University Place

Combat in Iraq: One Woman’s Perspective

– So good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Erik Wright. I’m the education specialist for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. And I’d like to thank everybody for coming out tonight for this special lecture from Wisconsin native and Iraq War veteran, Laura Colbert. And I would ask that everybody please hold their questions until the question and answer session at the end of the program. Laura grew up in Minocqua and Waupaca, Wisconsin. And she attended UW-Madison from 2000 to 2006 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology. She concurrently served in the Army National Guard from March of 2001 to 2009 as a military police officer. Laura deployed to Baghdad, Iraq from March 2003 to July 2004. And after graduating from UW-Madison, Laura taught physical education in Aylesbury, England in 2007. And in 2008, she worked as the activities director in Fargo, North Dakota for individuals with special needs. Laura has worked as a physical education teacher and dean of students at Madison West High School from 2008 to 2017. And she received her master’s in educational leadership through Cardinal Stritch in 2011, and a master’s in experiential education from UW-LaCrosse in 2012. She assumed the role of Waupaca Middle School principal from 2017 to 2021. And she now works with the City of Waupaca as the parks and recreation director. Additionally, she’s the author of her novel, How to Pee Standing Up, or Sirens, an Alarming Memoir of Combat and Coming Back Home. She’s also appeared on Montana PBS, Veteran Radio, NPR, and a variety of podcasts. And she’s here tonight to talk about her experience in Iraq. So will you please help me welcome to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Laura Colbert. [audience applauding]

– Thank you so much, Erik, for that nice introduction. All right, so let’s get started. I’m gonna talk about my perspective at war, and then I’m gonna share a little bit about misconceptions of women at war, and then how to speak to veterans, what to say, what not to say, at the end. So this is a picture 20 years apart from each other of myself at war and the last headshot I received. All right, before I really dive in though, I want to mention that everyone’s story is different. You may know some veterans in your life. I am one person with one perspective. I cannot replace somebody else’s story. We all suffer and heal in our own ways and in our own time. When I first started suffering from post-traumatic stress, a girl in my squad said to me, “Why are you going through this and not me?” And it was about five years later that she started suffering. So you just never know when it’s gonna happen or how it’s gonna happen.

Thanks to Erik for the introduction. Yes, I am a wife and mother of three amazing children. I worked in public education for almost two decades. And now, I’m the director of parks and recreation, and I did just finish that show last night, so I know how to do it right. [chuckles] And I am a combat veteran and post-traumatic stress sufferer. This is the image of my book. And what’s really interesting is my great editor and I couldn’t quite agree on a title. When I had the idea to write this book, starting from when I got home, because I journaled every day while I was deployed. I had two giant, stuffed journal books full of information. When I wanted to write this book, I wanted to call it How to Pee Standing Up. Thanks to one of my co-teachers in England who recommended the title. And the reason why is because as a female in a fighting environment, in an urban fighting environment, you cannot drop your trou and go to the bathroom. And I couldn’t also just knock on somebody’s door and say, “Can I use your toilet?” Because they could be a bad guy or girl. And so, I taught myself how to pee, before I got deployed, with a funnel. And you can read about it in my book, how it didn’t always work out okay the first few times. [all laughing] And so, I just thought it was a really intriguing title.

She liked the title Sirens because we are MP. So when you think of police officers, you think of sirens. Also, when you’re deployed for a year, they call you queen of whatever, queen of the deployment, and men gravitate towards you, which certainly happened, including Iraqi men who would just sit and stare at you no matter what you did. And I even had Iraqi police officers bring their neighbors to come look at us females to just see what we look like and sit and stare at us. So that siren, you know, of the sea. And also, when I had post-traumatic stress, the siren’s going off in my head. So both titles are fitting. I just think How to Pee Standing Up is intriguing and might make people pick the book up and wonder what this is. And I also wanted to put a picture of the blue funnel I bought from Farm & Fleet in Madison for 99 cents. [laughs] And she said, “We’re not selling a hardware store. We’re selling you.” And so, she put a picture of me on it. I did do an audio version, in case anybody’s interested, and that’s also available on Audible. And just so you know, I did that in my closet sitting by my laundry, so I had good acoustics. [all laughing]

