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ready for a day of rifle practice on a nearby range. But first they had to line up for breakfast at the mess tent. “Because I guarded the ammo at night, I was usually first in line, right at seven o’clock,” Melanie told me. “But for some reason, I kept stalling. The guy who relieved me said, ‘come on, it’s been 15 minutes. Get going.’ So I did.”
At 7:20, Melanie was fifth in line when two artillery shells fell far short of their drill target and sent shrapnel ripping through the mess tent. The cannon shells, each with the power to rip apart a tank, were fired after members of another battalion “acting in a negligent manner,” according to Fort Drum’s then acting commander.
“We saw the shells coming.” Melanie recalled, “And then there was the explosion. The first person in line was killed instantly. That’s where I usually was. And another Sergeant whom I knew very well was killed. He didn’t die right away. He died later.
But I watched him struggle as we tried to take care of him.”
Melanie was thrown through the air. “I didn’t even realize I was hurt,” she said. “I was trying to help everyone else. Then I saw I had two pieces of shrapnel in my left leg.”
Her wounds healed, but the trauma remained. “You just don’t plan for that on your own base,” she said. “You plan for it over there, in Iraq.” Melanie went home, and things only got worse. “From my experience with military PTSD, there’s a lot of triggers.
There are so many noises that happen — a car backfiring or fireworks — that will bring up a previous event."
Worse, even the anticipation of being triggered caused Melanie to live in a clenched state of panic. “I had tightness in my chest and pain there all the time,” she said. After a decade of feeling untethered, Melanie, now a tattoo artist working out of Lawrenceville, Georgia, sought the expertise of a therapist who helped her work through her survivor’s
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