“These are the true stories told thru hundreds of hours of research and travel and listening to the veterans describe what caused their trauma, forms of treatment and how they live with their diagnosis. Thank you for taking the time to read each segment and hearing “Their Stories.”
The veteran’s real names I interviewed for this series will not be disclosed.
You will recognize them as “Bravo, Jack, Dub, Stacey, Grunt and Dano”
OUTLINE: PTSD: 6-Part Series: “THEIR STORIES” ( Living with PTSD) Part – 1 Part – 2 Part – 3 Part -4…
“We saw the smoke coming from the first tower and watching on the television. We all thought, this can’t be right. The consensus was this is a terrorist attack. Then our building starts to shake. This facility is concrete blocks and few windows. We all ran outside to see what was going on. We saw large black smoke come up from the Pentagon. Then we hear the sirens and a jet buzzed right over our heads heading to New York.”
“Me and my Sargent were in a bunker and those sand bags came over head high and a mortar round came in and hit right on the outside of the bunker. Me and him hit the ground. He asked me, you hit? I said, I don’t think so. He got a piece of shrapnel in the leg. If that mortar had hit just a foot closer we would have been paid for.”
“At that moment the left track hit a tank mine. Of course, that took me out. It knocked me 15 or 20 feet. I was unconscious. The only thing I remember was there was a corpsman around me trying to wake me up. He said, “you are hit, and you are hit bad.” I said, “where at? I was numb.”
“I wanted to try something a little more adventuresome. I wanted to be on the edge of the sword. I wanted to be a helicopter door gunner,” beamed Dan. “That’s a different world Dan,” I said. “I did everything for the assignment, I took all the tests. I was ready to go.”
“I was in the mountains, the Hindu Kush. We flew into Kurdistan, but this time our mission is different. It was a new military concept to bring the tactical side to military intelligence. There were about 40 infantry men who got cross trained and imbedded with a Military Intelligence (MI) battalion,” said Juan recalling his tour in Afghanistan.
“The shot went thru my helmet and my sweat band into my skull. It kind of knocked me out for about ten seconds. My head felt like a big bell ringing. I did finally get the correspondent medevac’d out and I felt a large knot on the back of my head. The corpsman said we got to get you out of here, there is a piece of metal in your skull. They called another medivac and got me out of there. I went into Da Nang Hospital for several weeks and they finally got that metal fragment out from my skull.”
“I remember when the bullets started flying at me and at my guys that I was so obsessed that one of my guys would be hit by a bullet. It was like somebody shooting at your kids. I was constantly going around and making sure nobody was hit. My hands were shaking and my heart was beating thru my chest. A tremendous amount of adrenalin was coursing thru my veins.”
