HEALING
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
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FEW LIFE TRAUMAS CAN MATCH THE EXPERIENCES
OF A MEDIC IN COMBAT, OR ETCH SO DEEPLY AND
PAINFULLY INTO A SOUL. ¶ BILLIE GRIMES-WATSON
WAS A MEDIC IN IRAQ IN 2003 AND 2004. AS THE
INITIAL U.S. INVASION TURNED INTO BLOODY CHAOS,
SHE WOULD SPRINT THROUGH THE SMOKE AND FIRE
OF BLASTS FROM IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICES
and gunfire to save lives, struggling with the maimed and broken
bodies of soldiers she knew and
loved. And try to recover in a few
hours rest between missions.
She had just passed her 26th
birthday.
Occasionally she would call
home, but would burst into tears
when she’d start to describe what
she was doing. Then she stopped
trying. A young officer in her platoon, Ben Colgan, was fatally
wounded in a bomb blast. She was
devastated. “I couldn’t help Lt. Colgan,” she told the military newspa-
per Stars and Stripes in 2004.
Nearly a decade later, GrimesWatson is haunted by the war and
her part in it, bearing moral injuries
literally so unspeakable that she
seems beyond help. “I avoid talking about it, try to keep it down,”
she told me in a recent phone conversation. “But inside I’m trying to
do the happy face so no one knows
how much I’m hurting.”
Therapists and researchers are
recognizing more and more cases
of servicemembers like GrimesWatson who are returning from
war with moral injuries, wounds
Previous
page: Flight
medic Sgt.
Cole Reece
checks the
vital signs of
a wounded
Afghan
boy before
transporting
him to the
hospital at
Kandahar Air
Field on Oct.
10, 2010.