RORY PATRICK HAMILL

Rory Patrick Hamill grew up in Brick, New Jersey, the son of two Navy parents. Wanting to serve something bigger than himself, Rory joined the Marine Corps and, near the end of 2006, went to boot camp. He served from 2006 until 2012. He got out as a corporal.

I’m doing desert warfare training out in Twentynine Palms, California, when the battalion commander gathers our company and tells us that fresh bodies are needed on the ground in Afghanistan to hit the Taliban, as part of President Obama’s Operation Strike of the Sword.

“We’re up next at bat,” the battalion commander tells us. “We’re going to Afghanistan.”

Everyone around me is acting all Yeah, fuck yeah!

I’m like, Fuck.

I got married at eighteen. When I turned nineteen, in 2006, I had my daughter. I missed her birth because I had been deployed to Iraq. And now that I’m officially deploying to Afghanistan, I’m going to miss the birth of my son.

  

Afghanistan is constant, high-level stress. Every day when we leave our base to go out and patrol, someone in our area of operations is guaranteed to get shot at or blown up.

The first time I got into a firefight I didn’t realize what was happening.

We were walking through a cornfield, which was a nightmare in and of itself. It was 130 degrees, the sun blazing hot, the air humid from the floods farmers had to create to keep the corn alive. When I heard a snapping sound, someone had the wherewithal to yell at me to get down.

That was when I realized: Oh, shit, someone’s trying to attack me and take my life. And the adrenaline surge? Holy shit. I immediately unloaded my SAW machine gun.

The firefights are now happening almost every single day. We’re taking casualties left and right. And I don’t take cover the way I should. I always stay out in the open and shoot with my SAW and make myself a target. My technique looks borderline suicidal, but I want to make sure everyone is safe, everyone is covered.

The day we get ground intelligence saying there’s potential enemy activity, a squad doing an adjacent patrol about two hundred meters distant starts taking on fire—potshots. The enemy withdraws, and our squad moves to flank them.

We cut through a graveyard and set up along a tree line. We now have the best avenue of approach to engage the enemy.

Only they get behind us quicker than we anticipate.

My team leader, Charlie Lee, points to a tree about five feet to the right and says, “Rory, I want you to set up over there.”

I’m standing behind the tree, aiming out into the open field, when I hear a gunshot.

Where’s that coming from? What—?

Charlie starts screaming. “I got shot.”

I can see the damage: the round hit his shin head-on and blew out the back of his calf.

We react immediately.

Marine Corps rifle squads are designed so that if someone above you in rank gets wounded, you follow the succession of command, which, in this case, is me. I have to step up and become a team leader.

The firefight is intense—the single most frenetic situation I’ve been in up to this point in my career. We fight with tenacity and ferocity as the enemy ambushes us from three sides. I keep looking at Charlie bleeding on the ground and think, Oh, my God, I failed him. I couldn’t protect my team.

We soon get bogged down and decide to pull into the other side of the canal. The enemy appears and we start getting shot at, which means we have to pull into the trench water. That is a major concern for us because Charlie has an open gunshot wound and a muscle and skin laceration on the back of his calf. That unclean water gets into his wounds, he’s at risk of fatal sepsis.

We call in a medevac and a gunship and then take cover while the enemy keeps firing at us.

We wait an hour and a half until air support arrives. It feels like forever.

The medevac lands—directly in our field of fire.

Four of my guys drop their weapons, pick up Charlie, and start running through knee-high mud. I run alongside them and shoot anyone who pops his head out. The shooting gets so intense the crew chief door gunner jumps out and engages the enemy with his 9mm—ineffective in the grand scheme of things, but his actions say Fuck you, I’m going to try. His pilots are in harm’s way, and he’s got to protect them at all costs. Having a bird—this great big piece of metal—stranded on the ground makes us sitting ducks.

We get Charlie on the medevac. Later, when we exfil, the Cobras and Hueys move in and start pounding the area with Hellfire missiles, miniguns, everything. It’s not a good day for the bad guys.

