Page 838 - Total War on PTSD

When we went to Desert Storm we went to and we were training in the winter time in Fort Riley when it was snowing...and we were doing desert training. So that was kind of interesting. It did snow in the gulf...in Saudi Arabia...at night...it did get cold enough to snow. My first experience there...I was terrified...I thought we were going right into combat. We landed in the rear with the gear and they acclimated us to the country first before they sent us out. We were responsible for guarding the gates at Ryad Airbase. We spent quite a bit of time there...like three or four weeks. Then we pushed forward. We were out in the middle of the desert with nobody. No prison camps for the prisoners to be put into. I thought "Man, this ain't really happening".
My next memories were the first time I saw somebody die. They were in a truck. There were six of them in the front of a semi-truck...three on the tail of the semi-truck...because it was a bobtail...there was no trailer on it. They had a head-on collision. We went up the road right after they cleared it...and there were bodies everywhere. They did not clear them out. Not for quite a long while. We had just eaten lunch with them not 45 minutes before. It was really kinda sad. I found liquor over there though. I always found liquor over there. We went forward with the front-line troops and we carried over 400,000 prisoners to the rear from the front-lines. And we did that in seven months...I was there seven months, 14 days and three and a half hours.
Coming home, we had it made. People loved us. I worked for Walmart 3rd shift and they gave me 1st shift and they had a lottery for a T.V. I didn't even enter the lottery and I won the T.V. That was kinda cool. When we came home to S. Carolina, and even though I didn't have family there I was still cheered on by everyone else's family. It was really neat. I had a lot of troubles re-acclimating to the world and coming back to the states. Thunder and lightning would strike
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