ustxtxb_obs_2007_06_29_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

So let’s put this in perspective now. I got two Iraq tours, multiple kills, I picked up plenty of dead bodies, American bodies, enemy bodies. I killed an 8-year-old girl, which still haunts me to this day. I come back home. My wife finds somebody else. I’m sleeping on my brother’s couch while she has the apartment, the kids, the car, everything that we worked on together. I work as a bail bondsman making $432 a week, which all goes to my brother. I have to fight just to see my boys because she’s at the point where she thinks I don’t deserve to see my kids because I haven’t had help for my PTSD. She’s scared I might do something stupid. And the VA won’t help me out because of my other-than-honorable discharge. What else do you want to know? Every month the VA sends me a letter saying I’m still under review. I’m like, I couldn’t care less about the money. I don’t care about disability percentage. I want you to tell me to go to this fucking doctor here and go get help. That’s what I want them to tell me. If they think I don’t deserve money because I got kicked out with other-than-honorable discharge, fine. But don’t tell me I’m cured all of a sudden, because I’m not. I still have my nightmares, anxiety attacks, panic attacks, I still see the glitter from the IED blowing up when I’m going down the street. I still see the barrette in her hair when I carried her out of the car to the ambulance when she was bleeding all over me. I still see all that. And there’s nothing that I can do about that now Rocky, 26, prefers to remain anonymous. He joined the Army shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and went to Iraq in 2004 for one year and a day. A Houston native, he lives alone now in a Dallas apartment, goes to community college, and works construction. He’s funny, playful, and handsome, and carries a pool cue in his trunk to be ready for a game at any time. He doesn’t tell people he’s a veteran. He doesn’t like to talk about it. This story is an exception. IIwas one of those kids that could have been handed anything on a silver platter. But I really worked hard for everything anyway, because I wanted to prove myself. And my parents, who would have given me anything, ruled with an iron fist. And I was patriotic. So it seemed like everything in my life pointed to the Army as the way to go. I was 20. I’m sure I was different then. I don’t know how. I know how I am now I assume that the character traits that I show now are the core set of values that I left with. My sense of pride, hard work. Everything I have, I made out of nothing. You get to see what people are made of over there. You get to see how shallow people are, how weak they are. How strong they can be in horrible moments. And then how the people you should be looking up to are hiding, and you have to look out for them. You get to really see what a person is made of. And over there, I learned to read people. I know what they’re going to do before they do it. After seeing the same movements before you get shot at or bombed, the same symptoms of the city and the people around youit’s a fluid 18 THE TEXAS OBSERVER JUNE 29, 2007 “I go to school, maybe I’ll earn a midlevel job. Just fly under the radar. I don’t want any attention. I just want to be away from people.” -Rocky movement. Doors close, people disappear, and all of a sudden you’re like, OK guys, hunker down, it’s about to hit us. And all of a sudden you’re under fire. People would pop shots at us and pop back. They’d have a setup where they have a bomb in the road, and everybody sits by the windows when they set off an TED. When we’re looking at what’s going on, everybody’s laughing and pointing and smiling after your buddy’s sitting there bleeding. So I held them all responsible. Everybody that was in the guilty range. If there was gunfire coming from a window, I shot into that window and made sure nothing was coming back out at me. One time, there was an RPG shooter shooting at me. He hit a Bradley in front of us, and we were in a Humvee. He hit the Bradley in front of us, and the round didn’t go off. It got stuck in the mud. So the Bradley rolled back, and we rolled back. And I had to shoot the position-caller before I could shoot the actual shooter. He didn’t have a gun, but I knew what he was doing. He was the one calling out what’s going on. He was on