The Note I Wrote for PTSD Trauma Group
I remember that I was on my way back from visiting a soldier whose vehicle was attacked by an improvised explosive device, laughing about it with him, when I met you. I was nearing the exit from the ER when your nurse rolled you out in a wheel chair. What was left of your legs and arms were covered in gauze, wrapped and packed tightly around the stumps that remained of them, and you were heavily sedated. But we locked eyes, and in that moment, the war became far too immediate for me. Until that point, I was in a far-off country, mortared daily, and inexpertly, by a specter of an enemy that, but for those daily interruptions, were an amorphous notion, someone else's problem.
But the grotesque immediacy of the situation plummeted into my naivete in that moment. I wasn't in a far-off country. I was in your home town, where you grew up knowing only war. I don't know how you had your arms and legs taken from you. Was it our side that did that? The enemy? If it were me in that chair, I can't imagine that it would matter, and I don't think it did to you either, because in your eyes, all I could see was pain, and despair. You couldn't hold back your tears, even heavily sedated. You didn't know this about me, but in the career I left to come to your city, I was a martial arts instructor. I taught other kids your age, treated their cuts and scrapes when they got injured. Protecting people and empowering them was what I do. It's a part of who I am.
But what the hell could I do for you? You'll never have your legs or arms back. You were going right back to the same town me and my people put a scumbag dictator in charge of, the same town my people decimated in removing him from power. I don't know if you knew that or not. In that moment, it didn't really register to me as much as the fact that all I wanted to do was comfort you, hug you, and make everything better. But I couldn't even do that.You were in far too much physical pain for a hug.
I don't know what became of you. I don't know if you're even still alive. And I don't know what I'd say to you now if I ever met you in person. But I do know from a lot of hospital visits that we tried not to pay attention to our own casualties unless we knew them personally. We did this to survive emotionally. Watching you cry, I noticed that other soldiers passed you as if you weren't there. And when we got home, we did our best to put Iraq out of our minds, and try (not always sucessfully) to get back to a semblance of a normal life.
But if there's something I can say to you it's this: I will not forget you. You matter, and what happened to you matters. It shouldn't happen to anyone, it's not right, and I will not try and make it right in my mind. I'll never forget you, and I'll never forget that moment when I realized what war is, and what it did to you. It shouldn't happen to anyone, and where I can I'll try and stop it from happening. I'm not a super hero, and I don't know how much an impact I can make. In many ways, I'm as helpless as you are, just fortunate that the circumstances I was born to were safer. None of this makes anything that happened right, and there's nothing I can fix here. But I will carry the memory with me and live, as much as possible.
Where you are able, and what ever ways you are able, I wish the same for you.
-SPC Oakley