Today I feel like I became a man.

I think about the way the door gunner acted—how we all acted and came together to help Charlie and get him to safety. It’s the greatest symbolism of love I’ve ever seen in my life. That might sound bad, since I have children, but the way these men came together—it’s absolutely true: there is no greater love.

At the base, I receive the news that my son was born. I’m told the time of his birth, do some quick calculations, and discover that my son came into the world while I was out with my squad, fighting for our lives.

  

It’s 2010. I’m twenty-two years old, married, and have two kids. While I have an amazing set of leadership skills and can operate under pressure, in extremely frenetic life-or-death environments, I don’t have any actual skill sets that can translate into a job back home.

I decide to reenlist.

I’m told we’re going back to Afghanistan—this time to a place called Maja.

When my platoon arrives, we start working in the area of operations, doing foot patrols. I’m a corporal and a team leader.

We get ground intelligence that an improvised explosive device is inside a compound. Sergeant John Moler, one of my best friends, turns to me and says, “You want to go get in some trouble?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

We set up a cordon around the compound. John fumbles as he tries to get the metal detector off his back. I can tell he’s nervous. Shaky. This is his first deployment. I’ve been blown up six times: two IED strikes and four RPGs. I go into dad mode.

“Let me do it,” I say.

“Corporal, I can do it.”

“I know you can. I have no doubt in your abilities. I want to take care of it.”

I take the metal detector from him and go into the compound. The floor is all dirt. I’ve swept about three quarters of it when I step on a low metallic pressure plate attached to an IED.

The bomb explodes. I’m launched ten feet into the air and then I hit the ground.

I try to draw a breath and can’t because the bomb sucked away the oxygen. There’s smoke and dust everywhere, and I can’t hear anything.

Finally, my lungs inflate. I go to stand up, can’t.

What the fuck? I look down and see my right kneecap dangling by some sinew and my femur sticking out.

The lower part of my right leg is gone.

I draw on some crazy muscle memory. I go to grab my lifesaving tourniquet in my right cargo pocket but the pocket is no longer there. The only thing I can do is try to cut the flow of blood the best I can.

I pick up my stump, pin it to my chest.

And that’s when my new reality hits me: my leg is gone.

The pain comes.

I start to scream.

My guys run up to me. Even in pain, I’m locked in my training—my leadership mindset. “Did you guys sweep for secondary IEDs?”

“Yeah,” they say when it’s obvious they didn’t. They just ran up to me.

I would have done the same.

As they drag me out of the crater, I touch my ass and the back of my leg. It’s wet. “Doc, check my backside. I think I’m bleeding back here.”

The doc hits me with morphine. This is his first deployment, too. I know he’s scared—terrified—because he’s just a kid. We’re all kids, yet here we’re performing to the best of our abilities in the worst possible environments.

After he gets a tourniquet on my right side, he rolls me over, onto my stump. The amount of pain I experience in that moment turns me into an animal. I don’t feel human. I start clawing at everyone’s faces. They pin down my arms while the doc hits me again with morphine.

The pain starts to subside. I calm down. “All right, all right,” I tell them. “I’m good. I’m good. Someone give me a cigarette.”

They lean me up against the wall. I puff on a Marlboro Red, waiting for the helicopter to come.

“This is making me nauseous,” I say, and spit out the cigarette. I see it bounce off my flak jacket, and the pain in my head kind of stops.

Everything gets really peaceful.

Quiet.

I can hear the birds chirping. The sky is so blue, and the sun feels great. It’s so weird and perverse, having these thoughts, because the exact opposite is happening around me.

On the helicopter, I wind up flatlining for two minutes because of the amount of trauma and blood loss. I’m not a religious person. I don’t experience the typical “great white light,” but I do feel absolute peace. Like I’m one with the universe, or something. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

  

I wind up at Walter Reed, which, oddly, is where I was born. It’s ironic, this “full circle of life” kind of deal.

