In so many ways, it feels like Rory never left. He can still hear the car bombs exploding, the deafening sound of the waterfall of gun fire going off at the fence line… only yards away. He can still feel the heat, the way it seemed to get into your bones and cover you like a wet blanket. He can still feel the bullets ricochet, the way they shook the walls around him. That first night in Iraq he didn’t sleep one wink. But when he left four months later, the feeling of constant anxiety, of always being on edge, would stay with him…
“Being stationed in the Sunni Triangle was the beginning of the end of my personality, my emotions, and my mental state,” Rory told me on the phone. He recounted instances of being inches away from death, the way it felt when a car bomb goes off and suddenly everything becomes slow motion, like in a movie. He remembers the nightmares more than anything. The noise. The gut-wrenching fear. “Our base was hit by mortars 139 times in 120 days,” he said. When I asked what a mortar was, he told me it was a miniature bomb.
Big things come in small packages, he said.
One night, he felt like he was out of options. He was having one of the worst panic attacks he’d ever had, and he wasn’t able to snap himself out of it. Watching his three young daughters sleep didn’t have the same curative effect it usually did… he just felt empty, gutted, defeated. He felt like he just wanted it all to be over. “I was tired,” he remembers. “I was tired of locking up all my sadness, anger, depression, and anxiety and pretending like it didn’t exist. I thought about becoming one of the 22 a day because I didn’t think I deserved to be here anymore and I was just a burden to my family.”
As a last ditch effort to find comfort and solace, he posted about these suicidal thoughts on a veteran support group. It was the middle of the night, but he hoped someone would respond. Someone who had been there, who could pull him out of the trenches. Out of the 12,000 people who belonged to the support group, only a handful were online at that time. And of the handful who saw Rory’s cry for help, only one responded. And only a few months before, she had been contemplating the same dark thoughts. But in her case it was a charity, not a person, who came to her aid…
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