First Person: A Female Marine's Perspective of Her Tour in Iraq

As we near the 10-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, Yahoo News asked U.S. servicemen and women who served to share their perspectives and discuss how it changed them. Here's one story.

FIRST PERSON | I am a United States Marine; I am not on active duty, however. I was deployed to Iraq on February 2004, less than one year after the invasion. I joined the United States Marines when I was barely 17 -- a slightly unusual process which required both parents to sign the enlistment papers to make me an emancipated minor. I served in the Marines three years and 10 months. I was medically discharged due to my injuries sustained in combat.

When I was in my Military Occupational School (MOS), the place where you learn your job, mine was a combat driver. Being 17 while on active duty was interesting, while I was on liberty I wanted to get a tattoo. The tattoo artist told me he didn't tattoo minors but then rolled his eyes, handed me a form, where it said "parental signature" he told me to get my Platoon Sergeant to sign it.

My time in Iraq was difficult. I was the first of five females, out of a battalion of over 330 male Marines, to be directly attached to an infantry unit. While standards have changed in the past 15 years on letting females in combat, the Marine Corps wanted to avoid a disaster similar to Jessica Lynch.

My days were busy driving grunts back and forth to battles; driving midnight runs to different outfits all over Iraq to resupply units, pick up wounded, deliver mail, food, medical supplies, people, whatever you can think of. We had to do all of this while praying and staying vigilant for the lethal improvised explosion devices (IED). IEDs are essentially small bombs that detonate either by a radio signal, such as a cell phone, or a trigger mechanism that is activated when a person stands on them or are driven upon. IEDs are either buried in the sand so deep you could not tell visually, or they are disguised in a soda can, a Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE) boxes, and such. Each IED is unique; it can blow-off an appendage, or take out a tank.

Sadly, about six months into my deployment, almost six weeks before my unit was getting ready to go home, on a run to Fallujah, Iraq to resupply an outpost with food and medicine, I hit an IED. What I remember was driving down a dirt road that was kicking up a hefty amount of sand, which made it almost impossible to see the road, and ultimately the IED. I remember driving, everything being normal, then a loud bang, and being upside down, right side-up, upside down, and then the truck rested on its side. Rounds were being fired, and then I must have gone unconscious. During the attack, three Marines gave their lives for their country, one of whom I had morning chow with.

I had serious internal bleeding, the blast ruptured my ovary which needed to be removed and the blood lost stopped. By black hawk, I was flown to Belad, Iraq, to Lanshtuel, Germany then to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I met my future husband a corpsman (hospital medic) who took care of me. We had plenty of time to become acquainted, I spent nearly a month in the hospital. When service members come back from a combat theatre, it is common for a low-grade infection to persist for a few months. Frequently, Marines will have a cough that just will not go away, and can persist for years. With my wounds, it became a high-grade infection, and I was in the intensive care for two-weeks.

My husband and I were married for 8 years. He was deployed five blood tours to Iraq during those eight years, which caused him to drink. The Navy, after 11 years, decided to do the nice thing, and give him a medical discharge for alcoholism and PTSD. When he still continued to drink, I decided to leave him. I believed it was in the interest of our daughter. My daughter will be 7-years old in April of 2013. However, after the divorce and the steady pay check of the military, my daughter and I were homeless within six months. We are currently staying at an apartment complex which is paid for by the Veteran's Administration for Iraq Veterans.

Even with a Master's Degree in Behavioral Medicine, a Bachelor's of Arts in Social Psychology, when I moved to Florida, I have not been able to find a job. I write to make enough money to survive, but finding a job has been a problem. When I got back from Iraq, I started to suffer grand mal seizures. They went away for a few years, and have started to get much worse, especially this past month when I had to be hospitalized after falling in the shower and hitting my head on the side of the tub.

While things are currently hard, I know that I maintain the strength and discipline by my training in Iraq and the Marine Corps, to pull myself out of poverty and make a better life for my daughter and myself. Looking back, I would have tried harder to stay in and make the Marine Corps a career. While no Marine likes the politics of the military, I miss the Marines. I miss my fellow Marines, where I know I could call on a dime and they would stop what they were doing and help.

I have always wondered what kind of person I would have been if I did not join the Marines, and in short, I would be innocent. While clich?, until a person knows what it is like to do the things you have to do in combat, it is unimaginable. Once a line has been crossed, a type of innocence has been lost. You can no longer say in your mind "At least I haven't ever killed anyone". You and your squad see a bad guy, you shoot, and they go down.

In battle, you are either in battle, or you are waiting for the next one to happen, where you have too much time to think. That is why, except for times where I write about my time in Iraq, when it can be cathartic; I try not to think about it much. There is nothing I can do to change what I have done. The people I have killed are dead or they are not. The battle is done, and this Marine now carries internal and external scars that remind me what I have lost, my innocence.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/first-person-female-marines-perspective-her-tour-iraq-213500448.html

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