2005 · Camp Johnson, North Carolina
The graduation run.
Before the Army, before Iraq, I was a Navy in training. In 2005, my C school sent me from Beaufort, South Carolina, up to Field Medical Training at Camp Johnson, on Camp Lejeune near Jacksonville, North Carolina.
There was a man in our class everybody gravitated to. He was one of the older ones, and he was the funniest guy there, a real comedian. On the worst days of training, he was the one who had the whole class laughing. He had four kids and a newborn not even a year old, and he was there so his kids could go to college.
What most of us didn’t see was what he was carrying into the hardest day of training. His heart was already working against all of it.
On the graduation run, those of us who had finished were standing at the line, cheering everyone in. He was almost there.
We watched him pass out and fall ten feet from the finish. He died right there, with all of us looking on.
The next morning, we got ready for graduation. It opened with his eulogy. His boots, his M16, and his dog tags stood in front of us. A graduation became a remembrance.
And I drove back to South Carolina with that.
2009 · Fort Irwin, California
We were training for Iraq.
Four years later, on the other side of the country, I was in uniform again. In 2009, before the holiday season, my unit spent two weeks at Fort Irwin, out in the Mojave Desert, getting ready to deploy to Iraq.
This was my second time in uniform. My first tour, I served as a Navy FMF corpsman and got out honorably. Then I joined the Army, but not as a medic. I’d heard too many horror stories about Army medics, so I went in as a 12Y, a geospatial engineer. My job was maps: getting people where they needed to go, and getting them home.
But you don’t stop being a corpsman. I was still studying, still keeping my medicine current. And I was about to watch it happen again.
Long before Iraq, I already knew people die without ever seeing combat.
The bladder on his back
He filled it with an energy drink.
A CamelBak is a water bladder you wear on your back and sip through a tube all day. One of our soldiers filled his with an energy drink instead of water. Nobody checked. Flip it and see the difference.
Two ways down
Too little. Then too much, too fast.
Your body runs on a narrow balance of water and sodium. Fall behind on water and you dehydrate. Pour water in faster than your kidneys can handle and sodium crashes. That’s hyponatremia, and from the outside the two can look almost the same. Slide how fast the fluid goes in.
That day
How it happened.
I’m telling this the way I saw it, with what I knew then as a corpsman and what I know now. Six moments, one afternoon. Swipe through them.
What should have happened
Nobody checked the CamelBaks.
We treated ourselves like prime athletes and tactical machines, and nobody was checking what was in our bladders. This is the training he never got. Tap each one.
Two coasts
Two coasts. Neither one a war.
One in the humid woods of North Carolina. One in the open desert of California. Two services, two training grounds, four years apart. Tap a pin.
What stays with me
Nobody in our unit died in Iraq.
We deployed. We did the job. And every one of us in our unit came home.
The deaths I saw weren’t in Iraq. They were at home, in training, years apart and on opposite coasts, and I’ve seen more since, nowhere near a war. Every one of them came down to things education could have caught: the water, the salt, the heart, the bottle, the pace. That’s why I talk about water the way I do, with coaches, parents, first responders, and every guest who tells me they’re fine on coffee and soda.
0
soldiers our unit lost in Iraq
0
needless deaths in training, four years and a country apart
Too many
since then, nowhere near a war
A needless death is one that education could have stopped.
