Reader's Digest Soldier Stories

by Reader's Digest

  His family helps him remain upbeat. “I take great inspiration from my wife and kids,” he says. “I don’t always feel good, but I owe it to them to keep on trying.”

  Gadson isn’t sure whether his role with the Giants will continue next season. He hasn’t been discharged from the military, and his only official duty is to focus on his rehab. The soldier says he’d like to be there when his battalion comes home.

  “I’m living the journey right now,” Gadson says, reflecting on all that’s happened to him in the past year. “I’ve come a long way, and I still have a long way to go. I don’t believe you ever really arrive in life. You live life.” And who knows where that will take you? If you are Lt. Col. Greg Gadson, you could go from the battlefields of Iraq all the way to the Super Bowl alongside the New York Giants—in a wheelchair, but never, ever sidelined.

  You Own Every Bullet

  BY MATT SUSKO

  from reddit.com

  I remember the first time I ever pointed a weapon at someone with the intent to kill them. The experience was very different from how I had imagined it would be—far more ambiguous, confusing, and subjective. The training scenarios and exercises had never really covered situations like the one I found myself in.

  I hadn’t been in Iraq that long, maybe 60 days. My assignment: gunner for a troop transport vehicle known as an MRAP. There were 30 or so troops in the platoon, and our mission this evening was a reconnaissance patrol taking us to the edge of our battle space, the dividing line between the areas of responsibility for military units. That was where the bad guys tended to collect, much in the same manner that the space between tiles in a bathroom collects mold and grime.

  For this assignment, we were the Mr. Clean. The plan: look around, talk to the locals, try to winkle out some actionable intelligence, and then start kicking the hornets’ nest. Depending on where we went, this was either super successful (quite a few of the locals actually hated the insurgency) or a total bust.

  The village had only one road in. Just like so many other stories in Iraq, bad things happen when you are at the far end of your leash, late at night, on the only ingress/egress route. As we mounted up to head back to camp, I heard some of my buddies muttering, “Ugh, we are getting hit tonight.” I tried (and failed) to play it cool. We’re getting hit? I was excited and nervous. These guys had been here longer than I had and clearly knew what was up, but they seemed strangely unconcerned by it. “Getting hit” was spoken of in the same tones as “It’s gonna rain” or “We’re gonna be late.” An inconvenience, but not the end of the world. For a green kid on my first deployment, “getting hit” was a pretty big deal! I hopped into my turret, checked my machine gun, secured all my other gear, and settled in.

  It turns out the grunts were only half right. About one mile out of the village, our lead vehicle slammed to a stop. It missed running over a pressure-detonated IED (think of a mousetrap wired with three artillery shells) by mere feet. The platoon sergeant prepared to call for the explosive ordnance disposal unit to come remove the bomb, but the platoon leader cut him off. The leader had had enough. Too many IEDs, too many broken vehicles, too many broken men. He issued a new order: Dismount a squad, to be led by the leader, to take cover and watch the site. He then ordered the vehicles pushed back half a mile and hidden in a ditch beside the road with the engines and lights off. We were to wait and see whether anyone came to collect the IED.

  After we pulled back, my vehicle was positioned in a depression with just the turret peeking out at ground level. We shut everything down and settled in for a long night. After about three hours, through my night vision goggles I saw a pickup truck exiting the village. This wasn’t all that unusual in itself, but the vehicle was traveling across the field, not on the road, with no lights on. Naturally, this twitched my mental antennae. The vehicle was a little over a mile away and heading in our direction. Over the intercom, I let the vehicle commander know that we had company incoming. He passed the word to the platoon sergeant, who passed it to the platoon leader, who was on the ground near the IED. At about 1,500 meters, the order was given to me: “If they get within 300 meters, engage at your discretion.” It was that simple. No warning shots, no flares, no second chances.

  Waiting for the vehicle to approach the 300-meter mark was the longest 15 minutes of my life. “At your discretion” wasn’t something I heard very often as a 21-year-old specialist. I was being given the power of life and death over the occupants of that truck, and they didn’t even know it.

