COURTESY OF STEPHEN CANTY
THE GRUNTS
mates, Nick Rudolph and Stephen
Canty, sat watching him. They’d
gotten together in Philadelphia
for a reunion of sorts: Canty was
video-taping interviews for a
documentary about the struggles
of returning combat veterans.
The camera was off and for hours
they’d just been talking.
Doss picked up the narrative:
The battalion held a memorial
service for Smitty and Angus. The
next day, Doss’s platoon went out
on patrol and immediately there
was a large explosion and Marines
started taking fire. “We were in
open desert and you could hear
rounds bouncing off the rocks and
no one took cover because we were
like, just flat open,” Doss said.
Burning with revenge, the Marines responded with a hurricane
of rifle and machine-gun fire,
blowing apart adobe walls and
ripping one insurgent to shreds.
“We fucked up this dude, and another guy was like dragging him,
dragging him behind a wall,” said
Doss. “And I saw him throwing
up after he dragged that dude in
and we, like, just leveled the place,
shot the whole place up, went insane! But ... yeah.”
Then what? Doss paused,
glancing around to where Rudolph
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
and Canty were sitting, listening.
“We walked back in and I had
an MRE,” a military ration, he
said. The room erupted in laughter. Life at war goes on!
That gaiety hides a deeper, lasting pain at losing loved ones in
combat. A 2004 study of Vietnam
combat veterans, by Ilona PIvar,
now a psychologist the Department of Veterans Affairs, found
that grief over losing a combat
buddy was even greater, more than
Stephen
Canty during
his time in
Afghanistan.