TONY KARUMBA/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
THE GRUNTS
Marine Corps (his traumatic
brain injury from the IED blast
ended his dream of a lifelong career as a Marine). It took a while
for that maelstrom of remembered sound and images to slow
and fade — his men lying injured,
a dazed Martz directing the evacuation of casualties and getting
his surviving guys fighting back.
Martz told me that he looks on
that incident as his own failure because he didn’t spot the IED before
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it went off. Because he didn’t warn
his men away. “I’d say one of the
things I struggle with the most is,
all my guys got hurt and I let them
down. It’s a constant movie, replaying that scenario over and over
in my head. I constantly question
every decision I made out there.”
Almost three years later, he’s
“kind of stuck,” he said. He seems
to be moving on with his life, taking college courses to become a
mental health therapist. But inside, he’s not healed. “I have a hard
time feeling comfortable around
kids, because it was that kid that
U.S. military
soldiers tend
to a local
Afghan man,
who was shot
after being
suspected of
planting an
IED roadside
bomb in
Genrandai
village in
September
2012.