MIKE ERGO

The oldest of four, Mike Ergo grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Walnut Creek hearing his grandfather’s stories about the Marine Corps in World War II. An evangelical Christian from an early age, Mike always liked serving others. He went to Mexico to help build houses and one summer traveled to Slovakia to build a church. Mike served in the Marine Corps from 2001 to 2005. His MOS was 0311 Infantry, basic rifleman.

I stand up in front of the military board and say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

They’re shocked. I understand why.

Going through boot camp, when I was asked by drill sergeants, instructors, and others what my MOS—my military occupational specialty, or career—was going to be, I told them I had chosen musician because I played saxophone and, after having auditioned for the Marine Corps band, had been accepted. I got laughed at the entire time. During boot camp, I had thought about switching from musician to infantryman. I loved weapons training and being in the field and training with a bunch of other soon-to-be grunts. I felt like I was in the real military.

I clear my throat, nervous. I’m eighteen, and everyone is staring at me.

“I’d rather be in the infantry,” I tell the board.

Silence. I know what they’re thinking: People who join the school of music want to stay here. It’s easy physically and the people here are nice to you and really fun to be around. And they are. They truly are fun, nice people. But I want to go to war and be a part of something epic.

“Okay,” says one of the board members. “Okay, yeah, we can do that for you, no problem.”

Now I have to go back to the School of Infantry for a second time—only this time I’m going to do the actual infantry training. It’s the summer of 2002.

I know they’re going to push me far beyond my comfort zone and my perceived abilities. I know I’ll have to earn respect. I know I can’t rely on my dad’s career as a partner in a law firm to give me a job. I can’t rely on nepotism or favors from anyone. I’ll have to earn everything myself, and I can’t wait for it to begin.

  

The first time I deploy, in March of 2003, I’m part of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division. The plan is to go through Turkey’s airspace, land in Turkey, and then convoy down to Iraq.

I’ve let go of being scared. Whatever the heck is going to happen is going to happen. I’ll just deal with it.

Turkey decides it doesn’t want us coming through to go into Iraq, so we end up floating around in the Mediterranean and watching the initial invasion on TV. We missed Afghanistan and now we feel like complete losers because we’ve missed Iraq.

Not that the war is going to last that long. We assume this one, like the Gulf War, is going to be over in four days.

We’re wrong.

When I deploy again, in June of 2004, the insurgency has started to take off, and IEDs are the insurgency’s signature weapon. We fly into Al Asad Airbase in western Iraq’s Al Anbar Province and immediately get to work patrolling the deserts and some of the small towns. We get into a few small engagements, but nothing major.

The war gets real for me the following month.

My best friend, a fellow ginger, is moved over to a scout sniper platoon. On July 20, a day and a half later, after I had dinner with him in the chow hall, he’s killed by an IED.

He can’t be dead. I just saw him. A day and a half ago, we were joking around like we always did, and talking about what we were going to do when we got back home, and now he’s dead? The shock turns to anger—what are we going to do to find the people responsible?—and then, eventually, gives way to guilt about my inability to stop my best friend from being killed.

The sobering reality of warfare hits me: this isn’t a game. People get hurt and people get killed.

I don’t have time to dwell on these feelings, let alone process them. I’m a twenty-one-year-old corporal. I have to go about my job, doing security patrols and meet and greets with local farmers out along the Euphrates River. Then I’m told we’re heading down to Fallujah, to the base camp right outside the city, to start training for a big, massive invasion.

Al-Qaeda and all kinds of foreign fighters from all over the Muslim world have been flooding into Fallujah since April, when the insurgents, after ambushing a convoy containing four US private contractors from Blackwater, dragged the American bodies through the streets. The insurgents have been busy fortifying the city, getting ready for us to attack.

We invade the city on November 8. I have no idea I’m about to be a part of the largest urban combat battle the US has engaged in since Hue City in Vietnam.

