Two months later, I fly to Dallas to do a speaking gig. I want to drive to Killeen, where Fort Hood is based, to see Bart.
“I’m working long hours,” he tells me. “We’re trying to get ready for deployment. I’m going to be really busy. You’re not going to see much of me.”
“I’m okay with that.”
When I meet Bart at Fort Hood, he seems so peaceful. I’ve never seen him so okay with himself, so at peace. He radiates so much joy as he takes me through his company and shows me the tanks. He’s just so happy with who he is, what he has, and what he’s done.
He climbs up on top of a tank. He’s squatting, wearing his Stetson, and the sun is setting behind him. I wish I had a camera to capture this perfect moment, but my phone doesn’t have one. He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him, and I say, “Stay right there. I’m going to take a shot,” and I put my fingers up as if I’m taking a picture and I make a clicking sound. He smiles, my beautiful son who is in all his glory. It’s the most amazing picture, in my mind. It’s the last one I’ll ever have of him.
Two weeks later, two uniformed officers knock on my door.
“On behalf of the president of the United States, we regret to inform you, Mrs. Luther, that your son, Lieutenant Robert Fletcher, was killed by one of the soldiers in his company.”
When I get to Texas to recover his body, I want to see my son, but the Army won’t let me. They say he was shot in the chest and I want to drive to Dallas and see him, but they won’t let me go there and see him.
“You’re not going to cremate him now,” I tell them. “We’ll eventually cremate him, but we want to have an open casket just for the family.”
My husband and I make arrangements to bring his body back to Florida—and I have to do it quickly. A major hurricane is threatening to hit Texas.
I go to the funeral home with my husband and Bart’s siblings. As we drive, all I keep thinking about is all these plans Bart had for his life after the service—like how he wanted to become an ambassador. He was going to study international relations at Georgetown. He had all kinds of plans—and he had all kinds of skills. And his captain knew that. His captain told me how, the night before Bart died, he had been talking to Bart about one of the soldiers in the company, this man named Jodie, who had been suspected of stealing some highly sensitive night equipment and selling it on eBay. The original plan was for Bart to go to the captain’s office and together they would travel to the soldier’s apartment, which was off base, in Killeen. They needed to collect the goods, before the man was to be discharged the following day.
Bart, though, had another idea. “No, I’ll do it,” he told the captain. “You go to the office. I’ll get up early, and I’ll go.”
And he did. Bart took a master sergeant with him. They weren’t armed, because the apartment was off base. Jodie’s apartment was in a motel-like complex, on the corner of the second floor. It had a balcony with an iron-rod fence. All the blinds were shut.
They knocked on the door. Nobody answered.
The master sergeant went to the apartment manager. “We would like to talk to him, but he’s not answering. His car is parked in the driveway, and we’re kind of concerned that maybe something’s going on, because we know he’s in his apartment. We can hear him.”
The apartment manager tried to open the door, but it was locked from the inside.
Bart and the master sergeant became even more concerned. They knew Jodie was in there, and he wasn’t answering. They were all thinking the same thing: Had Jodie killed himself?
The balcony had a sliding glass door. The blinds were drawn there, too. The apartment manager got his tools and they removed the kitchen window.
Bart felt all sorts of alarms going off in his brain as they looked through the blinds, into the kitchen area and beyond. The place was a mess—alcohol, guns, and all sorts of crap scattered over the counters, tables, and floor.
Jodie came out of the bedroom with a Glock in his hand.
Bart grabbed his phone. He dialed 911 and turned to the master sergeant and apartment manager. “Get off the balcony,” he said.
They got off the balcony.
Bart did not. He spoke to the dispatcher, who urged Bart to get to safety.
Too late. Jodie stepped outside, onto the balcony, the Glock tucked in his pocket.
Bart tried to talk Jodie down. “Listen, we’re just here to visit with you,” he said, and then he tried to negotiate with Jodie a little bit, talk him down.
Jodie walked back inside the apartment. Now was the time for Bart to leave.
But he didn’t. He thought he could talk Jodie down.
When Jodie came back out, he was more agitated. Then he heard the police sirens—and now he was even more alarmed. Jodie lost it and pulled his gun.
And went right for Bart.
Bart had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. He turned away and shots belted out from Jodie’s gun. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.
The police arrived. Shots were exchanged. Then Jodie shot himself and fell on my son, who was carrying in his pocket the little star I had given him the night before he deployed. I’d always thought he’d thrown it in the garbage. I’m told he carried it with him all the time.
I arrive at the funeral home to see Bart.
As they open the casket, I recall what the captain told me on the phone: “You need to be prepared. Bart might not look…There might be a little shift in how he looks.”
I thought he was shot in the chest. He can’t look that different.
The person lying inside the casket doesn’t even remotely look like my son.
That’s when my husband sees a bullet hole behind the ear. “Oh, my God,” he says. “I think he was shot in the head.”
My husband and I and Bart’s brother stand there, stunned. They said Bart was shot in the chest, not the head. But Bart was shot in the head not once but five times. Jodie literally blew his face off.