So my military timeline is this. I enlisted my freshman year at UW-Madison so that I could help pay for college, so that I could stay in shape, so that I could serve our country, and go on adventures. It was six months before September 11th, and it was peace time. One of my friends said, “Do it. What’s gonna happen in the next six years?” And then six months later, we know what happened. I was officially put on active duty March 15th of 2003. We did not bomb Iraq until the 19th of 2003. So I was already sitting in barracks at Fort McCoy, listening to the radio to find out if Saddam Hussein was going to give his weapons of mass destruction up. And he didn’t. So I heard live as they were bombing Baghdad, and my fate was sealed that I was gonna go to war. We came home on July 11, or we left Baghdad July 11, 2004. We officially landed in Wisconsin on the 28th of July. I started suffering debilitating post-traumatic stress and moral injury in September of ’05, literally the exact same time Hurricane Katrina was barreling through New Orleans. I was discharged in ’09 with an honorable discharge. All right, so we were deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, and our time there was June 28 to July 11, as mentioned.

My jobs are listed on the top right of the screen. I worked in the Iraqi police stations, so that’s what IP stands for. We were training the Iraqi police officers on how to be proper police officers. About half were brand-new individuals who had never been in law enforcement before. And the other half were prior IPs who were in a pretty corrupt system. So we’re trying to get everybody up to speed and up to our standards. We took them on foot patrols throughout the community, which was very interesting. I wore a black cover over all of my hair and my Kevlar and obviously full uniform. And the women, who would just kind of peek up at you out of the corner of their eye, ’cause they’re not supposed to give eye contact, when they realized I was a woman, their eyes would grow big and they’d look up at me. And some didn’t know I was a woman, which we could tell when we had women come into the police station. We had to search every single person that came in. And so, the women soldiers searched the women civilians. And sometimes they would push my hand away, and they’d yell at me in Arabic, and they would shove me away, until I would take my Kevlar off and my hairpiece, and they could see my hair come down, and they realized that I was a woman. They’re like, “Ah, okay.” [laughs]

We also went on driving patrols with the Iraqi police officers, which was an incredibly difficult part of my deployment because at that time was when they started putting roadside bombs out. So not only was I navigating a city with 6 million-plus people, I was navigating horse-drawn carts, cars driving down the wrong side of the street, just anybody driving in general, people, pedestrians crossing any which way. And now, any sort of roughed-up side of the road, or piece of garbage, or box, I had to veer around. So after an eight-plus hour shift, I remember just, you know, you scan the road constantly, and I remember just not even being able to keep my eyes open once I got back to the compound ’cause I was so exhausted. And then we did gate guard, which was one of my favorite jobs. So we lived in the Green Zone in this very center of Baghdad. It was a fortified about two by five-mile area, with 15-foot barricades all around it. And we had our compound within that compound. And so, as gate guard, I only had to check people, or I had to check people coming in to our compound, but they had already been checked to come in the Green Zone. So it was a fairly safe position to be in. And it was not always very. . . It wasn’t very demanding. So there were times that we would get sticks and rocks and play baseball with sticks and rocks, or we had infantry guys, and special forces, and Gurkhas from Nepal come past our compound to go to theirs. And so, we’d do a little bit of flirting once in a while, and we had some fun.

And then I got to escort the brigade, which is the highest echelon in the Military Police Corps. It’s not like the armory or the infantry, where you go up to division level. So we were escorting around some very high-ranking military police officers, including surgeons and other individuals who needed to get around the Green Zone or outside of the Green Zone to some very important people’s houses. Then I did CPA escort. And this is really fun to talk to kids about because I ask them, “What did we call our partners during World War II?” And so, Allies is what we called our partners in World War II. We called them our Coalition Forces though during the Iraq War. And so, this place is the Coalition Provisional Authority, so quite a mouthful. We called it the CPA. It was one of Saddam Hussein’s huge, huge infrastructure buildings within, like, his castle within the Green Zone. And it was this beautiful building with three-dimensional ceilings, marble everywhere, gold-plated doors. The chow hall had everything you could possibly imagine. So we got ice cream quite a lot when we went there. And we got to escort around U. S. senators. We were Colin Powell’s ground escort, but he chose to fly helicopter. We did a lot with the Australian UN ambassador. So actually, one of his security personnel was engaged to a girl in my squad for about six months, and then they realized it was more of a military romance and not civilian. [all chuckling] And then at the end of our deployment, we went back to Iraqi police stations. So those were my jobs.