  

RPGs fly over my head and explode against buildings. Smoke is pouring out of mosques, and insurgent fighters and squads are dashing across the street and making their way to the area my team has secured, the place in the middle of the city known as the mayor’s complex.

In the midst of all the fighting, my team and I find ourselves totally exposed on the northwest corner of the mayor’s complex. The rest of our company is situated on surrounding buildings, with some pretty good cover, but here we are on the ground. Did our company forget about us? Did they—

Women wearing hijabs and young girls appear right in front of us. Some are holding a white flag, the signal that they’re civilians. The rules of engagement state that if they’re waving a white flag, they’re to come to us, and we’ll get them out of harm’s way.

My thirty-day crash course in Arabic taught me some basic phrases. I tell them to come to us. When they start walking, I see young men standing behind them. That’s when I figure out that they’re using these women and children as human shields.

Our rules of engagement are clear: if they don’t come to us and surrender, we can open fire.

I turn to my men, my decision absolute. “Do not open fire. I repeat, do not shoot them.”

Later that day, I find out one of our lieutenants got sniped through the side of his body armor, bled out, and died. I’ll never know if one of the bad guys I let pass was responsible for it, but I regret my earlier decision of not engaging the enemy.

My idea of right and wrong is thrown into question. I’m also unsure of my grasp on being an effective infantry team leader.

Think about it like baseball, I tell myself. Instead of being up at the plate and saying, “Okay, don’t strike out, don’t strike out,” say instead, “Let’s try to get a hit. Let’s just focus on being here. Whatever comes, comes.”

We spend the next six days kicking down doors and clearing houses. We get shot at and we shoot back. Along the way, we get into engagements in the streets, and we shoot the enemy. Then the oddest, creepiest thing happens: they get hit by three or four rounds, jerk back, and then get up and run and scale a wall.

It’s like we’re shooting zombies.

The bad guys, we come to find out, are injecting themselves with some kind of stimulant that helps them keep going even when they get hit.

We do sector clearing all the way south. Then we’re told to go back to the buildings we cleared and basically do mop-up duty, try to find the remaining insurgents who are playing cat and mouse with us.

Our platoon splits up to do the clearings. One of my junior Marines, who was off taking a leak, runs over to me and says, “Corporal, I saw these guys hiding behind a building. Then I saw them jump in it.”

“Did you shoot ’em?”

“No, I came to get you.” He gives me the location. The building is near where my platoon is currently located.

I take a makeshift team of four men, including myself: my point man, a guy from Grass Valley, California; the Goose, a combat engineer; and a guy carrying a light machine gun called the squad automatic weapon, or SAW. We hop over a wall, onto a street that’s north of my platoon. I see the bad guys—there’s four of them.

And they’re moving to position themselves to ambush my platoon.

We start clearing the group of buildings. The first one is clear. Same with the second and third. They’re empty of people.

There’s one building left. They have to be in there.

We’ve just opened the back door to a courtyard when my point man says, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I just realized there’s a very small bathroom I haven’t cleared.” With his chin, he nods up the stairs.

“Check it,” I say. “I don’t want anyone sneaking up on us.”

We go back inside. He heads up the cement steps. I trail him, my SAW gunner and the Goose behind me.

My point man kicks open the door.

Starts yelling and shooting.

And the bad guys inside return fire.

Then two guys shoot at us from a room across the hallway. We start shooting back. The place fills with gun smoke. The Goose, still behind me, gets shot in the helmet. Underneath all the shooting, I hear him yell and fall down.

It’s complete chaos.

It brings to mind something my lieutenant told me: When it comes to combat, you need to embrace the chaos because things are going to fall apart, and you need to be able to adapt.

But we’re pinned down—my point man and I are pushing up against each other. There’s no place to go.

They throw a grenade.

This is the end.

I don’t give up fighting, but I know I’m going to die. I don’t have any urge to call out to God for help or to beg for my life. I don’t pray. If this is how I go out, then I’m going out with my friends, these brothers I trust and love. This is the way to go out.

