A Devastating Injury Results in Discharge

March 19, 2001 at 9 o’clock in the morning, Ethiopian time we were servicing the vehicles and there was a major explosion in one of the vehicles. My face took the brunt of the blast where a 25 mm round and everything else had blew off in it, inside the turret and it ended my career instantly. I was deaf and blind for a better part of three or four days.

I would do it again in a heartbeat. I know everything that I have been through, you know, when the explosion happened I remember, I remember getting out of the turret and seeing the blood dripping inside my eyes and then everything went red and everything went white. I woke up in the hospital about a week later and it was and at that time I probably had about twenty surgeries to reconstruct my face. And then the turmoil over PTSD started. And it was and still is not easy at all.