And this is the Tigris River. I lived on the Tigris River. We had a mile-long running route. It was gorgeous and beautiful, and one of the things that made us pretty fortunate to be where we were. But let me get to our compound now. So this was our home. We were the first permanent establishment after the Marines came through. This is one of Saddam Hussein’s top men’s compounds that we had bombed. In fact, there were still remnants of bombs left in this building. And we lived in the outside rooms that only had two walls ’cause the other two were blown out from the explosion. And you can see parts of that in the foreground of the image. And it was great because the wind could come through when it was about 120 degrees, and you could still get a little bit of sleep. [laughs] See that scaffolding, that metal scaffolding there in the foreground? We took some of that, we stuck it into the ground, and we put our ponchos around it and connected a garden hose to the irrigation system, and that’s how we showered. Those were our showers. And so, whatever the weather was outside, that’s how hot the water was. Hot, cold, doesn’t matter; that’s what it was. And pretty soon, we had helicopter pilots from the United States who found out there were women in our company showering without a roof over their heads. Yeah. [clearing throat]

We had a pool that, when we moved in, had a few dead birds and lots of green algae, and we actually hired an Iraqi to clean it up for us. So after about a month and a half, we had a beautiful running pool, which was a huge morale booster. And shortly after the pool was put in, or rather fixed up, we got to move into the basement. And you can see how ecstatic I am in this picture about that. We got air conditioning for the first time. So this is about September or August of ’03. And we got to Kuwait in May, and so we went through a very hot, hot summer. And even if there was an AC unit, it can’t combat that heat in a tent. So it was just wonderful to get down there. And we got working showers with temperature control. And so, I was very happy. The rats were an issue, but we could live with them.

All right, so when we first got to Iraq, I like to say that we were liberating the country. The Iraqi people would come out to us like we were in a parade, and they’d give us the thumbs up, and they’d cheer us on and yell, “Good America.” And after about six months, we went from that liberation type of state to more of an occupying state. They would start to throw rocks at our gunners. They would give us the middle fingers, the thumbs down. And that’s, again, when those roadside bombs really started to occur. And unfortunately, our police station that we essentially lived at for 12 1/2 hours a day for 2 1/2 months straight was attacked by a single car bomb. So this crater you see in the ground is just due to one truck full of explosives. And there is a soldier standing right behind that crater to give you some idea of the actual size of this explosion. We lost 21 people, five of whom were Iraqi police officers, and over a hundred were injured. The morning of this explosion, we were sitting at our compound waiting for our job duty for the day. And all of a sudden, we heard massive explosions occur throughout the city. This police station was a good 15 miles away from where we lived, so I don’t think we heard this one. But there was other police stations attacked. There was a Red Cross attacked and other locations.

There was a squad from our company at the police station at the time of this explosion. And they got on the radio immediately and said, “Get here now; we need backup. We’re headed to the med station.” One of the lieutenants that was there had his ear severed off and had to get stitches in his head. Another person was knocked unconscious. Many of the individuals had shrapnel wounds all over their bodies and eardrums exploded. So we got in the vehicle, and it usually takes us about 45 minutes to drive there. We got there in 25 minutes. I was driving; I was the lead driver in the convoy. And I was jumping over medians, I was going down the wrong side of the road, I was driving on sidewalks, busting through intersections just to get to the police station. And when we got there, there was estimated 2,000 to 4,000 people there already trying to find out what was going on. Windows were blown out in a four-block radius. It was like parting the Red Sea as we approached the crowd to get to the police station. This next picture I’m gonna show you is what I would look at every day when I was at a fighting position waiting to get attacked. These are homes of civilians who lived next door. And my job was to push this massive crowd away while holding on to the concertina wire, that circular razor wire, and I pushed them away. And as I was doing that, parents were digging their children out of the rubble, dead, charred, and burned. Those same kids that I would watch play day in and day out, and have dinner with their families, and sleep on their verandas, and they were gone. There’s heaps of metal on the road; those were all cars. This is a picture of me on top of the police station roof later on that day. You can’t really see in this picture, but I have my finger close to the trigger because the person taking this picture I thought was somebody pointing a gun at me from the rooftop across the street. This picture ended up on yahoo. com the next day. So before Google got big, Yahoo was big. And they would post pictures of the war on a daily basis. And this is one of those pictures.