I surrender to it.

In that moment, I can feel my entire body. I can feel every single cell, even the hairs growing out of my skin. I can feel the air rushing into my lungs. And then I have this weird experience where I feel the world around me dissolve. I’m now in this timeless, peaceful place where I’m guessing my consciousness expands, taking me out of this building, away from the men shooting at us.

Right here, in this eternal moment, I don’t have any worries. I know everything is going to be all right, and I’m at complete peace.

Somehow we manage to take these guys down. I survive, with a little cut on my neck from when the grenade exploded.

  

We stay in Fallujah for a little bit, living in the city and in other people’s houses. Then we’re sent to the Abu Ghraib prison and live there for a stretch while doing security patrols in the area. When I finally get back to the barracks, I go seek out two guys who went with me to the infantry school. We’ve become very good friends.

I find my friend Winters. “Where’s Hawk?” I ask.

Winters shoots me a look. “You didn’t hear?”

“No. Where is he?”

“Hawk is fucking dead, man. He got shot in the face.”

Just when I think it’s over and I can come back and meet with my best friends—nope, sorry, one of them is now dead. Death is the gift that keeps on giving.

I try my best to stay busy. Then, in 2005, near the end of January, I go back home to North Carolina.

  

The battle of Fallujah, what happened to my battalion, was all over the news, every single detail. I can tell that my wife and parents want to ask me about it. I’m grateful they don’t.

How can I explain what it’s like fighting to the death and seeing horrific shit like torture rooms where people were kept in cages? Or how can I explain how, when I got back to the barracks, I’d have hallucinations of people appearing in the bathrooms and then I’d go kick in the doors and leave feeling stupid because no one was in there?

And how do I explain what a huge shock it is for me to go from combat to living back in the United States, where people are living peaceful lives, where there’s no gunfire or roads marked with huge craters from bombs?

Different sounds and smells, I discover, trigger my fight-or-flight response. My body gears up for something really bad to happen—something truly dreadful—even though the whole time my mind is saying, No, no, no, everything is fine.

In the summer, while I’m working for my dad’s law firm and starting up at community college, I almost get extended for a third deployment. It doesn’t happen, which is good. I know, deep in my heart, that if I go back, I’ll die. And yet some guys I know have just deployed again as individual combat replacements to different units where they’ll be the new guys, and it makes me feel guilty that I’m not there with them.

I worry about them all the time.

On top of that, I’m living in the civilian world without a purpose. I’m not around people who really know and understand what I’ve gone through.

I don’t fit in here. What can I possibly do after fighting—and surviving—that huge battle in Fallujah? The only things that bring me joy are smoking cannabis and drinking excessive amounts of alcohol.

The cannabis does wonders for my anxiety. The booze helps stop some of the bad feelings and lets me tap into some of the good ones. It helps stop all these intrusive thoughts that are playing on an endless loop—getting a grenade thrown at me, shooting people and them shooting back.

I drink every single day, without fail, because I just want to stop feeling so bad. I go on some epic benders, too. Sometimes I wake up in the creek across the street from my house, dressed in my camis. Other times I feel so despondent that I hop on my motorcycle, drunk, and ride it around and black out.

Oh, my God, I think every time I wake up hungover, I did it again. I’ll never do this again.

But I do it again. And again. My life is falling apart even though I’m going to UC Berkeley and getting good grades. I’m even getting some counseling, but I’m still not ready to face some of these intrusive thoughts, some of these difficult feelings. I’m not consciously aware that I’m purposely avoiding processing the traumas. I don’t know I’m purposely avoiding getting close to people because I’m scared of going through the pain of losing someone again. I don’t want to grieve. My friends are gone. I don’t want to face that fact, or the feelings involved.

What complicates this even more is my friend Josh Munns. He went to Iraq to work as a contractor so he could buy a house for his fiancée. He got kidnapped, and the kidnappers mailed his fingers back to someone in the US forces to prove that they had Josh and he was still alive. He was held captive for over a year, and despite intense negotiations, he was killed.

