What stays with you after deployment?

For years after Iraq, Anisa Palmer could not do the Fourth of July.

“I remember being a civilian, postmilitary experience, and I couldn’t do fireworks, like, forever.”

Hear it at 13:21

Palmer is an Iraq combat Veteran who served with the 82nd Airborne and founded I Will Survive. Her first deployment was mortar rounds and bunkers. She says it is better now. She has a four-year-old, and four-year-olds like fireworks, so she goes, with a plan.

“I’m like, okay, let’s go. If we have to leave early, just prepare yourself, kiddo.”

Hear it at 13:29

That is what this article is about. Not what happened over there. What came back in the luggage, and what a person does with it on an ordinary Tuesday years later.

We should be straight about the material. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, eleven Veterans touch on this, most of them briefly, on the way to something else. It turns out we ask a lot about what happened and not enough about what is left. So this is a shorter piece than the subject deserves, and we say at the end what we are going to start asking.

What a blast is like

Three of our guests describe being hit by an improvised bomb. None of them describes it the way a movie would.

Joe “Doc” Worley, a U.S. Navy corpsman who holds a Bronze Star with valor and a Purple Heart, was two weeks from the end of a deployment to Fallujah.

“September 17th, 2004, I was hit with a roadside bomb while I was running to assist a vehicle that had been disabled by another bomb on an overpass.”

Hear it at 7:06

He remembers all of it. He put on his own tourniquet, with an old cravat he had carried since school, not the expensive ones. And he has done the math on how badly his own memory lies about time.

“I would say the whole thing was three or four minutes of me doing all this. It was guaranteed 35 seconds.”

Hear it at 9:06

Then the flight home, stacked in a transport with another wounded man in the rack above him. Ask him what stays from that and you do not get what you expect.

“I don’t remember the pain. I remember needing to pee for 20 hours.”

Hear it at 10:11

He lost a leg above the knee. That is what he remembers of the flight.

Alfred Brenner, a Purple Heart recipient, retired Marine Corps K9 handler and author, was in Kandahar on October 24, 2010, with his dog, Grief, on the worst day his unit had. He was handing a rifle back to someone.

“As I go to take my third step, everything just went white.”

Hear it at 33:40

He thought he was dead, then thought he was spinning through the air. He was not. “I realized the flipping sensation was just because my brain got rocked.” Hear it at 34:11 His face was hit and his eyes were shut, and he calls that a blessing: he remembers everything and saw none of it. He lay there listening to the radio call. One wounded, one killed.

“I heard everybody talking except I didn’t hear anybody talking about my dog. And that’s when I realized that he was killed.”

Hear it at 34:36

The dog had been at his side for the whole deployment, he says, up to the last second. The book he wrote is named for him.

Randall Parkes, a Marine Corps Veteran, drill instructor and founding MARSOC Raider, did three combat deployments. The one he calls demoralizing is not the one with the most shooting. It is the first, in Iraq in 2005, driving convoys.

“That first deployment was kind of demoralizing, because you get hit with an IED and there’s not really a whole lot you can do about it.”

Hear it at 19:59

The next one, he says, had enemies you could see, and “it was what you thought a deployment would be.” He means that as praise. As he tells it, a fight you can see beats a bomb you cannot.

Juan Valdez, a Marine Corps Veteran and Purple Heart recipient who works with Wounded Warrior Project, took a sniper’s round in Iraq while carrying the radio. He lists its route like a man reading directions.

“Shot me through the arm, inside the chest, through my lungs, ricocheted off my rib, and came out my back.”

Hear it at 2:19

Later a platoon commander asked whether he would deploy again, and told him to talk it over with his family first. His answer was “I’m in.” Whatever stays with you, it apparently does not always include reluctance.

What the body keeps

Some of it you can hear. “Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, describes his ears: “It’s high-pitch ringing. It comes and goes.” Hear it at 1:16:47 Sometimes there is a pop, the sound drops out, and it comes back slowly.

Some of it shows up late. Delvin Bourn, a U.S. Army Veteran, 82nd Airborne paratrooper and Gulf War Veteran, was in a neurologist’s office years afterward.