So when we first got deployed, we were just a bunch of Wisconsinites from Madison and Milwaukee who have other lives, we were all in the National Guard. And they said, “You’ll be gone six months tops. So you’ll be home by September.” You know what, okay, I can either start my semester of college a little bit later or I can skip my semester of college; it’ll be okay. We didn’t know what to expect because, again, we got deployed before the war had even started. So we didn’t know if we were staying stateside or if this was just gonna be, “Okay, thanks for coming, you can go home now.” Well, September came and went, and we were still in Iraq. And then they said, “You’ll be home before any major holiday.” Well, I can tell you, November came, and I was actually supposed to go see our secret guest at the airport, who was George W. Bush. And I went into the opposite side of the tent, and by the time we realized which side we were supposed to go to, the security shut it down and we couldn’t get in. So we had to sit in our Humvee for three hours until he flew out. [laughs] And then Christmas came and went. And it would be remiss if I didn’t mention, on January 2, my older brother came to visit, who was also in Iraq at the same time as a medic in an infantry unit in Ramadi.

And so, we got to see each other the very first part of– actually, I’m sorry, he came right after Christmas and stayed ’til January 2. At any rate, we were there for Christmas. Then they said, “You’d be home by January 29.” That did not happen. And then they said, “One year of active duty.” Well, we were put on active duty March 15, I told you that. So that means we would probably leave Iraq/Kuwait a month before that to get home. They quickly changed their mind and said, “You have to have one year of boots on the ground. ” So we got to Kuwait in May. So if we had one year of boots on the ground, we’d be leaving April, May-ish from Iraq. And I thought it was really gonna happen this time. We started cleaning our gear. I had a whole box of stuff my family sent, like, a magic eight ball, and a little origami set, and a finger bowling lane. And I sent all that home. We sent old night vision goggles home, tents, things we weren’t using, and cleaning our gear. My company was the only company that was still on duty. We were escorting the CPA at this time that I already told you about. So we’d do that for about eight hours, and then we’d come home, and we’d be able to clean and relax. And one night, I was, well, I’m getting ahead of myself. No, let’s stay with that; one year of boots on the ground.

So I was watching Finding Nemo, it was about 10:00 at night. And our insurgents come into our room, and this is the very beginning of April, and they say, “We need to go to the police stations right now. They’re getting overrun by insurgents. ” So I get in my up-armor Humvee that does not have power steering. I’m telling you, I had guns of steel at that point because you can’t, this is a many thousand-pound vehicle. I get to the police station, we pull guard until about 4 in the morning. We go home, we sleep for a few hours, get up, and do our escort mission. And then while we’re at our escort mission, they decide we’re gonna do 96-hour operations in the police station. So that’s, again, I ask my students, how many days is that? It’s four days. So we went to our escort mission, and then we’d go to the police station ’til about 2 in the morning, drive home, wake up again at 6:00 or 8:00, go to the escort mission, and we had to do this for four days.

I was tasked to go to not Al-Shaab, the police station you saw that was bombed, but rather one called Adamiyah. And Adamiyah was a Saddam Hussein stronghold. He had many followers in this area. And it was by far one of the scariest moments of my time at war. And there were tracers flying through the sky, almost like the 4th of July fireworks. And you know with every tracer, there’s two bullets that are not lit up. So there’s even more in the sky than what you can see. There were bombs going off all around us. It was myself and another person, the one that asked, “Why don’t I have posttraumatic stress,” sitting on the Humvee with me. And we didn’t know what was going on, so we’d oftentimes yell up at the roof of the police station and say, “Was that us?” or, “Is everybody okay? Could you tell us what’s going on?” And we’d drive home. Well, the second night, we got hit really hard with small arms fire. We had about 10-story buildings on both sides of us, and we were getting shot at while in the Humvees. I gunned it, got us into the Green Zone ’cause again, I was the lead Humvee, or lead driver of the front of the convoy. And then as we were getting into the Green Zone, a roadside bomb went off at the back of our convoy. So we got in, I busted through the serpentine, probably scared the bejesus out of all the soldiers working the serpentine. And we all got out, we checked each other, we checked our vehicles, and we were unscathed. It was a miracle. And we went home, and we went to bed, and did the same thing the next night.

Unfortunately, the next night, another squad took the same route at the same time. And they were not as lucky.
Michelle Witmer was in my company, and she was the first female to die in the history of the National Guard in a combat-related incident. She was a gunner and she was shot. We were driving home at the exact same time, taking a different route into the Green Zone. And we heard on the radio the entire time what was happening with her. I’ll share you the details, but it’s in my book. She was 20 years old. She had a twin sister that was in a medic unit in Baghdad at the same time, and a sister that was a few years older in a different platoon in our company that was also in Iraq. So all three Witmer girls were there at the same time. We had a memorial service for her on the side of the pool. And it was, as you can imagine, a terrible day. I will never be able to hear “Taps” or a 21-gun salute without losing it.

