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When I left the Marines, I didn’t think my life could get any worse. Now, I don’t think it could get much better.
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For five years following the infamous 2008 photos of my brush with a Taliban sniper at age 26, I battled three traumatic brain injuries accumulated over 13 years as an infantry rifleman, the last from an IED blast in Marjah, Afghanistan.
I was a shadow of my former self when my time as a grunt ended in 2013. I was a staff sergeant and had joined up right out of high school a year before 9/11.
Memory loss from the TBIs [traumatic brain injuries] and the weight of a decision I took that resulted in the death of two Marines were constant. My outlook on life was dark.
It’s now 2022, I just turned 40 and I live in suburban North Carolina with my wife, Bobbie, and son, Ethan, near a creek where I teach him to fish.
I may not be fully healed, but I am in a far better place, in many ways, including literally, than I was in 2008 — the sweaty perineum of the world, Helmand province.
A single round cracked
The day that changed my life was May 18, 2008, a month into the Battle of Garmsir. I was washing my cammies with soap and a rusty bucket and laughing that my pants were so crusty they could stand on their own.
I was a squad leader in 1/6 Marines on my third deployment in Afghanistan. When a single round cracked over our building, I threw on my pants and grabbed my rifle. Moments later I spotted a mud hut where the sniper was firing from, took aim — and then my world went dark.
The round had impacted inches from my face and propelled a mass of mud wall onto my head. I woke up strapped to a stretcher. I had been unconscious for a few minutes, but I refused to be evacuated; I had no holes in me and I wanted to stay in the fight.
Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic showed me the images that would grace the front pages of newspapers and be broadcast on TV screens. The pictures may have looked heroic, but I thought they were hilarious. I was doing my laundry and my response was muscle memory.
Duct-taped to a fridge
That massive blast left me with brain injuries that still dominate my life. At first, I couldn’t walk 100 yards without stumbling. I began suffering flashbacks as well.
