You Can’t Be Traumatized if You Never Went to War (An Army Story)

Throwing A Grenade Builds Character

I still remember the first time I tossed a grenade. I was in a field exercise with my unit, and we were broken up into teams, each one assigned to a different war game. We alternated every hour or two, and the one I was most excited about was the grenade exercise. Now, the bunker had a wall in front of it, with a hole carved out which we would have to throw the grenade through. Not drop it through, or lightly toss it. Throw that motherfucker with all your might. There were several variables to consider — distance, for one — but also the misfires that could occur. You might miss the hole, for example, which apparently happened from time to time. The grenade might just fall in place or it might backfire and launch at your head, or the head of one of your team, or go off in some other direction. Having the hole there was really to prevent those with terrible aim from throwing the grenade somewhere else entirely, potentially killing or maiming an unsuspecting soldier. According to a 2019 congressional report, 31% of soldier deaths occur in training, while only 16% occur in combat. So don’t think that because we were training that we were somehow safer. Sure, we got instructions on what to do, and practiced throwing motions a couple of times, but we were by no means experts.

Now, when I pulled that pin, if I had thought about all the variables that could result in my death, I would have been paralyzed with fear. I might have even stared at the pin, my heart pounding, as my mind ticked down the seconds — then boom! I’d suddenly be missing a hand, possibly some organs, or I could just be fucking dead. When you take a risk, the more you think, the more danger you are in. If you want to survive, you pull the pin, take a millisecond to aim, and throw that grenade. Duck behind the wall, cover your head, and wait for the shrapnel and ash to fall to the ground.

My last year in the Army was my first year in Colorado. I was sent to a school for becoming a Sergeant even though I was on my way out. The school was on base, so it wasn’t like I was out of town, but because the school is considered essential for soldiers to attend, it was treated as the only thing I was allowed to focus on. I couldn’t leave for appointments or call in sick. I was expected to show up every day, no excuses. This being the Army, there are always exceptions, you learn that early on, and one day I got mine, and every day since I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish I didn’t have the memory of being pulled from the school and taken to the base hospital and escorted to the psychiatric ward. Not for me, it was for one of my fellow soldiers, a young woman in our squad I had befriended, apparently far more than I had even realized. She had overdosed on pills and was now recovering and the only person she would talk to was me.

The reason for this is that I had been the only person since she had come home from Afghanistan who listened to her, believed her story, and gave a shit. The Army and all her superiors wanted her to get over the thing that was giving her night terrors and making her suicidal. Nobody wanted to listen or help. She kept appealing to be medically discharged, but no one would agree to do so, saying she was weak for not sucking it up. ‘It’ being that while performing guard duty one day at their base, a mortar rocket swooped down from the sky and directly hit the soldier she was guarding the base with. The rocket ripped him in half, which she witnessed before blacking out from the explosion. That she survived was a small miracle, and now she was back in the States, trying to kill herself.

During the meeting, the doctors and officers in the room would ask her questions and she would turn to me and answer them. When she was unresponsive, I was commanded to repeat the question, and she would then respond. I asked for a couple minutes alone with her, just to assure her she wasn’t alone, and that everything would be ok.

She wanted to go to school to be an art therapy instructor, and when she finally was discharged five months later, shortly before I was, she was enrolled at a school back home and joyful to finally be free of the military. We stayed in touch for a few months and then she disappeared. Deleted her social media. I Google her from time to time, checking to see if there is an obituary. When I see there isn’t, I’m relieved. I hope she has a practice now and is living a good life.

But she probably still has nightmares. Like I do.

Before my friend Patrick died in 2018, I told him something I hadn’t shared with anyone: that during the 4 ½ years I was in the Army, I couldn’t remember my face. I didn’t like looking in mirrors, because the sight of my face sometimes scared me. There was a time I would look at them and my face seemed like a blur. One time a fellow soldier said I have a distinctive look and I asked, what do I look like? They just laughed and said, Like you, dummy. But I was serious. I would look at pictures and not recognize myself. This was a dissociative reaction to enormous stress. I showed my girlfriend a picture of me during that time and she remarked how sickly I looked. Rail thin. When I looked at the picture I just focused on the smile, which was devoid of joy.

I have struggled talking about being a soldier not because of a specific thing that occurred to me but because since I never went to a warzone, in the eyes of most veterans this means I have nothing to complain about. When I brought up having PTSD to my brother, who fought in Afghanistan, he straight up asked how that could be, You didn’t go to war. You didn’t go through shit.