She wrote this email to her twin sister the day she died. This article was in Glamour magazine. After I got home, they highlighted correspondences between female soldiers and their family members. “Hey, Sweety Bear, life here has been very crazy the last week or so. About five days ago, our platoon sergeant starts running into our rooms saying the Baghdad police stations are overrun and there are riots all over the city. In the meantime we’re getting attacked almost nightly with RPGs, mortars, and small arms fire. Rachel’s station in al-Adhamiya got the worst of it.” And again, that’s where we were. “I was really afraid for her. Charity, please pray for us; this is some scary stuff. “Hopefully by next week, this will all be over. Love you forever.” And as mentioned, later that day, she was killed when her convoy was attacked. Her sisters were able to go home and stay home after that happened. A few days later, it was Easter Sunday. I called home and wished my parents a happy Easter. And we talked about all the amazing things we were gonna do that summer, like go to Washington D. C. , and I had a trip planned in New York City, and watch the birds on the deck. And we were on our CPA mission, so we were at the beautiful palace. And we got a call that said, “You need to come back to the compound immediately.” So we stuffed our face with the rest of our ice cream, we got in the convoys, and we headed back. They sat us down and they said, “You’re extended for four more months.” Two days after we lost Michelle.

It was at this point that we had this gallows joke that we were in hell, that this was our hell, that we would keep having these hopes of going home and they would take them away from us. We couldn’t believe anybody’s word anymore. We just didn’t know when it was gonna happen. This next email depicts how I felt better than I can probably convey today. I sent it two weeks after we were extended. “Another week of missing home more than I can say. It’s been a rough one. A lot of emotions and not many of them good. This place is taking a toll on me. My hope and morale have been drained from my system. Now I’m just a pile of skin and bones that does what I’m told. It’s hard to even think for myself anymore. I don’t care. I don’t care when mortars hit. I don’t care when an IED goes off. I’m numb. That’s why they need to get us out of here. We have nothing left mentally or physically. It is completely inhumane what they have done to us. We are tortured souls.” I literally thought the only way I was gonna get out of there is if I lost a limb or got injured so badly that I couldn’t be a part of our unit anymore. And I was, no, okay, I shouldn’t say that. I wasn’t willing to go put myself out there, but it was like the only hope I felt I had left.

When we were extended, we had to move away from our compound that we had made our home for nine months because the next unit coming in wanted it. So we had to move into tents and live on the south side of Baghdad. And these tents were not safe, and mortars were coming in almost nightly. And I would pray to God before I went to sleep. I pray. . . I pray. . . [laughs] Now I can’t think of it. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Because when those mortars hit, it was a crapshoot on if you should stay in bed, if you should run to the bunker and get hit on the way, or if you should sit in the bunker that only has two sides and get hit while sitting in the bunker. We’d wake up and seven tents down would be destroyed by a mortar. One time, I was in the gym working out and had to go to the porta-potty. So I went to the porta-potty right outside the gym, went back in, was doing my push-ups and sit-ups routine. And as I was doing that, we were barraged by mortars, so much so that everybody, if it wasn’t a life and death situation, it would’ve been the funniest thing to watch, as, like, the soldiers in the gym looked like ants scurrying, like, “This is the safest, no, this is the safest, no, get under here, no, do this, away from the walls, by the walls.” And so, when it was all done, I’m a combat lifesaver-certified person, so I went outside to go see if I could save anybody or if anybody needed my help. And that porta-potty that I was just in not a mere five minutes before this was incinerated by a mortar. There wasn’t even a piece of blue plastic left. So I often would write home and say, “Close call number 5,325,” and, like, tell my stories. And I was just being silly, but ultimately, there was a lot of close calls.

And when I was deployed, I told myself that if I ever made it out of there alive, that I was gonna do the best things that I could do for not only myself and my family, but for the community, and make the biggest difference I could, and I would do things that I love because life is fleeting. So when we got extended, we got a new job, and we had to go back into the Iraqi police stations south of Baghdad. And we were driving a lot for many days. So we hit a roadside bomb on May 24. And this is actually, I should fix what I said. This was not my Humvee, but rather two Humvees behind mine. When it happened, I thought my gunner had slammed down his ammo can on top of the Humvee. And I was getting ready to yell up to him, like, “Thompson, don’t do that! Don’t slam it down ’cause I think it’s a bomb.” Well, it was a bomb. And then this Humvee goes past me and slams into a garage. The driver was sucked out of the Humvee by the compression of the bomb. The person behind her was knocked unconscious and a piece of shrapnel’s sticking out of his leg. The passenger in the front seat, the team leader, saw they were headed straight for this garage and he jumped out of the moving Humvee. And the gunner was knocked unconscious and found in a fetal position inside the Humvee. At first, they didn’t know where Carly was. She’s one of my best friends. And I was like, “I can’t stay here without her. We have to find her; she has to be okay.” And she ended up being okay. We had to medevac all three of the individuals, who were the driver, the two concussed. And then the one who was the passenger in the front, he got to stay behind. And, boy, did we wanna retaliate, but we never found out who pulled the detonator.

