PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
“WE PARTICIPATED
IN SO MUCH HORROR...
THE MORAL PAIN GOES
BEYOND TRADITIONAL
PSYCHOTHERAPY.”
LeJeune, N.C., the Marines had
become her real family. In the year
before she flew to Iraq, she got to
know the EOD guys, their wives,
their children. Facing the terrible
risks of unstable explosives, they
trained exhaustively and partied
hard and grew emotionally close
and tight — no secrets.
They arrived in western Iraq
in 2007 to find a bloody terror
of fighting, with an escalation of
booby-trapped IEDs detonated by
cell phones and garage-door openers. The blasts were erupting beneath soldiers and Marines causing horrific injuries and death.
That year, 764 Americans were
killed in Iraq, mostly by IEDs.
Frantic calls to the bomb disposal teams, spread out over al-Anbar
Province, came in every hour of
every day of every week. Natasha
was on the road making sure each
team had the gear and supplies it
needed. In a single day, April 27,
the team lost two Marines, Sgt. Bill
Callahan, 28, who left a wife and a
three-week-old son, and Sgt. Peter Woodall, 25, who was married
with a 3-year-old son.
Amidst the carnage, Natasha
went numb. It was her job to
gather the dead Marines’ personal effects, make sure letters
got written home to the families
and that nothing got sent home
with blood on it “because of the
biohazard.”
What was that like for her?
Tears welled in her eyes as she
felt again the shock and grief that
she had stuffed deep inside five
years ago. “At the time … I just …
functioned,” she says. “I’d make a
pot of coffee because I knew we’d
be up for two or three days.”
Such enormous stress is the
heart of war trauma — including PTSD and TBI — that causes
physiological or neuro-chemical
changes in the functioning of the