find some new ones, along with new friends who had been through
what she’d been through.
Carla Garcia, thirty-five, described how she’d volunteered for the
first Iraq invasion in 2003 and then returned as a vehicle commander
running fuel convoys across the war zone from Al Taqaddum. In
2005, her truck hit a roadside bomb and she was blasted from it,
landing on her head. Her driver died. During her third tour, in Mosul,
another bomb exploded, crashing her head against the vehicle roof
and pelting her with shrapnel. Garcia pulled her ailing driver from the
smoking wreckage and fought off insurgents with her M-16 until she
passed out (she received both a combat action badge and a Purple
Heart, I found out later). Doctors induced a week-long coma to relieve
pressure in her brain. Afterward, she had to learn how to talk. In
addition to chronic pain, she suffers seizures, headaches, mood
swings, and nightmares. She can’t walk far, won’t drive, and can
barely stand being in any kind of vehicle. “I don’t like crowds and I
don’t like people,” she said. “This will be hard.”
After dinner, we grouped for the processing talk, our first one, to
articulate goals for the trip. That’s when Kate Day, a Navy vet in her
fifties from Las Vegas, mentioned her three-year stint of
homelessness, a stay in a mental institution and her near-inability to
leave her house. Two other women chimed in that they too had been
institutionalized. One said she was still so depressed she didn’t want
to keep living. Another said her anger and misery had alienated her
whole family. Another, sitting expressionless, said in a flat voice that
she wanted some time to “be in the moment and not zone out.” A
skinny blonde wearing a sparkly blue sundress and pink sunglasses,
whom I’ll call Pam Hana, showed the opposite affect: maniacally
chatty, never still. She woke up scared and crying because she hated
airplanes and had successfully avoided them for years until this trip.
Tania Herrera, wearing a Gilliganesque fishing hat under dark,
cropped hair, talked about being limited by her body. First struck by