Pay your bills
on time. Don't beat your spouse. Don't kick your dog." All
of these things that once you've reached a certain age,
you're supposed to know. None of it is, "If you have
discomfort with dealing with crowds, if you don't feel
comfortable with your spouse, if you can't sleep in a bed,
if you don't want to drive down the road because you think
everything is a bomb, here's what to do." No psychological
or de-stress counseling is involved in this reintegration to
garrison. And that's just if you're staying in the Army. If
you're leaving the Army, you get, "Here's how to write a
resume."
They don't prepare you to leave. Hell, they didn't prepare
me to be there. I was going into people's houses trying to
tell the wife and kids as we're segregating them out from
the men that we're the good guys. But they're crying because
one of their kids got killed because he was up there
sleeping on the roof when we decided to bust into their
house. I mean that's crazy. But we're the good guys. Now I
have to deal with that for the next 20 or 30 years. I have a
3-year-old. I deal with that every day.
I think we are going to end up like after Vietnam if we're
not careful. The Vietnam guys were treated really horribly,
and whether they came back and quietly went back to their
lives or not, they were all stereotyped in a criminal
negative. And I'm afraid if we as a society don't learn what
we didn't do for those guys, we're going to have that in
spades. We don't have low-end kind of industry jobs for them
like working in the auto plant, so they're not going to be
supporting their families. And they're going to be angry.
They're going to feel like they're owed. Do we get everybody
counseling as soon as they get out, mandatory 90-day
counseling? I don't know how. But there isn't enough money
in this country right now to make some of these guys feel
like what they went through was worthwhile.
We have no comprehension of the psychological cost of this
war. I know kids in Iraq who killed themselves. I know kids
that got killed. OK, that's apparently the price of doing
business. But multiply me by 2 million. If I'm fairly
high-functioning, what about the ones that aren't? They're
going back to small-town America, and their families aren't
going to know what to do with them. It's like, what do we do
with Johnny now?
Emily DePrang is a writer from Pearland, Texas.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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