First Responder

Jaji District, Afghanistan.

August 27, 2007.

The night sticks out to me for three reasons. For starters, I had a nightmare.

I’m not one to remember dreams, but this one was grotesque. My leg was covered in a rash that looked like bacteria beneath a microscope. Except each bacterium was two inches long and oozing pus. In the dream, I held a knife, and I cried as I cut bacteria from my leg.

The second reason I remember that night was because we were mortared.

I awoke to Staff Sergeant Sanders. She was our cook, and she told us she’d heard incoming fire. My tent mates and I threw on shoes and grabbed our rifles and sprinted to a nearby bunker. We were there a long time. So I didn’t get a lot of sleep, and I was dead tired the next morning when I woke up to run a logistical convoy from Jaji District to Logar Province.

The third reason I remember that night is because three soldiers died during the next morning’s logistical convoy. Their names were Staff Sergeant Rocky Herrera, Sergeant Cory Clark, and Corporal Bryce Howard. They were members of Support Platoon, 585^th Engineer Company. And they were building a Bailey bridge across a dry streambed that was prone to flooding in the winter when they were killed.

My logistical convoy was passing by Support Platoon’s jobsite at the exact moment that a suicide bomber infiltrated the perimeter and detonated his vest.

I was a first responder.

I called in the 9 Line MEDEVAC Request, the radio request for medical evacuation helicopters. While I called it in, others in my convoy rendered first aid to Support Platoon soldiers.

I had been deployed to Afghanistan for nine months, but it was the first time I’d witnessed death and danger, or been called upon to be a first responder.

A few weeks later, I had to be a first responder again, when there was a vehicle rollover in a convoy I was riding in. It was the Battalion Sergeant Major’s vehicle. He was injured, and we had to extract him from his vehicle and call in a medical evacuation helicopter to fly him to a field hospital.

After the suicide bomber and vehicle rollover incidents, my default way of dealing with death and danger was telling myself that it couldn’t happen to me. I had a purpose left to serve. I was destined to be a mother, a writer, and an activist. And so, somehow, I was protected from a fate like Staff Sergeant Rocky Herrera, Sergeant Cory Clark, and Corporal Bryce Howard.

I wasn’t the only one who believed that a person’s purpose could protect them from death and danger.

A few weeks after the suicide bomber incident, my company was mortared again. It was the middle of the day, and about twenty of us packed into a bunker — our feet, legs, arms, and hands intertwined. And from the din I overheard Sergeant Jasper Pothoven, one of my team leaders, say that he liked the crowdedness. “Some of you must have a purpose,” he said. “So when we’re all up on top of each other like this, I feel safe.”

***

During the fall of 2007, two friends shared with me their first responder stories, their brushes with death and danger, their trauma impacts.

My friend Captain Rob Calhelha, a guy I’d met at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, a few months before my deployment to Afghanistan, was now deployed to Iraq. In October 2007, Rob emailed to tell me that he was suffering PTSD from an incident that had happened earlier in his deployment, when his Stryker vehicle drove over an improvised explosive device.

The PTSD was made worse on October 10, when the dining facility on Rob’s forward operating base was mortared, killing three soldiers and injuring 40 others. One of the soldiers who died was a female who worked in the dining facility. Rob had talked to her almost every day of his deployment and had spoken to her only hours before she died.

And then on October 14, another friend, Captain Erika Noyes, lost her fiancée Captain Tom Martin, to small arms fire. Erika and Tom were both deployed to Iraq the day Tom was killed, Erika as a medical evacuation helicopter pilot, Tom as a Sniper Platoon Leader.

Erika was in a Tactical Operations Center at a nearby Forward Operating Base when the call came in over the radio that Tom had died — that a helicopter was needed to pick up his body. Hours later, Erika was asked to identify Tom, to claim his West Point ring.

***

When I returned to the United States in February 2008, I maintained my sense of immunity, my emotional detachment. It served me well, as I was called upon to be a first responder three more times. Once while I was driving, and a truck sideswiped a car a few dozen meters in front of me. Once at a library, when a man next to me had a seizure. Once in a university bathroom, when I walked in on a young woman passed out on the floor from alcohol poisoning. Every time, I assessed the situation, calmly called 911, and felt fine afterward.

Maybe the war didn’t affect me I thought after all these incidents, as one soldier friend after another succumbed to PTSD.

But then one day in 2013, in a nonfiction writing class at a small liberal arts university in Roanoke, Virginia, my instructor crumpled to the floor.

He was having a seizure, and while I called 911, another classmate named Michael — also an Army veteran — administered first aid. I gave the emergency dispatcher directions to our classroom. And then I enlisted several classmates to help me move furniture so that paramedics could navigate in and out of the room.

But in the aftermath, something was different.

For a good seventy-two hours after our instructor was taken to — and released from — the hospital, I felt soul-crushingly anxious. I felt like I’d consumed several cups of coffee on an empty stomach. I felt like I couldn’t inhale enough oxygen. I felt like all the strength in me was gone. I felt like I could never do something like that ever again.

Michael and I crossed paths during those seventy-two hours, and he admitted to feeling the same way.

The suicide bomber and vehicle rollover incidents had been my first brushes with death and danger, and for the next six years I’d prided myself on being excellent in emergency situations, as a first responder. I’d told myself that this was a trait I must have been born with, like my dark brown hair and olive-colored skin.

But in Roanoke, Virginia, I realized that my “innate” ability was actually finite, that somehow Afghanistan and the six years afterward had tapped it.

This was confirmed again, several months later, after I graduated from the university in Roanoke and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

One night, will jogging around Lake of the Isles with headphones, I heard what sounded like “Help! Help! Help!” coming from the center of the lake.

“I can’t do this,” I remember thinking. “I really … I just can’t.” I kept running for a few seconds under a canopy of trees that shivered in the breeze. And then slowly I came to a halt and peeled off my headphones and faced the lake like I was facing a firing squad.

The moonlight reflected off the water, illuminating a canoe a few hundred meters off shore. And instead of “Help! Help! Help!” I heard “Helllooo! Helllooo! Helllooo!” emanating from the water craft.

It was just a couple of teenagers, relishing the way their voices could echo.

Shaking, I put back on my headphones and kept running.