My stump, I discover, had been cauterized by the blast, so I didn’t bleed out.

But my leg is gone. They couldn’t reattach it.

A week later, after I’m stabilized, a nurse comes in and says, “You’re going to have a special visitor today, so make sure you shave your face.”

Great. Some Marine officer is coming to visit me. Whatever.

I have a full beard. I shave my face using a bedpan filled with water and a shitty two-blade disposable razor. I’m all cut up, sitting in my bed with pieces of toilet paper stuck all over my face, when I see President Obama.

Is this real?

He walks into my room with a cameraman and a Secret Service agent.

Oh, shit, this is real.

“Corporal Hamill,” he says, pinning the Purple Heart medal to my hospital shirt. “I want to thank you for your service on behalf of this nation.” He starts asking me questions: How’s your recovery going? Are you in a lot of pain? Is everyone here treating you well?

I know we give people in positions of power a lot of shit, and I know we don’t agree on politics, but I can tell he is a genuine dude. A normal human being who is shaking my hand and talking to me. It’s an amazing experience, and extremely humbling.

  

The amazing thing our brains do for us is compartmentalize any kind of trauma.

And therein lies the problem: people don’t address PTSD or what psychologists call a moral injury—the feeling of overwhelming shame and guilt, even rage, anger, or betrayal over compromising your moral conscience. If you don’t address these actions and reactions, they come back to haunt you down the road.

I learn all this stuff later. Much, much later.

I get my prosthetic leg one day shy of three months after having my leg blown off. I don’t want to sit in bed. I want to get up and move. I want to recover.

I have great motivation: my wife left me at the hospital. She confessed she did some extramarital shit while I was deployed.

It fills me with such rage and anger that I decide: I’m going to prove her wrong. I’m going to prove everyone wrong. I’m not going to be a statistic. I’m going to succeed in my new post-injury life.

I do daily physical therapy and then go out and party at night with guys who have come back from deployment—guys who have seen others get killed, maimed, and eviscerated. We don’t talk about any of that. We don’t talk about how we miss being with our unit, with our guys, our problems with wives and girlfriends. We don’t address anything that we’re dealing with, which is why things start to go south for me mentally.

I get medically discharged and find a civilian job in New Jersey working on helicopters.

I get remarried.

The demons from all my deployments start eating away at me day and night. I can’t sleep, and I’m drinking too much. I’m smoking like a chimney. I’m not seeing my kids, and I’m shirking my responsibilities—and it’s all because I’ve been ripped out from the familial structure of the military. And I miss the camaraderie.

From day one in the military, your entire day is regimented. It’s scheduled and structured down to the minute. You have a mission. You go out and get it done. Now I don’t have anyone telling me to do anything. I don’t have anyone keeping me in check.

My second marriage ends.

I find myself sitting outside a marsh by my dad’s house in Atlantic City. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, holding a pistol.

I raise it to my head, about to end my life, when for maybe a half second my kids flash through my mind.

What the fuck am I doing?

I start crying.

I disassemble my weapon, take all the bullets out of the magazine, and throw everything out of the car.

I need to address this. I need to get some help.

I get diagnosed with PTSD. I start seeing a therapist full-time and get my head out of my ass. I quit binge drinking and stop smoking, which I’ve been doing since I was thirteen. I learn the importance of exercise and nutrition and taking care of myself. I begin to claw and scrape my way out of my self-loathing. I stop hating myself for everything. I stop blaming myself for my friends dying and every other shitty thing that’s ever happened to me.

I start speaking to other people about my experiences.

Over time, I start to learn to love my fate. Instead of letting it control me, send me into a deep, spiraling depression, I discover a way to turn it around for good—to help others. If I can help one person every day, regardless of how I do it, then that’s a win for me. If I can use my experiences, my story, to help a person every single day, then everything I’ve gone through in my life is worth it.