Counseling on the Battlefield: When the Abyss Stares Back

By MB Wilmot                                                                  photo cc by bytehead

Summer 2005 in Ramadi, Iraq was hell.
Sure, it was about 138 degrees Fahrenheit, but the blistering heat paled in comparison to the hellfire my fellow troops and I endured with constant rocket and mortar attacks accompanied with daily firefights between insurgents and us on the streets.  

By this time I had been in Iraq for about 7 months, served on a female search team attached to Marine infantry units called Team Lioness. As both a medic and mental health sergeant, my days were long yet rewarding-- no matter where I was working in the Anbar Province.  I had just returned from my R&R leave, which was a relief to me as the whole time I was away from Iraq, I somehow missed it.

A noisy, gunfire-filled afternoon on June 15, 2005 quickly brought me back from my R&R mindset: five Marines were hit with multiple IEDs under their vehicle in front of the government center in downtown Ramadi. Those Marines were just a few of the infantry grunts that I had worked with at checkpoints with my battle-buddy, Specialist Mattingly, on Team Lioness.  

Sergeant X, who we knew from working mainly at Ramadi’s government center, came to the clinic in tears and made a beeline straight to me in front of the only two male mental health soldiers, Sergeant Arnold and Captain Jack, who worked with Mattingly and me.  She was still in Baghdad en route to Ramadi from R&R – she didn’t know yet.  These two men – both who’ve given me hell for being everything they hate: a minority, a Catholic, and a woman - looked at each other; Captain Jack rolled his eyes and gave a look to Arnold that said, "He wants to talk to the woman, of course."  Little did they know, I had worked with this guy before and he wasn't merely trying to pick me up as they always thought. Of course, in their eyes my clinical skills had nothing to do with the rapport we had with these soldiers and Marines. 


So Sergeant X sat down with me in our makeshift clinic cell and began telling me, "They're gone, they're gone, they're all dead!" while crying profusely into his hands. His eyes were blaring red and I began to ask who was dead.
"I'm glad you're here, at least you know…" he kept saying as he continued to identify the five Marines who were killed after rolling right over a spot in the road that turned out to be five 155 rounds waiting to detonate.  

Then, he tried to change the subject, asking me how I was doing.  I couldn’t believe it, but I kept encouraging him to tell me more.  He did, and the pain in his eyes spoke more than his tear-soaked words: it seemed as though he lost family members.

A lump grew in my throat, as I too wanted to cry. I held my breath as my eyes burned, trying to console him, asking him to recall what he saw. "He was still smiling," referring to one of the Marines whose face was still partly recognizable. The turret gunner was blasted out of the vehicle immediately upon explosion and thrown meters away into a wall and the others in the vehicle were literally in pieces.


I offered my advice, and since I knew him to be a very spiritual and religious guy, I consoled him along those lines; something I’m extremely reluctant to do. "They're feeling no pain now. They passed instantly and you did your very best to protect them. Pray for them, they're in God's hands now."

"I know, I just have to trust God, you know," he said still crying so painfully and passionately. These men are his brothers. Brothers from another mother as some of the Marines used to joke. Or sisters from another mister in reference to Mattingly and me These guys were hilarious, brave, humble, feeling, thinking people. And now they were ,dead. A slow montage of their smiles and jokes paraded through the back of my mind as I held back my own tears, while helping Sergeant X catch his. I held my breath intermittently throughout conversation, a trick I've become accustomed to in order to halt any crying of my own. I had to put it away and deal with it later, I had to be strong for them now.


After all those months on Lioness, Mattingly and I made a vow to look at this war with open eyes. Seeing what was really going on, beyond what the Banana Republic vest-wearing war correspondents or newspapers said. We didn't want to hide from the good or evil our eyes and souls would encounter, so we stared deeply and attentively into the abyss. Unfortunately that abyss can certainly stare back, and for us it surely did. Were we unwise to stare into oblivion for so long?

We stared so long into this living nightmare that it never left us, leaving us longing to be woken up. I didn't realize the impact until we got back to the US, but it was there all along, waiting.  My eyes can no longer savor striking colors nor can any of my other senses indulge in anything I once enjoyed thoroughly – nothing makes sense anymore.  This was our price to pay for leaving our eyes open in the darkness for so long. We sacrificed our inner peace to help pull others out of hell, only to witness the horror ourselves, forever burning its image into our souls.   

by MB Wilmot

http://ramquixoteadi.blogspot.com