Page 1004 - Total War on PTSD

year-old Soldier nearly decapitated by what could only have been an enemy sniper’s bullet. We ran to give aid, but we knew it might be too late to save him. We were under attack and getting hit by enemy fire. We knew we had to try to locate the enemy sniper, so Smith administered first aid while Panned and I ran up to a vantage point to try to spot where the enemy fire was coming from. We later found out that the young Soldier had killed himself. That was a real wake-up call, not only to me but also to the guy’s I was serving with a lot of old timers who had been involved in the conflict of Desert Storm. But we had a lot of new, young guys who had joined, sadly, with the idea that it was cool to kill people, to kill the enemy. I can assure anyone who reads this that there is nothing cool or glorious in killing anyone, even the enemy. I am truly glad that the guy’s I oversaw were great people who listened and thought first and never jumped head first into anything. All the guys and gals I served with came home.
I was assigned to the Special Forces while I was over there, and my job was to keep all the equipment up and running and to recover any equipment damaged during a mission. But as a combat heavy company, our major mission was to build base camp for the troops coming over to help fight this war. Being in charge of the Contact Team, a special team that would go out and recover equipment that had either broken down or had been blown up. One day, we were called out to recover a front-end loader that had broken down. While we were repairing it, it flipped over and pinned me down between the tires that had been taken off and the machine itself. A front-end loader weighs just over a ton, and I was very lucky I didn’t get the full weight of it. But it did some damage to my body — I broke my neck, the center of my back, and my lower lumbar area. I also suffered a major Traumatic Brain Injury when the back of my skull was cracked, causing a major seizure disorder which I still live with today.
The team that was with me was the best. Junior, who is still a close buddy of mine, was there, and he really saved my life that day. He acted quickly, taking over to get things done and get me out of the jam I was in. I was told afterward about what he did to save my life that day. I had no idea how bad I was until they shipped me out to Germany. The doctors there at the Army hospital did a great job fixing me up. The neurosurgeons who worked on me discovered that the C1 cervical vertebra was broken on the right side of my body and had been shoved upward to
1004 of 1042