AFTER: The Battle Has Just Begun

by R. J. Belle

  The supply guys started coming in, and it didn’t really click in my mind that I shouldn’t be walking next to this truck. But I ran over there. I was all excited because there was cold water in this truck, and we hadn’t had any cold water for a couple of days. The truck hit an IED. The driver lost his legs and one guy is still in the hospital; he’s been there four years. After the IED had gone off, I was looking around dazed. I saw a body just slam on the ground. He was still alive, – he probably weighed 110 lbs – that IED just picked his body up and threw him high and far to where I had slammed down. I looked around and saw this body just slam down on the ground next to me. I tried to help out as best I could then lost consciousness. I woke up later – I don’t really remember the next two or three weeks. I was in a hospital in Afghanistan for a week or two then I was in Germany for two and a half weeks. I don’t remember that time – it’s like lost time. After that, I went to Walter Reed for a little bit and then to Balboa. I didn’t lose limbs; Balboa has a focus on amputees. I had a serious head injury – I got that taken care of. Life sucked pretty bad right after I came back because I didn’t want to be home.

  My guys were all in combat. I guess I was lucky though – after I had got hurt, one of the guys from the company stepped on an IED and got torn up pretty badly, and then our radio operator got torn up, our staff sergeant got shot – all these guys from the platoon got hurt and didn’t see much more combat after that. In Sangin, they got it pretty good a couple of times but nothing like Musa Qala. The worst part about the whole thing – the day after I left a couple of guys got killed but nobody that I was close to got killed until after I came home. The night of the memorial we had for the guys who died – my squad leader got killed by four drunk Marines outside the gate of Twenty-nine Palms right after our memorial for the guys who got killed in Afghanistan. A week before that a guy I went to boot camp with got killed in a car accident. My best friend rolled his truck and died. That was the last straw. I didn’t want to be around anymore after that.

  I was taking a bunch of medications that the doctors had given me and was addicted to painkillers – I didn’t need them at the amount I was taking. I was a mess. I think that’s a real problem in the hospitals. I don’t think the doctors know how to monitor or measure the level of pain we go through or the way to best treat it. The amount of medications I was taking was insane. I woke up taking pain meds and ended my day taking them. I was messed up for awhile – addicted to pain meds. Then I woke up one day and just quit. But I had wasted an entire year of my life; a whole year living in the barracks in San Diego doing nothing. Not doing what I should have been doing. Not hanging out with the guys that I should have been hanging out with.

  Then I met Sandy about a year after I got to San Diego. I met her right when I got told that I was being retired from the Marine Corps. That wasn’t something that I wanted to happen. I kind of had a plan of going on – in the Marine Corps. I got told I was going to be retired and shortly after that my friend, Povas, told me about Sandy. He was the only friend I had at the time that wasn’t a complete nightmare of a mess. He had been injured about a year before I had, and so he had already gone through the shitty parts of coming home after you’re hurt. We became really good friends. He moved into Freedom Station and right after that I decided that’s where I needed to go.

  Living in the barracks just wasn’t conducive to realizing that life goes on after that. I mean you got to think about it – coming from combat where you saw guys get torn up, saw people get killed, and you killed people then you are living around a bunch of guys who are just ripped to shreds. I don’t like how the Marine Corps does that. They should not put everyone in the barracks – a cramped barracks – and especially because its run by the Navy – the Navy guys who – they have no idea what it’s like. The Wounded Warrior Battalion, at that time, was run by a bunch of reservists and those guys have no idea. The way the Marine Corps was handling that – it was a mess. But we muddled through, got a lot of Page Eleven’s – got in trouble often – but it was cool.

  I remember one morning formation after my injury; this Sergeant – the worst Sgt. I have ever seen in the Marine Corps – was yelling at one guy. He had lost a leg and wasn’t able to run yet. The Sgt. yelled at him and let him know he should be running to the formation. Everyone was quiet – nobody said anything. I went off on the Sgt. He kept telling me I was over-stepping my bounds, I was a Corporal at the time. This Sgt. hadn’t done anything in his Marine Corps career close to what this guy had done. I told him that in front of the junior Marines, and he said I needed to calm down. I got in his face, grabbed him by the cammies and pulled him close to my face and said, “Don’t fuck with me.” Then I let the Sgt. go. He emailed my unit, which was still deployed in Afghanistan, and told them what a shit-bag Marine I was. My command responded letting the Sgt. know that they had just given me a meritorious promotion. I ended up not getting that promotion for a few months because the Sgt. held it up until my command returned home and got the full story. It’s that kind of stuff at the Wounded Warrior Battalion that didn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to mess with a bunch of injured guys.

