Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  I’m going to be a Navy SEAL. Today is the day. I walk into the Baltimore Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), stoked.

  This is all I’ve ever wanted. I got hooked on a show on the Discovery Channel—a program that took you inside the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school, or BUD/S. I watched it religiously. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

  But you have to be really physically fit. I’ve put in the time these past few years—running, swimming at the pool, or working out nearly every single day. All my hard work has paid off. I did really well on the PFT, the physical fitness test for special operations. I blew them out of the water—high push-ups, high sit-ups, everything.

  After I go through the MEPS process, I enter a room and sit across from a woman who is reviewing my file and test scores. It’s the summer of 2008, and I’m feeling great. Confident. My dream is about to come true.

  “Looks like you’ve completed all your paperwork,” she says. “And you’ve had your physical. Your security stuff looks excellent.” She shuts the folder and looks up at me. “But you can’t be a SEAL.”

  My stomach drops.

  “You have what’s called color vision deficiency,” she says. “It means you’re unable to distinguish between certain colors, so being a SEAL is out of the question.”

  It hurts to breathe. This is all I’ve ever wanted, what I’ve been training for, and now I’m being told I can’t do it. Because I’m color-blind.

  My head is spinning and I’m feeling overwhelmed as she starts going down a roster of available Navy jobs. All of the ones that sound interesting to me—rescue swimmer, aircrew, explosive ordnance disposal—are out because I can’t see certain shades of color.

  “You could be a hospital corpsman,” she says.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Use my computer to look it up.”

  I go on Wikipedia and up pops a picture from 2002—a corpsman attached to a Marine Corps infantry unit. The corpsman is walking down some road in the mountains of Afghanistan.

  My uncle was deployed to Afghanistan, and while he didn’t talk much about what he saw and did over there, I kept up on all the news on TV. I watched the Towers fall on 9/11 and I watched Saddam’s statue come down. I watched the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq—and I know what’s going on there right now, the battles in Ramadi and Fallujah.

  Corpsmen, from what I’m reading, fly in and out of hot landing zones. They’re on the ground, engaging in battle.

  “Can I get into that?” I ask.

  She nods. “We can get you into this, walk you into the job, and then we can try to send you off to boot camp as soon as possible.”

  When I get home, I tell my parents what happened. My mom reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I’d walk around with this toy medical bag, using a stethoscope to give everyone in the family medical exams. Apparently, I also did CPR on one of my sister’s dolls.

  “Hospital corps,” my mom says, “sounds right up your alley.”

  The Navy doesn’t have any slots open until next year, in March of 2009. I spend the entire time training, doing push-ups, and going to weekly meetings and weekly physical activity sessions. I talk to a couple of sailors and hear their stories. When the day to leave rolls around, I’m ready to go, get my life started.

  Coming from Baltimore and playing lacrosse in a parochial school, I’m used to wearing preppy clothes. I put on a pair of yellow Ralph Lauren chinos and a Vineyard Vines polo shirt, board the bus, and immediately feel out of place. Everyone else is dressed in regular jeans and T-shirts.

  I arrive at Chicago O’Hare airport with my yellow folder and backpack, which holds some toiletries and an extra T-shirt. I check in with the USO. Then I walk what feels like a couple of miles to a terminal where I see all these kids around my age sitting cross-legged, in perfectly aligned rows. They’re all facing the glass windows. I’m told to go sit with them.

  We can’t get up. The moment anyone stands up, a sailor screams to sit back down. We all sit and wait.

  For six hours.

  Finally, we board a bus that will take us to the Naval Station Great Lakes, in Chicago. It’s a solemn ride. The lights are off, and nobody talks. When we arrive at the gate, the bus is dead quiet. Outside the window, I can see the double doors leading into the recruit training center.

  The first thing the Navy wants us to do is a urinalysis. Not a problem. I’m hydrated. I’ve been drinking Gatorade and water.

  I can’t pee.