  My brain raced. Are these insurgents? What if they are doing farmwork in the middle of the night? (Not that uncommon in a desert country.) What if they are driving off-road to avoid the insurgents and IEDs they fear may be on the road? What if it’s some guy taking a family member to the hospital? What if they are insurgents and the truck explodes when I shoot it? Hopefully 300 meters is far enough away . . .

  But what played through my mind, over and over, was a lesson my father had taught me ten years before: When you pull the trigger, the consequences are yours—forever.

  When I was a boy in Sandwich, Massachusetts, I became interested in firearms and hunting and asked my father to take me shooting. After some haggling with Mom, he agreed. I remember sitting down at the dining room table prior to heading to the range. He had removed some rifles from the safe in the basement and instructed me on their proper handling. After I gained his confidence, he fixed me with his loving, firm gaze and said, “I’m going to tell you something very simple but very important. You can’t take a bullet back once you pull the trigger.”

  I smiled and said, “Yeah, Dad, I know.”

  He didn’t even blink. “No, you don’t. I mean this. You can’t take a bullet back. Once you pull the trigger, it’s forever. It’s not a movie; it’s not a video game. No matter how many times you say ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘It was an accident,’ ‘I didn’t mean to,’ that bullet Never. Comes. Back. Do you understand?” He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “I’m not trying to scare you, but rifles are for men, not boys. If you take this, and we go shooting, you need to accept responsibility every time you pull the trigger. Every bullet. Forever.”

  I nodded my head. I remember tearing up because the enormity of what he’d said had finally gotten through. I’d have the power of life and death over other people. It’s an awesome and terrifying responsibility, and the person I loved and wanted to impress most in the world had entrusted me with this responsibility.

  That night in Iraq, I performed mundane little tasks as the last five minutes of the lives of those strangers in the truck ticked down. Checking the safety, straightening the ammo belt so the rounds would feed correctly and not jam, securing my earplugs, spitting out my gum. Over the radio, I checked my clearance to fire. The platoon leader broke in with a yelling whisper: “Check fire, repeat, check fire. DO NOT SHOOT.” That was weird, I thought. I popped back up to check the truck. Still coming.

  Suddenly, a loud burst of machine gun fire erupted from the squad situated near the IED. Tracers arced across the night sky from the ambush site, past the truck, low, fast, and deadly. A few scattered rifle shots barked out. Then silence. The truck cut a sharp turn back to town and roared off. Our MRAP raced to where the ambush had occurred, spotlights piercing the darkness, guns up and out. Two men—dumped from the truck—lay on the ground, one twitching and bleeding. The platoon medic kept them alive until a medevac helicopter arrived and ferried them to a hospital.

  Though I never learned who they were or what they were doing, I was 90 percent sure that night, as I am now, that they were coming out to pick up the IED and use it later. The other 10 percent of me sometimes wonders. If I had shot, regardless of who was in the vehicle, under the rules of engagement I would have been cleared legally. Ethically I believe I would have been cleared, too, given the circumstances. Morally, I’m not so sure. Morally, I believe we answer to a higher power than rules of engagement, or even the letter of the law. Morally, I believe someday I’ll be c
alled to account for the things I’ve done or neglected to do. Some days, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to do that.

  What I am sure of today in my early 30s—the same way I was sure of it on that moonless March night when I was 21 and when I was a wide-eyed child at my family dinner table taking in one of life’s most important lessons—is that once you pull the trigger, you own it forever. Because the bullet never, ever, comes back.

  A Soldier’s Last Bedtime Story

  BY KENNETH MILLER

  When the package arrived in the mail, Cdr. Chong “Jay” Choe stared at it in shock. This was the fifth delivery since his wife had been shipped overseas. On previous occasions, he’d brought the padded envelopes to his three-year-old daughter, Kristin, as soon as he saw the return address. She would eagerly help him open the seals, and they’d watch the DVDs together right away. But this delivery was different. Florence must have sent the disc shortly before the gunman opened fire, he thought. He wondered what she’d chosen for the reading that would be her last gift to her daughter. He could feel the square plastic case inside the pouch. But he couldn’t bring himself to pull it out, let alone watch it. So the package sat on his desk for weeks, unopened.

