THE GRUNTS
wives and sweethearts and parents had crowded around to say
their tearful goodbyes, imploring Martz, Make sure you bring
my boy back, now. Looking him
in the eye, hand on his shoulder.
Keep my boy safe.
“Well, that’s a high order,” Martz told me, “given that I am the
one directing these guys where to
go and I don’t know where anything is. I can’t say, ‘Oh don’t go
there, there’s a bomb there, and
there’s a guy over there, make sure
you watch him and don’t get shot.’
You are praying that the decision
you make is the right one, and if it
is the wrong one — which a couple
of decisions were the wrong ones
— you are paying the price and
you are living with it.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so
stressed in my life.”
It was a young Afghan boy, Martz found out later, who detonated
40 pounds of explosives beneath
Martz’s squad. He was one of the
younger kids who hung around
the Marines. Martz had given
him books and candy and, even
more precious, his fond attention. The boy would tip them off
to IEDs and occasionally brought
them fresh-baked bread. One day,
as Martz’s platoon walked a rou-
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
tine patrol, the boy yanked a trigger wire from a hidden position.
Whether he had been a secret enemy all along or whether some incident had turned him against the
Americans are questions Martz
wrestles with to this day.
But the effects of the blast were
immediate. The detonation and
“The feeling hits you and like ...
I don’t want to be like that.
I just want to be normal.”
blizzard of jagged shrapnel felled
Martz, knocking him unconscious,
and ripped through his squad. Every Marine went down wounded.
Luckily, no one was killed, but
several were severely injured.
Martz fought back to consciousness. He checked to see if his legs
were there (they were), and got on
the radio. “As a leader you can’t
— I wasn’t allowed and couldn’t
allow myself to crumble, or just
give in to despair,” he said, his
thoughts and words accelerating
as he remembered.
We were talking in a quiet corner of the Wounded Warrior barracks at Camp Lejeune in November, shortly before Martz received
his medical separation from the