Life, I know, is never going to get better; it’s only going to get worse. All I can do is pump more booze into myself, and do more reckless things, and feel good once in a while, try to live for those fleeting moments the booze and drugs bring.

That changes in 2012, when I graduate with a master’s degree in social work and start working with a vet group called Killing the Wounded Heart. The group talks about a principle called radical honesty. You have a choice, they say. You can live with your shit and feel like shit, or you can decide to be brave and face your fears.

Listening to them, I feel this pang deep in my gut that this might be my only way out. One day I decide to go home and practice some radical honesty.

“I’m drinking a lot more than you think,” I tell my wife. “I’ve been doing a lot of drugs, and I’ve been unfaithful.”

My wife of four years stands there, glaring at me in shock. She just got home from work and I’ve verbally thrown up all over her.

That day she moves back home with her parents.

The next day, she calls me and says, “I want to stay together. But only if you give up every single drug, even cannabis. And no more booze. One more drop and our marriage is completely over.”

The idea of living without alcohol or drugs—the only things that make me feel good—is terrifying.

“I choose you,” I say.

We work on our relationship. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous and face all these feelings I’ve been avoiding, the grief and the intrusive thoughts, the post-traumatic stress—all of it.

It takes years before I start to feel better.

The real transformation begins on my thirtieth birthday, when a friend gives me a completely shitty present: a registration card for a half marathon. What kind of gift is that? The last thing I want to do is get in shape and run.

But for some reason, I decide to do it. About a week and a half into training, I feel good for the first time in a long, long time—all without using any mind-altering substances. I come to the realization that I can be here, in my own body, without having to disappear inside my head. I don’t have to get blackout drunk or stoned out of my mind to feel like it’s okay to exist.

I sign up for a half Ironman. I do a few of those and fall in love with the sport.

I sign up for a full Ironman. By that time, I’ve got a few triathlons under my belt, but for me it’s still incomprehensible to go 140.4 miles without stopping.

Ironman sends out a short motivational clip of a woman named Lisa Hallett who lost her husband, John, in Afghanistan. In the video, she tells people that she was depressed and stuck in her grief and dealt with it by running. Running, she says, is all about physically moving forward, and that helped her move forward in her life, literally and figuratively. It helped her move forward emotionally and spiritually. She runs in honor of her husband and wears a shirt with his name on it.

In that moment, everything clicks for me. I’m able to shed tears of grief and joy. I’m so overcome by emotion, this freedom of not feeling ashamed or guilty that I survived. I don’t have to feel this utter dread.

I can remember them. I can honor them by racing and carrying their names on my jersey. I can deal with my grief in a way that makes their families feel happy. I can do something I enjoy and do it with a purpose bigger than just completing a race, which in itself is a good enough purpose.

I begin to experience my own transformation and healing.

Ironman gets wind of how their events helped reshape my life. They ask me if I’d be willing to share my story in their upcoming footage for the World Championships. I jump on it. I want to let other people who are in my shoes know that they’re not alone. Trapped. That you can find something that can change your life.

When Ironman announces its upcoming fortieth-anniversary celebration will take place in Santa Rosa, California, the company reaches out to me again, this time asking if I’d like to become their race ambassador. “Is there anything you’d like to do to make it unique or special?”

“Actually,” I say, “I’ve been thinking of running a marathon for a gold star family. From experience, I know they get a lot of support during the funerals, but afterward they get ignored because the community doesn’t know what to do to help support them.

“What I want to do is invite a local family to the event and run the entire marathon while carrying a flag with the name of their son or daughter on it. I think it might not only help other veterans who have survivor’s guilt but also help the community make sure these gold star families feel welcomed.”

And that’s when the fear shows up. How the hell am I going to pull off running 26.2 miles while carrying a flag?

I tell myself I can do it—I will do it.

And I do.