  I got approved to move to Freedom Station – I don’t think the command wanted to approve me – at the time I was a nightmare. I wouldn’t listen to anybody; I was punching people and didn’t care about anything. I’m sure they thought I was out of my mind. I guess I was. I was drunk almost one hundred percent of the time; in the middle of the day and the morning, I was either drunk or on pills. Then I moved out and as soon as I moved it was like this veil was lifted off of me and I could see that life was going to be normal again. When I moved, I started going to school and living life. Even after I moved though, I still didn’t respect authority. I was told to dress in cammies for formations and would conveniently forget. Once I knew I was getting out of the Marine Corps – I didn’t trust them anymore, these weren’t the guys I was in combat with – I just couldn’t care less about some guy telling me to shave my face. I just didn’t respect these guys – with the exception of Lt Col Bleidistel; he was the only person in that whole detachment that believed in me besides Mr. Cheney and Jack Lyon. If it weren’t for Lt Col Bleidistel I wouldn’t have been able to go to school. He believed in me and he made it happen.”

  David left San Diego after residing at Freedom Station for nine months. He moved to Texas to attend the University of North Texas. He began as an economics major, but his path would eventually take him in a different direction.

  “I wanted to go into the stock market. I was at the University sitting there with a bunch of frat boys and sorority girls, and I hated every second of it. It wasn’t challenging. I was sitting in classrooms and regurgitating information that anybody can find on the internet. After the first semester I switched to biology which was my interest the first time I went to college. I started taking biology and chemistry classes. About six months after I started at Texas I met my mentor, Dr. Guenter Gross, a world-renowned neuroscientist. I started doing research with him and toxicology studies. I was most interested though in traumatic brain injury. We came up with a model to mimic a TBI. It’s ground breaking research. I attended Scholar’s Day at my university, and I submitted a poster with my research on it. I didn’t realize how big this was until that day. I kept hearing Dr. Gross say that this was the frontier, the future in research, but I figured he had to tell me that. On Scholar’s Day there were many great posters, but I ended up winning. I won a fifteen hundred dollar travel grant. I didn’t end up getting the grant due to a technicality – I wasn’t in the Honors College.

  Winning that competition gave me confidence in what we were doing, so I submitted my research to a neuroscience conference in Germany and was selected to present it at that conference. I couldn’t afford to travel to Germany but knew how important it was to get this research out there. I made a call to Freedom Station and they handled the travel expenses for me – they know how important this research is too – espec
ially for our combat-injured guys. During the time in between those two events, I had been published twice for research on TBI and an anti-malarial drug. The research started to get attention and I was asked to present it again in Washington D.C. Learning more about TBI is important, we don’t know enough. Essentially what I do is quantify the effects of TBI and how long it takes for cells to recover from TBI. I am thinking of transferring to the University of Texas, Dallas to do my Ph.D. They have a center for brain health there. I would like to make devices to put into the brain that can more accurately detect what’s going on in there. That’s my goal – we will see what happens.

  I would like to see a University pick up my research model and use it to look at pharmacological intervention. After you suffer a traumatic brain injury, you have to take all these medications: sleep medications, pain medications, SSRI’s. You end up on so many medications. I want to look at how their interactions with each other and the brain affect the recovery of nerve cell networks. If you are impeding some repair mechanism that the brain is trying to do – you are delaying recovery from a brain injury, and you might even be doing permanent damage. From what I’ve seen in my studies if you get even a small brain injury, the effects of that are not going to go away. You might recover gradually over time, but you will never recover completely. With my brain injury – I don’t know what happened to me. I was just filing out an application last night and looking over my previous college grades. I had a 1.75 GPA before starting college again, and now I have a 3.5 GPA even with five F’s on my transcript. I don’t know what happened to me – I think my brain injury – Afghanistan as a whole – woke me up to living. I wasn’t living before. I’d like to see my research translate into clinical research. Someone needs to work on this for five to ten years and then that might happen. If nobody does, that’s fine too. As soon as I have my Ph.D., I will start it right back up again. It’s a great method. We will see what happens.

  I want people to know about the horror of war. I find myself caught up in reading comments to posts or articles online – I don’t know why I do, but I do. And, I get angry when I read ones that say, “They signed up for it – how come they didn’t know?”

  I want to grab those people and tell them that you can’t possibly know what’s going to happen – you can sign up for it all you want. Everybody is a little bit different, and people that sign up for war have a warrior in them – there’s something in them that just drags them over there. So when people say “they signed up for it,” I understand I signed up for it, but they don’t understand the honor or the altruism associated with doing it. The ultimate form of altruism is to sacrifice your life. It’s against every evolutionary principle in biology. That a Marine will jump on a grenade to save another Marine – without even thinking about it – just does it. I’ve seen stuff like that happen. People don’t understand what that’s like. You can never understand unless you go there. The only way to get close is to hear stories first hand from us. I read a book recently about the Spartans. When the Spartans came back to Sparta or Greece as a whole, the townspeople would bring them in and they would all sit down, and the Warriors would talk about all of their experiences. Everyone would be completely open with it. No one was saying, “I’m sorry,” there was no hero worship, nobody was crying about it; the people would just listen. They listened. They learned from the experiences, and it helped everyone to understand each other after a battle. It was an open discussion – the ugly included.