  Jay and Florence had met at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was doing his internship in general surgery. Shy and unassuming but fiercely disciplined, Jay hit the hospital gym nearly every day early in the morning before beginning his rounds. The only other person in the room at that hour was a small, beautiful woman who always wore headphones and seemed intent on avoiding eye contact. He ran into her again at a staff meeting and learned that she was a medical service corps officer named Florence Bacong. When he gathered his courage and asked her to dinner, she blurted, “No!” and told him she had other plans. Sensing wariness, he tried another tack: “How about lunch this Sunday after church?” To his amazement, she agreed.

  Over sandwiches, he learned that Florence was the daughter of a Navy cook; her parents were from the Philippines, and she’d grown up in San Diego. She was the first in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree, which she had topped off with a master’s in public health. Two days after the 9/11 attacks, she’d followed her father into the service. Despite her manicured nails and well-coiffed hair, she shared Jay’s taste for camping and hiking. Their romance bloomed on the trails of Virginia’s Great Falls Park.

  They were married in June 2004 and were deployed to Okinawa, Japan, soon afterward. At Camp Hansen, Jay was assigned to the Third Marine Logistics Group as a general medical officer, while Florence became officer in charge of the Headquarters and Service Battalion, overseeing nearly 100 sailors and Marines.

  Kristin was born in November of the following year. The joys and stresses of parenthood—compounded by the demands of their jobs and the challenges of living abroad—tightened the couple’s bond. Jay marveled at Florence’s gung ho performance as a mother and an officer, but it stung him when the strain of balancing both roles made her cry. In 2007, as their tour neared its end, he applied to do his residency at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where his in-laws could provide a support network. And then, in May 2008, Lt. Florence Choe was called for duty in Afghanistan.

  • • •

  Florence and Jay’s immediate concern was how she could remain in her little girl’s life from more than 7,500 miles away. Soon after landing at Bagram Airfield, she found the answer: United Through Reading (UTR). Run by a San Diego–based nonprofit, the program enables military parents to be recorded on DVD reading storybooks to their faraway children. UTR was founded in 1989 by Betty J. Mohlenbrock, the wife of a naval flight surgeon who was deployed when their daughter was a baby; after his return, the child didn’t recognize him, and their relationship had to be painstakingly rebuilt. Mohlenbrock, an educator who’d seen children lagging at school because no one read to them at home, designed the program as a way to sustain family closeness while boosting literacy.

  For her first DVD for Kristin, Florence selected Cinderella. When the package arrived in San Diego, it was as if the Fairy Godmother herself was inside. Jay popped the DVD into the player and settled on the floor with Kristin while her grandparents sat on the sofa, craning their heads toward the TV. When Florence appeared on the screen, Kristin yelled, “Mommy!” and ran to kiss her face. Kristin sat rapt throughout the performance, then demanded a replay. Over the next few weeks, she begged to watch the video every evening—and sometimes several times a day. Florence and Kristin had, indeed, been united through reading.

  From Bagram, Florence flew to Camp Mike Spann, a coalition outpost within an Afghan National Army base near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Her assignment was to help organize administrative logistics at a new medical station for troops and civilians. In her off-hours, she got to work establishing a local branch of UTR. She lobbied camp authorities to set aside a small room for a library, which she furnished with handmade shelves, donated recording equipment, and books collected through an e-mail drive.