So on July 11, we finally got to go home. Or July 28, we landed in Volk Field, Wisconsin. Here are my parents. My dad, bless his heart, is a feely, touchy kind of man. And I was not used to human touch, loving touch. And so, it felt awkward and weird and very foreign, and I wanted to ask him to stop, but I obviously didn’t have the heart. But I did tell him, “Dad, you gotta stop staring at me.” [laughs] And he said, “But, Laura, you’re home, and you’re my daughter, and you’re safe.” And I said, “Okay, that’s fine.” And now that I’m a parent, I totally get it. I wanna share that before I left, he sat me down in my family’s sunroom, and he handed me a $2 bill. And he said, “This was what your grandfather carried in his wallet as a lucky $2 bill for most of his life.” Of course, I broke down and started crying. I said, “You’re not supposed to make me cry.” And when I got home, when I landed in Volk Field, I pulled that $2 bill that I kept in the front pocket of my uniform, and I handed it back to him. And that was just a beautiful moment, that we could be safe together again. It was about a month and a half later, whoo, there’s one. [laughs] A month and a half later, Joe got home and he landed in Fort Riley, Texas. So we all drove down as a family, and we were together for the first time in two years, together again, and it was absolutely beautiful.

All right, so I’m gonna move on to the next part of the presentation that talks about returning home and what that’s like. ‘Cause you know what, when you’re at war, home is this heavenly faade where nothing could ever go wrong and it’s the best place in the whole world. And then you get home and you realize, dang, you still gotta study. There’s still drama. There’s still things that happen. And this quote really summed it up for me. “The return from the killing fields is more than a debriefing. It is a slow ascent from hell.” So as mentioned, I do suffer from moral injury and post-traumatic stress. I have suicide on here too because I wanna share this statistic with you. We have lost about 7,000 soldiers since post-9/11. We have lost four times that to suicide. So those 7,000, that’s in combat-related incidences. We’ve lost 30,000 to suicide. And as most of you are probably aware, that’s 22 veterans a day. Please, please, don’t ever tell veterans to just get over it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you I had fleeting thoughts of suicide through my really tumultuous times. I never had a plan, but they were fleeting thoughts that would come and go. As mentioned, it got really bad in ’05. And the reason for that is I was at sergeant school. And while I was there, I was doing a ruck march, and there were simulated bombs going off and gunshots going off around me. And doggone it, I’m a strong person with a good head on my shoulders. I was gonna get through this, but I kept having images of Iraq pop into my head. I kept feeling this oppressive feeling of being back at war. And I just started hyperventilating, and I had to just get off the ruck march, and I couldn’t breathe, and I was bawling. And they thought I was having a heat stroke so they started taking my clothes off. [all laughing] And that same Carly who was in the roadside bomb was there, thank God. And she said, “She just got back from Baghdad! There is no way this is a heat stroke!” And I took two hours off and resumed sergeant school, and finished top of my class, which was a huge thing. But I will tell you, the most frustrating part about that whole scenario was that the medic on hand told me to stop crying and get over it. And I said, “You ever been at war?” He said, “No.” And I almost punched him in the face. [laughs]

I’m just gonna take a second to talk about moral injury because that could potentially be a new phrase for people. I appreciate this concept because when we are civilians in the United States, we are taught not to kill anybody. We are taught to love our neighbor. We are taught that all people are inherently good. And when you go to war, all of that is off the table. So you are literally switching your morals into something other than what you grew up with. And I do believe that that can have a lasting impact on people. So I’m gonna go over a few misconceptions. And one of them is that women weren’t allowed on the front lines before 2015. You can see in this picture with our female gunners that they are definitively on the front line. We were also interchangeable with the infantry on several occasions. They would ask us as MP women to come along on their searches to search the women and to keep the women together while they did what they did. There were times that we were getting attacked, and I was the lead person going into a building with a gun in one hand and a flashlight on the other, breaking the door down with my foot and yelling, “Clear!” as I cleared rooms. And so, if that’s not front lines, I don’t know what is. And we know that women did a lot of things in other wars prior as well. I think it is very safe to say that women are now allowed in all of the other parts of the military we weren’t before, but we have definitely been on the front lines.
And I’m a firm believer that front lines is a very archaic term anyway, since we don’t have trenches anymore.

