Current and Future Questions

by Eddie Dzialo

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I am worried about the day my daughter will ask me if I’ve killed someone. No one has ever asked. Not even my closest friends who swam through Jameson with me when I first got home from my deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. She’ll ask around the time she’s old enough to be curious, but young enough to have no filter. Of course, then, I’ll tell her that I didn’t and that I love her. But some of that will be a lie, because I don’t know if I’ve ever killed anyone. Nothing about the type of combat being fought in Afghanistan is that definitive.

The Taliban wore the same clothes as the people we wanted to protect. Sometimes pregnant women were a means to hide explosives; dead dogs on the side of the road were packed with nails and ball bearings. Things weren’t as absolute as the Shoot/No Shoot drills that we’d rehearsed in training, and no one had promised that they would be.

During the first month I was in Afghanistan, we were in a firefight for four hours, and I never once saw a single person who had been shooting at us. We moved, they moved, and then at some point, they dropped their weapons and blended back into the huts. On another day, my buddy’s platoon—a kid from the south shore of Massachusetts—got attacked, and my platoon helped corner the attackers into a section of the city. We fired rockets, detonated walls with C4, had helicopters flying overhead, giving us additional viewpoints. But like the four-hour firefight that preceded it, the attackers eventually dropped their weapons, and they likely stood next to innocent civilians who were trying to get away from both sides.  

Throughout all this, I never saw a dead body. When we were being attacked, I saw bullets kicking up dirt around Marines who were too brave to run away; I heard rockets and mortars landing, but I never saw if anyone had been impacted by the things we did. It would be easy for me to say that because I didn’t see anything then it didn’t happen. No one got hurt. They fought; they ran. But I’d been told that the people who were attacking us often took the dead with them before fleeing. Another friend of mine, from another platoon, went into a room after a firefight, and there had been fresh, ungodly amounts of blood on the walls and floor, but no weapons, clothes, or people.

Once, on the morning after we were attacked, a man approached my company. He’d been pushing a wheelbarrow, and in that wheelbarrow, was another man who was badly mangled, barely alive. The man told us that his friend had been mauled by a tractor and was asking for help. The only thing we could offer him were prayers. But was he telling the truth? Had he gotten hurt by a tractor or had it been from artillery rounds? Honestly, I don’t know.

It’s those situations that will make things difficult on the day when my daughter will inevitably ask me if I ever killed anyone overseas. When she’s young, I will tell her that I didn’t and that I love her. And when she’s older, I’ll probably tell her the same things that I’ve written here and that I still love her. As for me, I will likely leave this world not knowing if I ever took someone else’s life. Maybe then I’ll know for sure.

Running to Trauma

by Eddie Dzialo

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When I first appeared at the Officer Selection Office in Durham, NH, I told them that I wanted to be a Marine officer and that I would do whatever they needed me to do. Had it been an option, I would have left that day. 

I went down to the Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, but three weeks before graduation I broke the second metatarsal in my right foot. The intensity of the physical fitness requirements literally broke me.

In the mornings, before the Sergeant Instructors tore through the barracks, I got up and wrapped my foot with duct tape. The top of my foot had swollen so badly that I wouldn’t have been able to get it in my boot without taping it down. My rack mate, the nephew of a legendary NFL coach, said that my foot looked like it had swallowed a purple grapefruit. One of the Corpsmen—the Navy’s version of an EMT—caught me doing my morning duct tape routine. When he told me that I would have to go see a doctor and be dropped due to injury, I told him that I must have pulled something and nothing was broken. To prove this, I hopped up and down on one foot—the shattered one. Either he was foolish enough to believe me, or he saw how badly I wanted to stay.

During the timed runs, the endurance courses, the conditioning hikes and fitness tests, I ran on the outside of my foot—until that bone broke too. Before graduation, I ran three miles in 19:02 with a foot that looked like an infected circle. When I got home, I went to get X-rays. After getting the results, the doctor refused to let me get off the examination table; he wanted to get me into surgery. Even then, I pleaded for a cast because getting surgery would have prevented me from being sworn in as a Marine officer when I graduated college the following spring.

Three years later, I was in Iraq.

Both of my parents were Marines, as were two of my uncles, my aunt, and my cousin. Despite my background, no one in my family told me to become a Marine. Before I left, my father tried to talk me out of it. It’s not that he wasn’t proud of me or that he wasn’t being supportive, but he told me that if I was going to risk my life doing something, then the decision to do so had to come from me alone.

I am not the same person I used to be. Before I left for the Marines, I had friends; I had been the president of a fraternity; when I smiled, I meant it. I am guilty of making choices that impact not only me but everyone in my life. Relationships of all varieties become strained, but unlike many survivors of trauma, I was an eager participant. I volunteered for something, and I accept the consequences of that decision, but the people around me, the people who see me struggle, did not.

After my second deployment, life morphed into a dull fog. The aftermath was the loss of emotions, the feelings of isolation and confusion that evolve into anxiety. And I became this way because I wanted it. A draft notice never appeared in the mail, an economic hardship hadn’t made me consider the military as a means for a better life. I didn’t stumble into my current state, I ran into it, willingly. I wanted to become a Marine and I ended up exactly where I had set out to go.