They knew. The Army knew what had happened, but they didn’t tell me the truth.
They won’t tell me why.
I never had to forgive my son’s killer because, in my mind, Jodie was the person I feared Bart would become if I had not put in the hard work to help Bart go in the direction he needed to go.
Was I angry that this happened? Yes. But all I had for Jodie was empathy. Jodie had a background that was very stressful. He experienced lots of trauma. The reason he went to war was because of 9/11. He went to Washington and saw the devastation there and then he went to New York and saw the destruction and said, “I’m going to enlist, I’m getting into the Army, that’s what I’m doing.” And he did. Jodie had the same mission as Bart, but he wasn’t there for the right reasons.
My work has always been focused on helping very young children be able to regulate social and emotional behavior so parents don’t have to engage in warfare. Conflict always starts with an upset emotional state. If we can see it as a call for help, we can teach kids to regulate their emotions so they don’t feel as though they need to be aggressive. Jodie never got his needs met. He was a homeless kid, living on the streets with his mother. No father in his life. He was very depressed and struggled all through school. He never got the support he so desperately needed. He never got a chance to learn resiliency, which is the ability to take disappointment and conflict and turn it into something better. Get through it.
Which got me thinking: what if we built a foundation of early-childhood centers that could help the Jodies of the world? These early-childhood centers are mom-and-pop places, and most parents can’t afford the high-tech schools, the family privilege schools and nurseries that are out there. What if we could provide not only parents but also teachers with the critical skills needed to help children build resiliency?
That is the mission of my nonprofit, Bart’s Blue Star Foundation: to transform aggressive, scared boys and girls into powerful leaders like my son.
Bart got to live his dream. That’s the good news. My son lived his dr
eam and always followed his heart.
And the military was so about his heart.
RORY PATRICK HAMILL
Rory Patrick Hamill grew up in Brick, New Jersey, the son of two Navy parents. Wanting to serve something bigger than himself, Rory joined the Marine Corps and, near the end of 2006, went to boot camp. He served from 2006 until 2012. He got out as a corporal.
I’m doing desert warfare training out in Twentynine Palms, California, when the battalion commander gathers our company and tells us that fresh bodies are needed on the ground in Afghanistan to hit the Taliban, as part of President Obama’s Operation Strike of the Sword.
“We’re up next at bat,” the battalion commander tells us. “We’re going to Afghanistan.”
Everyone around me is acting all Yeah, fuck yeah!
I’m like, Fuck.
I got married at eighteen. When I turned nineteen, in 2006, I had my daughter. I missed her birth because I had been deployed to Iraq. And now that I’m officially deploying to Afghanistan, I’m going to miss the birth of my son.
Afghanistan is constant, high-level stress. Every day when we leave our base to go out and patrol, someone in our area of operations is guaranteed to get shot at or blown up.
The first time I got into a firefight I didn’t realize what was happening.
We were walking through a cornfield, which was a nightmare in and of itself. It was 130 degrees, the sun blazing hot, the air humid from the floods farmers had to create to keep the corn alive. When I heard a snapping sound, someone had the wherewithal to yell at me to get down.
That was when I realized: Oh, shit, someone’s trying to attack me and take my life. And the adrenaline surge? Holy shit. I immediately unloaded my SAW machine gun.
The firefights are now happening almost every single day. We’re taking casualties left and right. And I don’t take cover the way I should. I always stay out in the open and shoot with my SAW and make myself a target. My technique looks borderline suicidal, but I want to make sure everyone is safe, everyone is covered.
The day we get ground intelligence saying there’s potential enemy activity, a squad doing an adjacent patrol about two hundred meters distant starts taking on fire—potshots. The enemy withdraws, and our squad moves to flank them.
We cut through a graveyard and set up along a tree line. We now have the best avenue of approach to engage the enemy.
Only they get behind us quicker than we anticipate.
My team leader, Charlie Lee, points to a tree about five feet to the right and says, “Rory, I want you to set up over there.”
I’m standing behind the tree, aiming out into the open field, when I hear a gunshot.
Where’s that coming from? What—?
Charlie starts screaming. “I got shot.”
I can see the damage: the round hit his shin head-on and blew out the back of his calf.
We react immediately.
Marine Corps rifle squads are designed so that if someone above you in rank gets wounded, you follow the succession of command, which, in this case, is me. I have to step up and become a team leader.
The firefight is intense—the single most frenetic situation I’ve been in up to this point in my career. We fight with tenacity and ferocity as the enemy ambushes us from three sides. I keep looking at Charlie bleeding on the ground and think, Oh, my God, I failed him. I couldn’t protect my team.
We soon get bogged down and decide to pull into the other side of the canal. The enemy appears and we start getting shot at, which means we have to pull into the trench water. That is a major concern for us because Charlie has an open gunshot wound and a muscle and skin laceration on the back of his calf. That unclean water gets into his wounds, he’s at risk of fatal sepsis.
We call in a medevac and a gunship and then take cover while the enemy keeps firing at us.
We wait an hour and a half until air support arrives. It feels like forever.
The medevac lands—directly in our field of fire.
