Four soldiers, four battles — and, between them — four total inches separate the slim expanse between death and life.
One
died because his armor plating wasn’t one inch higher. Three survived
by that same tiny fraction, left to mull the unanswerable: "Why am I
still here?"
In the final days of 2012, the somber tally of
American service members wounded in action in Afghanistan surpassed
18,000 while the number of U.S. military men and women killed there
eclipsed 2,040, according to the Department of Defense.
As
Jesse Holder can attest, many of those 20,000-plus causalities are here
— or are gone — based on a cold geometric fact of war: So often,
everything comes down to a single inch.
"I got hit in the neck and I thought I was done," said Holder, a
173rd Airborne trooper wounded in 2007 by shrapnel from a
rocket-propelled grenade while in Afghanistan. The round detonated just
above and to the right of Holder’s head as he rode in the turret of an
Army truck, patrolling a steep-walled riverbed.
"I said, out loud, 'Oh, this is it. I’m going to die right
here.' Everybody in the truck was thinking the same thing because of all
the blood."
He was airlifted to a makeshift hospital where a
surgeon removed the metal fragment. The doctor then revealed that if the
chunk had entered Holder’s neck "one centimeter to the left," it would
have opened an artery. He likely would have bled to death in the truck.
Instead, he was back on the line 10 days later. He never lost
consciousness.
"After the fire fight," Holder said, "when you're
back at your base talking about it, that's when it usually comes out: 'I
was inches away.' You'll hear: 'If that glass shield hadn't been there,
or if that tree hadn't deflected the bullet, I wouldn't be here now.'
"During
combat, you try not to think about it. But I think that's why, when
people come back, some have a hard time," added Holder, who recently
published a book, "Chutes, Beer, & Bullets," recounting some of
those close calls. "I've been good at compartmentalizing it, and not
thinking about it. But I lost a friend like that. It was the one inch
that killed him."
'It could have been me'That buddy was Army Spc. Jacob Lowell,
22, a 173rd Airborne trooper who had been in Afghanistan for two weeks
when his unit clashed with enemies armed with small arms and grenades on
June 2, 2007.
"All my friends, all at one time, they got wiped out," said Holder,
who was not part of that mission. "A lot of our guys didn't make it
home. My good friend did die by a narrow margin. The bullet went right
above Jacob’s protective armor."
The feeling dubbed "survivor
guilt" is a sentiment that Dr. Harry Croft, a San Antonio-based
psychiatrist, has often heard expressed during his conversations with
more than 7,000 veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
"I've
heard lots of stories, including: 'I was so close, it could have been
me.' For some, it's almost like they're saying: 'I feel worse about that
than if I would have died.' So they bring home this terrible,
burdensome guilt," said Croft.
Recovery can be helped by "learning
to reframe that event — not to forget it, but to be able to understand
it in a different way," Croft said.
Therapy can include coaxing
veterans to talk about — and eventually accept — the notion that "in the
heat of war, a lot of things happen, things you wouldn’t wish on your
worst enemy," Croft said.
What's more, combat includes the mathematical equation that thousands
of deadly projectiles are whizzing back and forth, up and down; some
hit vehicles; some hit trees or rocks or dirt; some hit people, and
breeze an inch past human flesh.
'There's a reason I'm here'Former
Army helicopter pilot Joe Baginski has lived more than 40 years since a
Vietnam mission during which he nearly was wounded or killed so often
in the span of just five minutes, he can't even calculate the number of
near misses. But he's put his own survival into healthy — and
folksy — perspective: "I must have been smiling just right because I
never got a scratch."
In November 1968, Baginski, then 21, hovered
his chopper at about 75 feet in thick foliage as other men on board
dropped crates of ammunition to U.S. soldiers who were running low on
bullets amid a battle with a far larger North Vietnamese force. The
helicopter's tail rotor spun inches from branches thick enough to bring
down the craft. At the same time, North Vietnamese Army troops fired on
the chopper. Bullets pierced the floor. The co-pilot was struck in the
arm. A sergeant major was hit in the foot. The instrument panel and
numerous gauges — directly in front of Baginksi — were obliterated in
the barrage. When the ammo drop was complete, he carefully maneuvered
the bird up and through the jungle canopy.
"I have no idea how
many rounds we had hit on the inside of that helicopter," Baginski said.
"But there had to be at least a dozen that struck that instrument panel
and fragments were going anywhere. I don't know how close I came but it
had to be pretty close."
For soldiers who beat heavy odds to
survive harsh battles, finding deeper meaning in their post-military
lives can help them deal with nagging wonders about why they came home
when buddies did not, Croft said.
"They decide: 'I guess there's a reason I'm here.' That can be the impetus to move forward with life," Croft said.
That's
a sentiment embraced by John Bennett, who was dropped by a sniper's
bullet in Iraq in 2005. The bullet entered his right side, shattered two
vertebrae, fractured a third, and cost him his colon, his spleen, half
his pancreas and his ability to walk.
"An inch to the left, it
would have deflected off my ballistic armored plate and I would have
been fine. And an inch to the right, it would have hit my liver and it
would have more than likely killed me," said Bennett, a former infantry
soldier who lives in Cascade, Mont.
"In the earlier stages of my
recovery it was a daily thought: Half inch left and I wouldn't be in
this situation. And I still think about it periodically. But, I don't
dwell on it," Bennett said. "I am a firm believer in everything happens
for a reason. I don't know what the reason was for me to stay alive and
be in this wheelchair, but it was for something. Maybe it was to help
with articles like this that help others believe they can move forward,
no matter what their situation is. Who knows?"
Despite the fact we all see our own naked form on a daily basis, for
some reason we're still gobsmacked when a designer chooses to exaggerate
it on clothing. Whether it's Jean Paul Gaultier's conical bras or
Vivienne Westwood's photocopied 'boob tee', you can guarantee a hefty
round of gasps and whispers of disapproval as soon as what should be
hidden inside clothing is illustrated on the outside.
Former IAS officer and anti-corruption crusader Arun Bhatia has lodged a complaint against some office-bearers of his residential complex for barring him from entering the society premises. Bhatia and his wife were returning to their home at Blue Hill Society after going to a restaurant in the wee hours of March 20 when the security guards refused to allow his car into the premises.