  This little Filipino chief who is running around cussing at everybody comes up to me. “There’s one water fountain right here. The other is over there.” He points across the big square room. “You drink from this water fountain. The one over there, you stand at attention. You’re going to keep going in circles until you have to pee.”

  I spend two hours walking in a circle, drinking from one water fountain and standing at attention at the other.

  “This recruit requests permission to use the bathroom,” I say.

  The Filipino chief blasts me. “Head! This recruit requests permission to use the head!”

  In the normal world, when you go to take a leak, you use a stall or a urinal. The bathroom here contains only urinals—about twenty of them lined up against the walls. The Navy orders us to strip down and pee in a cup.

  This is my first experience being completely naked in front of a bunch of other dudes. On top of that, I have to try to pee in a cup while a sailor stares at me. I want to ask him not to look at me, maybe turn the water on, so I can relax and get in the mood. I don’t, so I stand there naked, straining to pee, trying to get out as many drips as possible to meet the marker line inside the cup.

  They move us into another room to hand out uniforms. We’re given a seabag and then, as we walk down an aisle, they throw our uniforms at us—two pairs of this, two pairs of that. Out of the corner of my eye I look down, expecting to see the “blueberries” the recruiters promised me—the blue camis that are so cool and so much better than the old Navy uniforms. What I see instead are these old-school prison dungarees straight out of The Shawshank Redemption, along with navy-blue dickies and a light-blue long-sleeve shirt. I’m holding a janitor outfit.

  They lied to me. This is not the cool uniform I thought I would be rocking.

  I’m used to wearing Patagonia, and now they hand me this watch cap and a borderline see-through ski mask and this scarf that’s probably been in a Navy uniform locker since the 1800s. What did I get myself into?

  They teach us how to fold, clean, and iron uniforms. Then we start learning basic seamanship, stuff like rope handling. When I arrived here, I thought I’d be running and gunning, and I’m learning how to fold towels and toilet paper, how to properly clean the head, all these menial tasks.

  It’s a really interesting mix of people, a real melting pot. I start finding these clichés. All the poor kids hang out together. You have kids who are here either to avoid jail or because they didn’t have any other options. Then you have the group of dudes who have wanted to do this their whole lives. There are also some guys who are in their mid- to late twenties and early thirties who failed out of college. They have a ton of issues. This is their last chance to do something with their lives.

  Everyone here is trying to talk a huge game, acting like they’re hot shit. Oh, I got hurt playing school football and decided to join or I got hurt my first year of college and couldn’t go pro so that’s why I’m here. I’m here because I want to be here. This is my dream, serving my country. I’m proud to be an American. What these guys don’t understand is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or out of luck and out of work. Here, we’re all E1s, the bottom of the barrel in the United States Navy. We’re all in this together.

  After boot camp, I’ll have to learn some Marine Corps tactics and the fundamentals for shooting and patrolling. I become a sailor and begin to learn about medicine. There’s a big emphasis on tactical combat casualty care. The instructors
are fresh from Iraq—guys who flew casualty evacuation missions in Ramadi and Fallujah, ran in and out of burning cities all night long to pull out wounded Marines. I really respond to their passion and dedication. I want to be like them, do what they do. I want to qualify as a corpsman, be Fleet Marine Force.

  The Navy, unfortunately, doesn’t have any Fleet Marine Force orders at the moment, so I go to Sicily and spend two years working at the naval hospital. My leadership there—they’re all Iraq combat veterans. I work on the multiservice ward, doing OB stuff, delivering babies. I’m happy to be there, but I’m chomping at the bit to get my chance to go with the Marines.

  My opportunity comes in 2011, as my tour is winding down. I pick every Marine Corps infantry unit that I can. After a day on the beach, I come back to the barracks and find a Post-it note on my door: I’m going to 2nd Marine Division in August. I head to Camp Johnson in North Carolina and begin my field medical training to become a Fleet Marine corpsman.

  I meet my chief, who is all of twenty. He can see how excited I am to deploy and answers my question before I ask it.