  Florence’s next DVD, reading Good Night, Gorilla, was an even bigger hit. Kristin watched it over and over; she made Jay or her grandparents read her the book at bedtime as well. Several weeks later came The Cat in the Hat, followed by Llama Llama Red Pajama. Between deliveries, Florence checked in via Skype whenever she could, but the connection was often wonky, and Kristin would drift away midconversation. The readings, however, held the toddler’s attention with an almost hypnotic force. Like any young child, Jay thought, she thrived on repetition and ritual; the comfort of these virtual visits with her mother was heightened by their utter predictability and the gentle rhythms of the stories. The element of control was another factor: Instead of waiting for a call, Kristin could summon Mommy’s face and voice whenever she chose.

  The DVDs were a balm to Jay as well. The tenderness of Florence’s gaze, and the avidity of Kristin’s response, provided a countercurrent to the worries that come with military life. It felt deeply soothing to tap into that circuit of love.

  In January 2009, when Florence came home on leave, Kristin climbed into her lap as if she’d never been away. The family spent a week in Hawaii, reveling in the sun, the sea, and one another before Florence boarded a plane back to the war zone. Two months later, on March 27, Jay’s department chair told him the admiral wanted to see him. Jay’s first thought was that he’d bungled some task and was due for a dressing down. But when he saw the faces of the dozen people gathered in the wood-paneled office, he knew the news would be infinitely worse. “I’m so sorry,” the admiral said.

  It had happened when Florence and three friends were on their afternoon run. As they jogged along the base’s perimeter fence, an Afghan soldier swung his AK-47 toward the group. The first bullet passed through Navy captain Kim Lebel’s arm; the second struck Florence’s thigh. Navy lieutenant junior grade Francis Toner, 26, charged the shooter, giving his life in an attempt to save the others. The assailant stood over Florence and finished her off before turning his weapon on himself. No one knew whether he was a Taliban infiltrator or had some other grievance.

  A chaplain accompanied Jay to his in-laws’ house. As Florence’s parents wept, Jay carried Kristin down the street. “Can we visit Mommy in heaven?” she asked.

  “No, sweetie,” Jay told her. “She’s an angel now, watching over us.” Kristin hugged him tighter and buried her face in his shoulder.

  Florence was only 35 when she was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, on a hillside with a view of the sea. The last DVD arrived a few weeks after she died. When Jay finally mustered the strength to watch it, he discovered that the disc had been damaged in transit. He stared through his tears at the blank blue screen—an emblem of all he and his family had lost.

  • • •

  For a long time, Jay and Kristin visited Florence’s resting place frequently, bringing a blanket, snacks, and cards that Kristin had drawn herself. But inevitably, life began to pull them in new directions. They moved in w
ith Jay’s mother, who relocated from Maryland to lend a hand. The DVDs wound up stashed in a closet. Jay couldn’t bear to watch them anymore, and Kristin eventually stopped asking to.

  Today, Jay is married again, to a fellow surgeon. Kristin, now 11, has two younger sisters—a 23-month-old, Dana, and a newborn baby. Yet Florence remains a presence in the lives of the family members she left behind. Like her mother, Kristin is outwardly prim, with a tomboyish streak just below the surface; on fishing trips with her dad, she insists on being the one to gut the catch. She also inherited Florence’s studiousness, her focus, and something of her toughness and adaptability. She recently won the local Rotary Club’s “Character Counts” essay contest with an entry that described her time of bereavement. “Losing my mom made me feel different from the other kids,” Jay remembers Kristin writing. “But it taught me perseverance.”

  As for the storytelling DVDs, Jay keeps them tucked away on a shelf in the closet. He plans to present them to Kristin as a keepsake someday. “The time will have to be right,” he says, “for her, for me, for the family. I have no idea when that will be. But when she’s older, I want her to have those treasures. None of us ever knew how significant they would be in our lives.”

  Yet in a sense, the legacy of those DVDs—of the gift that a soldier-mother created for her daughter—is right there in the family living room. In the evenings, when the adults take out their medical journals and Kristin cracks a volume of Harry Potter, little sister Dana invariably climbs into her elder sibling’s lap holding a picture book. “Kristin loves to read to her,” Jay says. “When Dana is old enough for Good Night, Gorilla, we’ll really have come full circle.”