All right, so I’m gonna just talk a little bit about the campaign of I Am Not Invisible. And we’ve done that through Wisconsin. If you don’t know about it, feel free to look it up. I’m gonna share a few of my times where I’ve felt invisible as a female soldier. I walked into the VA hospital when I got home because it had been a good two years since I had a wellness check. And when I asked about the womanly things they do in wellness checks, the VA doctor says, “You gotta go somewhere else; we don’t serve women here.” So I went back to UW-Madison, and I was talking to the veteran coordinator people at UW-Madison, and they said, “That’s not true. There’s actually a women’s clinic. Go back and go to the women’s clinic.” And I did, and it was good. When I lived in England, I had a coworker ask me if I carried a gun. And when I said yes, she then asked, “Was it a woman’s war?” [laughs] And I said, “Have you ever heard of a woman’s war?” [all laughing] I also was at a friend’s house shortly after I got home. She was working in Milwaukee. And she was living with a guy from Texas, who, on a side note, only picture in his entire place was of him and George W. Bush, ’cause their ranches were next to each other in Texas. When I described my time at war, he said, “That’s not how it is. My friends were there. You’re lying. That’s not how it is at all.” Okay, okay. I’ve oftentimes gone to the VA, and I’m sure this is not new to any of you, and asked, “Who are you here to see? What veteran are you here to see?” I am the veteran. Hi. I also like to share the fun fact that my husband gets all the veteran junk mail at home, not me. [laughs] And then you saw in this picture here that we have women who are gunners. And after being there for nine months, there was a change in our brigade. And one of the new brigade soldiers looked at one of our soldiers who was in the gunner position and said, “Do you even know how to use that thing?” He is very lucky she didn’t demonstrate it on him. [laughs]

All right, so when you speak to veterans, there are some certain things that you should try to avoid. Now, I tell my students, I tell my friends, I’m an open book. Obviously, I wrote a book about it. You can ask me anything you want. But if you have a veteran who’s still suffering, these are some really good points to try to avoid. Try to avoid things that might trigger post-traumatic stress, such as, “So did you ever kill anybody? What’s the worst thing that ever happened? Tell me about a time that you were really scared.” You know what, when veterans are ready to talk, they’ll talk to you, but those can be terrible, triggering instances. And as I already illustrated with the Texas guy, don’t assume you know what they’ve been through based on prior conversations. ‘Cause again, we’re all different. My brother’s story’s very different. My friend who went through post-traumatic stress five years after myself, even though we were in the same squad on almost all identical missions, we have very different stories and experiences. And don’t assume that soldiers are mentally okay just because they’re physically okay. You have no idea what they could be going through on the inside. And it’s okay to ask, “Are you okay? Are you happy?”

Things that you can say. Welcome home. For any Vietnam veteran who’s watching, I have a huge thank you to them because they set the groundwork for when we got home, making sure that we felt welcome, and that we felt validated, and that even though, if you didn’t agree with the war, you still treated the veteran with respect. And so, that was huge. “Welcome home” is amazing. Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing. If you have a veteran who’s talking to you, just listen. Chances are they trust you, and this could be one of the first times they’re talking. Or if they’re like me, this is like a mini therapy session, and I feel much better when I’m done. [laughs] You can always thank them for their willingness to serve. We have a lot of veterans right now or people who have enlisted who feel like they haven’t done anything because they haven’t gone to war. You can’t put me in that category. I signed up, but I never went.” But you know what, you were willing to, so thank you. That means a lot. And you can always ask ’em why they joined. ‘Cause you know what, that’s probably, there’s some positive there on why they joined. [laughs] And if there’s not, they’ll probably tell you that too.

