"I guess I've done my duty"

http://wes-downrange.blogspot.com/2007/08/spec-alison-k-i-guess-ive-done-my-duty.html

[rquoter]Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Spec. Alison K.: "I Guess I've Done My Duty"

Last night, I had to wait for two hours to catch a Black Hawk from the IZ to Camp Taji. (I'll write more later about Taji and Tikrit, where I was last week.) In the crowded landing zone trailer, I plopped down on my body armor on an unoccupied piece of floor, thinking I would just watch tv and maybe sleep a bit before my flight. Instead, the soldier next to me, curious because of my civilian clothes and obvious youth, struck up a conversation, and we ended up talking straight up until her flight left an hour later. I'm still in awed shock over the story the soldier told me.

Her name was Spec. Alison K., and I stupidly assumed that she must be a rear-echelon soldier with a job at the embassy or somewhere like that -- she was petite, blonde, and looked like a more likely candidate for Princeton's Cottage Club than for combat. I was dead wrong about that. After I'd explained to her satisfaction what I was doing in Iraq, I asked her where she was from, where she was stationed, and what her duties were, as I do almost any soldier I talk to. She was originally from California, she said, and was with the 2-2 BSB at FOB Rustamiya, in east Baghdad (she was wearing the Indian Head patch so I knew she was from 2nd ID). She was 25, and twelve months into her first tour. I asked if it had been a rough deployment; she said yes, her truck had been hit by IEDs four times. Clearly she was not a rear-echelon soldier.

I hesitated to press for details, since you never know whether a soldier will want to go into what's happened to them, but she dove right in without my even asking. She drove a recovery vehicle for the 2nd BCT, 2nd ID, and went outside the wire three or four times a week to help drag burned-out Humvees, tanks, and Bradleys back to base. "We get either sniped at or IED'd pretty much every mission," she said. "East Baghdad's really rough, but it's awesome like that. You should visit before you leave!" It took me a moment to realize she wasn't being sarcastic. "The first time you get blown up by an IED, you're like, Dude, this is badass! but after that you're like, This really is not cool at all anymore. But riding out there, getting shot at, shooting back -- that doesn't get old." Many soldiers would disagree, obviously, it was hard to doubt her enthusiasm. She seemed to genuinely love combat, and she related two stories with particular relish. First, the time she was taping from her vehicle so that people could see what a convoy looked like, when, right there on tape, the truck directly in front of hers had hit an EFP and exploded in a cloud of flames. "It was insane," she added unnecessarily: "There no way you could ever plan to get a video like that."

The second story blew my mind. The previous week a soldier in her vehicle had been shot by a sniper and badly injured -- but saved from death by the bible he kept in his pocket, inside his armor. That sounded like something from a corny World War II-era morale-boosting story, of course, but seeing my disbelief she pulled out a photograph to prove it: a pocket bible, soaked in blood, with a squashed 7.62mm bullet embedded in it. There had been two rounds; both had penetrated the soldier's armor, and one had wounded him badly, but the other, which would almost certainly have been lethal, had been stopped by the bible. "He was asking for his bible at the hospital," she said, "so I found the top he'd been wearing and pulled this out of the pocket where he said it would be, and I was like, No ****ing way." If he had died, she said, she would have been furious: "My two best friends from my unit have been killed out here already, one of them right in front of me, and losing a third one would have sucked ass."

That was one of the most intense stories I'd heard in Iraq, I told her, then asked, as an afterthought, what flight she was waiting for. "Oh, I'm on my way home for medical leave. I'm going to see by dad, which will be weird, since he's an Army colonel and never wanted me to join and ever since I enlisted we pretty much haven't been talking. I'm dealing with a divorce too -- never marry an infantryman, although I guess that wouldn't be a problem for you -- and it'll be good to get home and work on that." An estranged father and a divorce on top of twelve months in combat, four hits by IEDs, and two best friends' deaths -- I didn't know what to say. So I backtracked and asked, "What's the medical leave for?" That's when she dropped the bomb I'm still stunned by:

"The truck got blown up the day before yesterday, but this time it was an EFP and I actually got hurt -- not too bad, just shrapnel stuff. So I got evacuated to the CSH [combat support hospital] up here for treatment, and while they were working on me they found out that I was pregnant, which I didn't know about, and it was twins, and I lost them both in the explosion. So then they took some tissue samples during the surgery, which I guess is routine, and it turned out it was cancerous. So I'm going home to start treatment so they can see if they can stop it before it spreads. Sounds pretty bad when I say it all at once, huh? I guess it hasn't really all sunk in yet."

I couldn't believe my ears. This was by far the most devastating story I'd heard from any soldier here, and yet there she was, telling it to me in an completely calm and amiable voice. I had absolutely no idea how to respond. What do you say when a soldier tells you, without missing a beat, let alone breaking down sobbing as one might expect, that in addition to losing her two best friends and being in the middle of an ugly divorce, she has also been wounded by an Iranian bomb, found out she was pregnant with twins, found out they were dead, and then learned that, by the way, she also had cancer and had better leave her unit and start treatment right away? Nothing I could possibly say would come even close to acknowledging what she'd gone through and, beyond that, the stunning courage she was displaying in dealing with it.

While I stared at her, trying to figure out how to reply, Alison continued: "I definitely want to stay in the Army, but I think after this they probably won't let me. Andt blows that I have to leave my unit early, though. They still have three months to go. But I've been here for a year -- I guess I've done my duty."

I've met some pretty impressive soldiers over here, from Gen. Petraeus to Lt. Col. Peterson, but none of them hold a candle to this one. I hope that if I remember one thing from this summer, it's that this is what service and sacrifice are all about: heroes like Spec. Alison K. [/rquoter]