  “January. That’s when you’ll deploy,” he says. “First, you’re heading to California, to Mojave Viper, to do your pre-deployment training. You’re going to be a part of an embedded training team.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means you’re going to live with the Afghans and train them in combat medicine.”

  The classroom training is intensive. I learn Pashto and Dari from Afghan linguists. I attend advanced medical classes and I undergo the same comprehensive combat training the Marines are learning at one of the Marine Corps’ largest training centers. Advisor training requires a lot of reading case studies and books on American advisors and Marine Corps advisors in Vietnam. Little do I know it will have absolutely no correlation to the bullshit I’m about to find myself in.

  I spend the holidays back home in Baltimore. I go to a New Year’s Eve party with one of my best friends from high school, intending to have an awesome night out. Deep down, I can’t stop thinking about what I’ll be facing in Afghanistan.

  What if this is my last New Year’s Eve on earth?

  I’m twenty-two years old and the corpsman for a twenty-man advisor team when I arrive in Afghanistan in 2012. As senior medical expert, my job is to teach an Afghan lieutenant commander, Farjaad, who is also a doctor, and his men how to treat casualties.

  I come into the job with the mindset that we’re partners. We’ll share medical information and techniques. I’ll help them learn their craft, and they’ll help me learn mine. My pre-deployment training stressed the importance of having this attitude.

  Farjaad, I soon discover, is absolutely worthless. He smokes opium all day long, every day. Sometimes he shows up to my classes, some days he doesn’t. He’s completely incapable of dealing with any negative feedback, no matter how I deliver it.

  His men are the exact same way. Their attitude is, everybody is talented, and everyone’s level of talent is on par. These Afghans don’t want to learn. They don’t want to improve. I try every which way I can to communicate information. They want no part of it.

  At the end of my first week, I get my first experience as a corpsman.

  I’m lying in my rack, trying to get a good night’s sleep, when an explosion shakes the entire compound. I check my watch. It’s two in the morning.

  A Marine kicks open my door and screams, “Doc, everybody needs to get up. We have a couple of Afghan soldiers coming in who just hit an IED.”

  Holy shit. My eyes are wide-open, and my mind is racing. I have my medical bag and some medications sitting inside cabinets I made, that’s it. No aid station or trauma center. The patrol base has a little open tent we can use for any mass casualties.

  I throw on my kit and, Kevlar in hand, I run outside with my med bag.

  Three Afghan rangers come blowing into the courtyard at the patrol base, but then they stand there, doing nothing. I start yelling up to the Marines to take action: retrieve the wounded, get them on the ground, and start stripping them. It’s pitch-black out, so we put on headlamps.

  I’m expecting to treat two very hurt Afghan soldiers. I get six.

  Two of my Marines, Peter and Jeff, guys I’ve trained with basic combat lifesaving techniques, get to work and start calling out what’s wrong with the wounded. Before Peter joined the Marine Corps, he was a volunteer firefighter from Danville, Virginia. He loves medicine. Peter, like Jeff, is trustworthy, a guy I can always rely on.

  I work my way down the line and start triaging. The rest of the Marines leave to set up the cordon, sweep the LZ, and get it set up so the medevac bird can land.

  The six Afghans are all suffering from directional fragmentation wounds—holes in multiple extremities, big chunks taken out. The worst one has dried blood all over his face. His hair is matted with it. He’s barely breathing, and his eyes are closed. He’s got a bunch of holes in his right arm and left leg.

  I put on a tourniquet and pressure dressing and then I start stripping him down. He’s got blood on his abdomen, it’s all over the place, and he’s making these agonal breathing sounds.

  Farjaad comes out of nowhere holding this massive ten-milliliter syringe.

  “What the fuck is that?” I bark at him.

  “Morphine.”

  “No! No morphine, no morphine, no morphine!”

  Farjaad’s got this smirk on his face, like I have no clue what I’m talking about. The guy’s a doctor; he should know you don’t give morphine to anyone with head trauma or respiratory issues, because it will kill him.

