I spent my 03 tour mostly in Kuwait. I went in February and built the combat support hospital. As soon as we finished, the war started the next day, March 20th. So I got to live out the MASH tv show I used to watch as a kid. I was a mechanic so my additional duty was litter bearer. So many wounded, maimed and dead came through that hospital. Soldiers, civilians(locals and US contractors. When surgeries took place, I’d sleep on the generators so I could make sure they didn’t lose power and then lose a life. I will always remember one Kuwaiti family. The mom was real sick, close to death. So dad grabbed mom and his 8year old daughter and raced to post. He was in such a hurry he raced around barricades toward the gate and the gate guards opened fire. Mom was killed, dad went into a 13 hr surgery where he lost a leg which was given to me to take to the bio freezer, daughter lost her right eye. Since, her parents were out of commission the nurses pretty much took care of her and I spent a lot of time with that young lady. I just had my daughter 2 weeks before I deployed so that little girl pulled in my heart strings. I can still see her face and I often wonder what happened to her.
When I got back from that fun, I was put on funeral detail and folded about 300 flags in 2 months before I pcs’d to Colorado. I can’t do funerals anymore, not even family members. It was an honor to do that for the soldiers and their families but that shit broke me. Listening to 5 different families a day mourn a love one as you try to fold a flag perfectly and keep your composure was a mission in itself. I really started having issues at this point. Waking up to every siren and start looking for my gear, waking up the wife and telling her to be quiet “they” are over there while crouched down holding an invisible M16. Shit was getting real. Lol
Another deployment from fort Carson and I really had issues. Had a near miss, let some people borrow our vehicle so they could convoy to Kuwait, on the way back they were hit with an IED made with copper, super heated copper melts through the armor plating, the 4 soldiers sitting were decapitated, the gunner was in half. We had to tow it back with everyone inside then clean it out. Not fun. I was supposed to go, but the camp commanders vehicle needed work so that’s where I was at. Crazy how that works. So I did the one thing you should never do in the military and I was truthful about my my mental state. 3 months later I was med boarded and sent on my way.
Needed a job, so I deployed to Qatar as a civilian to work on battle damaged Strykers. I’d cry every time the vehicles came in almost cut in half because I knew no in made it. On top of that, when cleaning the inside out we’d find pieces and parts of the former occupants. Well, now I drink and smoke to cope. Lots of meds, lots of therapy and I’m still stuck. One day, oil figure this all out.
I’m done now, sorry.
This is what this was made for.
No apologies needed here. They just get in the way.
My experience was a jumbled mess of "huh, what."
Field artillery, paladins. We did the regular 6 month rotation in Kuwait in '02, came back to find my first wife had put me $3k in debt while I was gone, and a two weeks later my mom died in 5 car hit and run pileup in a construction zone caused by a drunk driver. Learned to hate my older sister. Mom wasn't even in the ground, but she was wondering through the house pointing out all of Mom's stuff she wanted to inherit. Still gets huffy over dad spending the life insurance money on paying off the house.
Couple months later a rotation at NTC. We all new the war was coming, and we'd get home just in time to pack up and go back to the desert. We were right. Got stop-loss'ed, and made it in theater two days before the whole "mission accomplished" thing.
We were supposed to be the 2nd wave of the invasion that turned out to be unnecessary, so we got a one hour crash course in building clearing tactics from an infantryman, then sent to Baghdad and told to make like MPs. We had NO idea what we were doing.
Running around in ammo tracks like they're APCs, patrols and checkpoints, transferring prisoners, all that junk. I personally spent an inordinate amount of time on a guard tower watching traffic.
We knew an insurgency was coming, and we knew it would be AKs and IEDs, and we knew we were screwed when it kicked off. Because we had NO idea what we were doing.
I figured the easiest way to cope was just to accept that my end could be around every corner, and that there was nothing I could do about it, so just turn that damned corner like your heading to the club.
That's what got me. When I went home I was so confused at the notion that NOTHING HAPPENED. Fired one shot the whole time, and that was a tracer. (Some guy took his pants off to moon me, so I lit his pants on fire.
My favorite 4th of July memory.)
A couple months later things lit up for real, and I added survivors guilt to the existential cognitive dissonance.
Like I said, didn't see much, but just enough to understand.