Four of my guys drop their weapons, pick up Charlie, and start running through knee-high mud. I run alongside them and shoot anyone who pops his head out. The shooting gets so intense the crew chief door gunner jumps out and engages the enemy with his 9mm—ineffective in the grand scheme of things, but his actions say Fuck you, I’m going to try. His pilots are in harm’s way, and he’s got to protect them at all costs. Having a bird—this great big piece of metal—stranded on the ground makes us sitting ducks.
We get Charlie on the medevac. Later, when we exfil, the Cobras and Hueys move in and start pounding the area with Hellfire missiles, miniguns, everything. It’s not a good day for the bad guys.
Today I feel like I became a man.
I think about the way the door gunner acted—how we all acted and came together to help Charlie and get him to safety. It’s the greatest symbolism of love I’ve ever seen in my life. That might sound bad, since I have children, but the way these men came together—it’s absolutely true: there is no greater love.
At the base, I receive the news that my son was born. I’m told the time of his birth, do some quick calculations, and discover that my son came into the world while I was out with my squad, fighting for our lives.
It’s 2010. I’m twenty-two years old, married, and have two kids. While I have an amazing set of leadership skills and can operate under pressure, in extremely frenetic life-or-death environments, I don’t have any actual skill sets that can translate into a job back home.
I decide to reenlist.
I’m told we’re going back to Afghanistan—this time to a place called Maja.
When my platoon arrives, we start working in the area of operations, doing foot patrols. I’m a corporal and a team leader.
We get ground intelligence that an improvised explosive device is inside a compound. Sergeant John Moler, one of my best friends, turns to me and says, “You want to go get in some trouble?”
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
We set up a cordon around the compound. John fumbles as he tries to get the metal detector off his back. I can tell he’s nervous. Shaky. This is his first deployment. I’ve been blown up six times: two IED strikes and four RPGs. I go into dad mode.
“Let me do it,” I say.
“Corporal, I can do it.”
“I know you can. I have no doubt in your abilities. I want to take care of it.”
I take the metal detector from him and go into the compound. The floor is all dirt. I’ve swept about three quarters of it when I step on a low metallic pressure plate attached to an IED.
The bomb explodes. I’m launched ten feet into the air and then I hit the ground.
I try to draw a breath and can’t because the bomb sucked away the oxygen. There’s smoke and dust everywhere, and I can’t hear anything.
Finally, my lungs inflate. I go to stand up, can’t.
What the fuck? I look down and see my right kneecap dangling by some sinew and my femur sticking out.
The lower part of my right leg is gone.
I draw on some crazy muscle memory. I go to grab my lifesaving tourniquet in my right cargo pocket but the pocket is no longer there. The only thing I can do is try to cut the flow of blood the best I can.
I pick up my stump, pin it to my chest.
And that’s when my new reality hits me: my leg is gone.
The pain comes.
I start to scream.
My guys run up to me. Even in pain, I’m locked in my training—my leadership mindset. “Did you guys sweep for secondary IEDs?”
“Yeah,” they say when it’s obvious they didn’t. They just ran up to me.
I would have done the same.
As they drag me out of the crater, I touch my ass and the back of my leg. It’s wet. “Doc, check my backside. I think I’m bleeding back here.”
The doc hits me with morphine. This is his first deployment, too. I know he’s scared—terrified—because he’s just a kid. We’re all kids, yet here we’re
performing to the best of our abilities in the worst possible environments.
After he gets a tourniquet on my right side, he rolls me over, onto my stump. The amount of pain I experience in that moment turns me into an animal. I don’t feel human. I start clawing at everyone’s faces. They pin down my arms while the doc hits me again with morphine.
The pain starts to subside. I calm down. “All right, all right,” I tell them. “I’m good. I’m good. Someone give me a cigarette.”
They lean me up against the wall. I puff on a Marlboro Red, waiting for the helicopter to come.
“This is making me nauseous,” I say, and spit out the cigarette. I see it bounce off my flak jacket, and the pain in my head kind of stops.
Everything gets really peaceful.
Quiet.
I can hear the birds chirping. The sky is so blue, and the sun feels great. It’s so weird and perverse, having these thoughts, because the exact opposite is happening around me.
On the helicopter, I wind up flatlining for two minutes because of the amount of trauma and blood loss. I’m not a religious person. I don’t experience the typical “great white light,” but I do feel absolute peace. Like I’m one with the universe, or something. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
I wind up at Walter Reed, which, oddly, is where I was born. It’s ironic, this “full circle of life” kind of deal.
My stump, I discover, had been cauterized by the blast, so I didn’t bleed out.
But my leg is gone. They couldn’t reattach it.
A week later, after I’m stabilized, a nurse comes in and says, “You’re going to have a special visitor today, so make sure you shave your face.”
Great. Some Marine officer is coming to visit me. Whatever.
I have a full beard. I shave my face using a bedpan filled with water and a shitty two-blade disposable razor. I’m all cut up, sitting in my bed with pieces of toilet paper stuck all over my face, when I see President Obama.
Walk in My Combat Boots Page 30