  A call comes over the radio that the medevac bird is ten minutes out.

  I’ve got to move this guy now. We’ve got to haul ass. I start yelling at my interpreter to tell the Afghans to get moving, get this wounded soldier into one of their pickups since all of our gun trucks are already out. They pile the guy in the back.

  As the idiot driver speeds across the desert in the middle of the night, hitting every rotten pothole you can imagine, Peter and I hold on to the cab with our butts resting up in the back of the pickup. Our butts keep coming off the seats, and we’re flying up and down.

  “Man,” Peter says to me. “This is so fucked up.”

  We manage to get the guy on the bird.

  Things get progressively worse from there.

  Afghans seem to get hurt on a daily basis. They suffer mass casualties every single week, for months.

  When I lose someone, it tears me up. Here I am pouring my blood, sweat, and tears into treating and saving guys who are wounded and dying, and these Afghanis are acting like they don’t care about their own.

  The little courtyard is the place where we hang out, listening to music, playing guitar and basketball. On a rare day off—no classes or patrols—I go to the courtyard to unwind. A bunch of Afghans run over and tell me they need a doctor.

  I go grab my medical bag. When I come back, they take me to the Afghan side of the patrol base, into this little room, where I see a little girl no older than seven lying on one of the soldiers’ cots. She has dark black hair and is wearing what looks like a red sequin dress. She’s completely out.

  I look to the tall, skinny Afghan with the white beard standing next to her. “Are you the father?”

  He nods. He has an interpreter with him. A bunch of Marines have gathered outside the hooch.

  There are religious customs that I have to adhere to, so I say, “Sir, I would like to ask your permission before I touch your daughter. I want to be able to do an examination.”

  The man listens to the interpreter and then gives me his consent.

  “If at any point you would like me to stop,” I tell the father, “I will.”

  My Marine Peter is with me. I put on a pair of black latex gloves, and as I start doing my head to toe assessment, the father keeps calling out her name: Anja. Anja.

  Her arm is broken. I open up her eyelids. One pupil is blown out, completely dark. The other one is a pi
npoint.

  “What happened?” I ask the group of Afghans gathered inside the hooch. Peter gently lifts up her head. Her hair is matted with blood. “How did she end up like this?”

  One of the Afghans says, “She was playing in the road and someone hit her.”

  Bullshit. “Someone better explain to me what really happened, right now, because I’m starting to get mad. This girl’s life is slipping away—”

  “Fuck,” Peter says behind me.

  I look over to him. “What’s going on?”

  “Doc, you’ve got to look at this.”

  I move closer. He lifts up the hair on the back of her head.

  There’s a massive crater in her skull.

  “Someone needs to get me a radio, some kind of commo, right now,” I call out, probing the wounded area with my gloved fingers. A few of the Marines standing outside start scrambling.

  When I pull my hands away from her hair, my fingers are covered with brain matter.

  “We need to call a medevac. She needs to go out immediately. She’s dying.”

  A Marine comes in and says, “We set up a nine line. The Georgian Republic liaison team up north has priority on medevacs right now.”

  I start losing my mind. We can’t fly her out, which means…what? Where can she go to get—

  Delaram. It’s the closest place with any kind of higher medical care. The Afghans can ground-medevac her there. I explain all of this to the father’s interpreter as I throw a splint on the girl’s arm. Then I try to gauze up and pad up her head as much as possible.

  I stick an IV into her arm, carry her outside the hooch, and give her to her dad.

  Her father’s interpreter comes up to me and says, “He’s going to take her back to the village.”

  “He can’t take her back to the village! She’ll die!”

  I start screaming at the Afghans. “Don’t take her back to the village! Get her on that truck and take her to Delaram right now.”

  Many of the Afghans don’t speak English, have no idea what I’m talking about. I try speaking to them in their language, but no one is listening to me, and I start to lose my shit. A Marine tries to pull me aside, but I push him away.