I got the same response from a military therapist. I told him about the thing with my face, and the field training, and the sense of loss I felt. That I felt like I lost a piece of my soul I can’t get back. He told me I was exaggerating and that my real issue was with my now ex-wife. He wasn’t wrong that she was a problem, but I’m three years removed from that and she isn’t the thing that lingers in my mind, but the military does.

Like the aforementioned report said, since the Vietnam War, more soldiers die in training exercises than in combat. I did no less than two dozen of these exercises over four years. Every single one involves not only live ammo but also live explosives. You throw grenades. Rockets are fired. Artillery is fired. I became numb to the chaos, to the violence of my surroundings.

To get out of basic training, while in full gear (helmet, bulletproof vest, rifle, rucksack), I had to climb a wall and crawl under a mile-long barbed-wire fence, while bullets with tracers on them (lights that follow the bullets so you see exactly where they are as they approach you) rained down on me. A couple bullets hit my helmet, a few hit the wood beams holding up the barbed wire. These were real bullets that could have killed me. Hundreds if not thousands propelling toward me from above, and I could see every single one. I remember everything about it. I have been told that this should not have affected me.

When we would do exercises that involved shooting at each other in close range, we used blanks. AR-15s require a blank adaptor to shoot blanks. This adaptor is an iron cube with a metal tube that sticks into the barrel. It creates the pressure necessary to fire a blank, since the tips of the bullet are gone. The only thing is that when the tips are taken off, it is sometimes down in a quick and careless manner, leaving pieces of the tips still on the casing. When this happens, the remaining piece of the tip, no matter the size, will fire into the blank adaptor, causing the rifle to explode. We were supposed to check the clips to make sure the blanks had been properly rendered, but you don’t always have the time to do so, and you can’t see passed the first two or three rows of the clip. The frequency of blow ups is fairly common. They happen multiple times of year, we were told. One of the exercises I went on was with another unit who just weeks earlier had a guy whose hands were taken off by one such explosion. He was lucky, but only because he had fired the rifle incorrectly. You are supposed to fire an AR-15 by placing your face on or near the rifle, so you can aim before shooting. What usually happens with blow ups is that the metal of the barrel demolishes your face and you die instantly. So multiple times I year I would do missions with this knowledge, firing a rifle that at any time could explode in my hands, every squeeze of the trigger possibly causing my death. I had to do it again, and again, and again. I have been told that this shouldn’t have affected me.

After all, I didn’t go to war.

I once posted on social media that I can’t stand being thanked for my service because the service I was trained to do was to kill people. The response I received was to tell me to grow up. We were told this every day, especially in basic training, but even after, on a daily or near daily basis, we were reminded that we had to be ready and willing to kill someone when commanded to do so. The military wears down your conscience, until you are numb. I believe that soldiers justify to themselves that what they have to do is necessary, noble, and brave. They do this because facing the fact that they have been manipulated into killing other human beings is too much to bear. But they know it. Soldiers know that something essential was taken from them in order to fulfill missions where they have no dog in the fight. It is a knowledge that alienates us from the civilian world. It would frighten you to know how much contempt military personnel have toward civilians. How often the opinion is voiced that the military should turn its back on civilians and let them be slaughtered in the event of an invasion. It becomes ingrained in you to resent those who don’t serve, and I began to resent civilians, seeing non-military people as weak and stupid. I have been able to let go of much of that, but it still comes up. During the pandemic, I found myself fighting the urge to mock everyone who was scared. It’s just a virus, and for most people it’s a mild cold or a bad flu, but survivable. Once you’ve been shot at enough times, a virus is nothing. I have had to check myself a number of times. I know it’s the Army coming through even after seven years, the resentment toward perceived weakness or privilege. I have to remind myself to be empathetic at times. I know that the anger comes from feeling like something was taken from me that I’ll never get back, and no one understands, not even the people who should, all because this pain didn’t come from a “real” warzone.

The residue of that time haunts me, the feelings of being trapped, which all my nightmares revolve around. Cement-walled rooms with no exit. Hallways that double back on themselves. Sometimes there is a door and there is a small window and I see people I love in those rooms. They are always happy and celebrating, and no matter what I do, I can’t go inside the room and nobody can hear me.

My daughter Sofia asked me recently if I would ever have a gun in the house and I told her no. I was in the military and I was trained to hurt people with guns. She asked if I thought I would hurt others with a gun, and I told her no. I would hurt myself, and I don’t want to, so I don’t have a gun. That is a hard truth to tell a child, but I wanted the message to be clear that guns are no laughing matter. I’m sure plenty of veterans would call me a pussy for being afraid of guns. And my response would be, if you were honest, you’d admit that you’re afraid too.