So I also wanna just call out the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day, ’cause I sure as heck didn’t know the difference before I was deployed. Not only do I commemorate Michelle Witmer on Veterans Day, but when I got my sergeant stripes, I had a gentleman in my team called Daniel Thompson who volunteered to go to Afghanistan, and he gave his life serving our country in Afghanistan. So I also honor him. And so, as mentioned, Memorial Day is a day to remember those who died serving our country. When it is Memorial Day and you know a veteran, chances are wishing them a happy Memorial Day probably isn’t the way to go. You can say, “I’m here if you need anything,” or “I too remember soldiers that have fallen.” On Veterans Day, it’s a day to commemorate all who served. So you can say, “Happy Veterans Day,” but you can also say, “Thank you for your willingness to serve.” That’s something a little different than “Thank you for your service,” which is what we hear most of the time.

I’m going to share this vignette with you that I wrote after I got home. I was flying to Europe or something like that. “Life as a Veteran.” “There was a time when I could feel unadulterated happiness. A time when my life was innocent and carefree.” I remember getting home from Iraq and looking at my photo albums, and thinking, “I am never gonna be able to be that happy again. I’m never gonna be able to smile that big again. I have this giant weight on me that’s never gonna go away.” “I was desecrated by the horrendousness of war. A piece of me was left behind somewhere in desolate Iraq. Some days, that piece feels like it’s a tiny hole in my heart. Other days, it feels like it sucks me in whole, leaving me with nothing but the darkness to stare at and relish in. I was no longer innocent or happy. Through time, this hole has become manageable, and that happiness I felt before the killing fields is slowly finding its way back into my being. I am becoming the person I once was, but it’s been a difficult journey. From now on, take a second to consider the veteran. A person who gave everything to serve their country, only to return home to feel ostracized, changed beyond recognition, and afraid of their new internal war.” It’s not that my parents and my friends didn’t try to help me. It’s not that they didn’t try to understand. They just couldn’t. I remember being in college and sitting next to people who were now a year or two younger than me, and they were worried about what they were gonna wear to the party on Friday night. And I was like, “I just got shot at for 16 months.” I couldn’t relate with anybody. So in ’04, in November of ’04, I gave my first presentation to try to close that gap. I spoke at the Natatorium on UW-Madison to 80 people in the kinesiology program, and it was amazing.

Here’s why it’s so important I do this. There were 11% of the population served in World War II. So chances are, you knew somebody who was there or very close to somebody who was there, like, just a friend over or a relative over. There were 9. 7% of the U. S. population that served in Vietnam. There are less than 1% of our population that has served since post-9/11. There has never been a bigger divide between civilians and military than there is right now. For me, “a sound, a sight, or a smell can trigger intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, and the pure agony of war. The war a veteran faces is not over once a soldier steps on American soil. It will always be there, lingering.” There was a night when I was living in Fargo, and I went out and I was walking home with my boyfriend at the time. And there was a full moon, and it was beautiful. And I looked up at the moon, and I just started bawling. Because when I was in Iraq the month of August in 2003, I was on the night shift. And every night, I would look at that moon and watch the lunar cycle pass by. And I would say to myself, “That’s the same moon my parents just saw. And that’s the same moon they’re gonna see in a few hours. I am not on a foreign planet. We have this thing connecting us together.” And so, in ’07, that brought back this flood of emotions from those August nights. [clearing throat] “Personally, it’s the sound of thunder, fireworks, a door slamming, a gunshot, the smell of a specific hand soap, the full moon, a piece of garbage on the road, a song on the radio. The list can go on and on.”

I was driving in Waupaca one day on a back road in my little Nissan Sentra. [laughs] And there was a bag of garbage on the side of the road. So as I always did in Iraq, I got over the other lane and I just kept on going, giving it a wide berth. And that car heading my direction would get out of my way because I was in a huge Humvee. And it was the last second that I realized I was at home in my tiny little tin can of a Nissan Sentra and I better get back into my lane. When I was here in Madison, so if you lived here in ’04, I apologize. But when I first got to Madison, I would run every red light. I would yield, look both ways, and go because that’s what I did for 16 months driving through Baghdad, ’cause you don’t stop at intersections. I was also with my dad one time in Madison. He wanted me to drive because I knew the city better than him. And there was a traffic jam. So I did what I did in Baghdad. I drove down the middle of all the cars. [laughs] My dad doesn’t believe in yelling, but he definitely clears his throat.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a louder throat clear than at that moment. [all laughing] All right. “Triggers are elusive, yet real. And veterans are everywhere and are affected differently by war. Please be cognizant of them, always.” Some veterans drink, some veterans get quiet. I cry and then I feel better. So please be aware of those around you and take them into consideration. And that, my friends, is my presentation. [audience applauding] Thank you.