“They were beating on my legs and I had no reflexes. They were beating on my elbows. I had no reflexes.”

Hear it at 56:41

He had kept a letter the government once sent his unit, saying they had been in a chemical plume in Iraq. Billy Wiland, a Marine Corps Veteran, attorney and gym owner, says he spent two years in the Middle East, some of it running burn pits in Iraq.

“I have had so many autoimmune issues. I’ve already lost some brothers to cancer.”

Hear it at 32:39

Both men connect what they breathed to what happened in their bodies. We are a camera crew. We do not know what caused what, and we are not going to pretend to. What we can do is point at the people whose job it is. VA describes the PACT Act as a law that expands its health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange and other toxic substances, and says on the same page that every Veteran enrolled in VA health care gets a toxic exposure screening, with a follow-up at least once every five years. VA also keeps a burn pit registry, set up in 2014, and says taking part in it has no effect on eligibility for care or benefits.

The speed

Raivadus Gill, an Iraq combat Veteran and founder of Operation Battle Cry, was asked whether he noticed any change in himself when he got back. No, he says. He thought he was good.

“The problem is in Iraq, you going 110, 115, 150 miles per hour, man. But we don’t know that because this is what we’re doing. This is just life now.”

Hear it at 49:05

You come home still doing 110 and everyone else is doing the speed limit, and nobody hands you a note. The other thing he brought back was quieter. His team went through doors in the middle of the night, pulling fathers out of houses.

“I felt like a bully, man, to tell you the truth. And that really hurt me cuz I’m not like that.”

Hear it at 49:38

The people you left there

Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant who spent 20 years in signals intelligence, worked for a while in Mosul. What he still thinks about is not on any map.

“I think back and I’m like, man, that kid used to bring me some bread, man. He’s got to be in his 30s by now.”

Hear it at 59:08

And a calico cat that used to stop by, which he figures is long gone. He wonders how the men he worked with are doing. He is also clear that he is not going back to find out.

Aguillon counts his differently. He says there were four incidents in his service “that to me kind of changed how I react to things.” Hear it at 1:17:45 One was a shooting he watched from a guard tower in Afghanistan. Another was not an incident at all but a count: about 18 memorial ceremonies, which he says never got easier.

Is it a wound or a tool?

Here our guests part ways.

Not everyone brought much home. In one of our earliest episodes Nate Rosas, a U.S. Army Veteran who went to Afghanistan in 2009, says plainly: “My Afghanistan deployment was fairly easier than most.” Hear it at 10:01 He rarely left the base. That is a deployment too, and it comes with its own thing to carry, which is saying so in a room full of people who did.

Brenner, flying home in a hospital bed and unable to move, watched other wounded men walk onto the plane and hated them for it. Then he learned the soldier next to him had lost three limbs.

“When you start comparing yourself to other people, you’re going to beat yourself down for no reason.”

Hear it at 37:00

And Worley, who by any measure is owed a complaint, has decided the thing that came home with him works for him. PTSD is his word.

“PTSD, it is a survival mechanism. And if you’re in control of PTSD, it reminds you to double check your doors.”

Hear it at 15:22

He checks the doors, shuts the gate, turns on the cameras.

“At the end of the night, when I do those things, I sleep like a baby.”

Hear it at 15:38

He says eighteen months of school and war changed him down to the DNA, and that he has to find a way to use it or it is going to use him. That is one man’s arrangement with his own head, not a prescription. Palmer’s arrangement is an exit plan and a four-year-old. Gill did not know he needed one. Haines has a kid with bread he will never see again, and no plans to go find out.

What we have not asked

Nobody on our tapes mentions the smell of diesel. Nobody describes what their sleep is like now, or where they sit in a restaurant, or what a car backfiring does. We would be surprised if none of them could. We never asked. We asked where they deployed and what happened, because that is the question every Veteran asks every other Veteran, and it is the wrong one for this.

So the next time someone sits down in front of our cameras: What do you still notice that nobody else in the room does?