  I don’t talk about my experiences with these college kids because the second I do I get, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I don’t want you to be sorry for me. I don’t want anybody to be sorry for me at all. It doesn’t help anything. I also don’t want you to say, “You’re a hero,” because I’m not. I’m just a regular guy. The term hero has been so overused that it has no meaning anymore. Everyone is a hero now. If you do anything – you’re a hero. It’s just not true. My definition of a hero is much different. For instance – a basketball star gets labeled a hero but leaves a game because he has cramps or bangs a knee too hard. How is he a hero? We have all of these parades and ceremonies on Veteran’s Day, and you have people bowing down worshipping veterans. The guys that are the real deal, they don’t want that. It’s the guys that have never seen combat that want that stuff.

  It’s the same with the VA. I had this conversation with a congressman and a VA director, and they asked me what I thought the biggest problem was with the VA. My answer to that is easy; it’s the veterans themselves. That’s the biggest problem with the VA. Every time I go down there I sit next to some guy who is trying to tell me the best or easiest way to get more money. It should not be that way. I sat down next to a guy one day and I was wearing a brace; he immediately asked me if I was getting paid for the brace. No, I’m not getting paid for the brace. I already have a disability rating that’s more than fair. The guy proceeds to tell me how much I can get for wearing the brace, what paperwork to fill out and who to talk to. Then he gets up and walks away. Every single time I go to the VA it’s the same – someone telling me how to get more money. It infuriates me because I have to use the VA. I go down there and can’t make an appointment because there’s fifty people in front of me who don’t have a single injury from combat or even from the military – they just twisted their knee at some point in life, and they blame it on the military. It’s being used as welfare, and it shouldn’t be that way. I feel that this hero-worshipping culture just plays into that. It allows these guys to clog the channels with unnecessary claims. I don’t agree with it. It’s a strange thing for me to say, but there are a lot fewer heroes than people think.

  A lot has changed since my injuries, my time in the military. Although I still have a close relationship with my family, and my mom would say she knows everything about me; I hide the bad and tell her what I think she wants to hear. It’s easier that way. I didn’t realize that our relationship had changed until a few years after my injury. I didn’t realize that I had changed. During the year I went through abusing pain meds I was a lunatic. Once I cleaned up, I started noticing things that were different. My wife said I was different, my mom would probably say the same. I think I hold stuff in to protect myself – not others. I don’t care if people know what I did; if someone has an altered opinion of me based on something I had to do in an austere environment – I really don’t care. I’m not going to change that opinion. But if I can avoid having someone say “I’m sorry,” then I will avoid that at all costs. I will give you a great example. I had a class with this kid, a civilian kid, and I started going to the gym with him and hanging out with him. I never told him anything, never said anything about the military or my injury. When he asked what I did before I just told him I dropped out of college and kept quiet about the rest. One day I asked him if he wanted to get a beer. We went out to my car, and he saw my Purple Heart license plates. He asked if it was my dad’s car and I told him it was mine. Then he asked, and I had to tell him. Whenever I have to tell someone what happened, I always preface it with the strong desire to not have sympathy from them. I don’t want to deal with emotion – I don’t like seeing people sad – most of the time it’s hard to see people sad about trivial things. I’ve seen things to be sad about.

  The biggest things that have changed about me – that’s a hard question to answer. That makes me have to think about myself. I’m trying to get rid of what people have told me. I definitely have a temper that’s difficult to control sometimes which is kind of crazy because I go from zero to a hundred. I’m a pretty relaxed person and I’m usually calm. But if something irks me a certain way; instead of recognizing it and calming myself down – its just bam – I’m mad. This is an issue for me, so now I stay away from things that cause my anger.

  The other thing that changed for me is my outlook on life. Before I joined the Marine Corps I was partying all the time. I was in a fraternity my first time in college and that’s probably why I failed out. I was really into myself, I guess. But after I
was in Afghanistan, that changed. I was talking to a buddy of mine about this recently. In the Marine Corps you can be suffering on a hike or suffering because someone just died or lost a leg, or suffering because you just killed someone and that was the first person you ever killed, you are suffering in your head. Then you realize that you are suffering, but everyone around you feels the same way and if everyone else feels the same way there’s no reason for me to lag behind. I had to perform in front of these guys, and we all have to keep our spirits up – keep our positivity and get through it together. I never had anything like that before. I didn’t ever have anything like that, never played sports in high school where you had to care about others and put other people before yourself. On a deeper level – for myself – I didn’t turn to religion, but I did start to see a bigger picture. Everything in life seems to work out the way it’s supposed to. As long as you’re a pretty good person and try to do as many good things as possible, good things will happen eventually. We just had another guy from 3/7 kill himself. We all come together. I tell my friends if they call me and they are having a rough time, today is rough but tomorrow it could be completely different. Life can be gone so fast it’s incredible. This can all be gone so fast; every day has to be treated like a good day. We just have to live like that – all of us. I think if we did there would be less dickheads in the world. I don’t know what the answer to the suicide epidemic is – I wish I knew. I just don’t understand it. I’ve lost so many people that I have become emotionless to death. I guess that’s part of the deal for a lot of us.”