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Writer's pictureBrandy Menefee

COPING / a mental health storytelling series

SCOTT'S STORY PT 3




“I served in the military back before drones. So my team, we were the drones. We were a long-range reconnaissance team. Had cameras that we could set up and feed into satellite systems. Part our job was damage assessment, target assessment, and post action assessment.


On one mission, we had observed an Iraqi supply convoy. We called in Navy F-18s and they bombed the shit out of it. They wanted to know what was in those trucks, what was the body count, things like that. So we went down to survey the wreckage.

 

After an action like that, the fire is so intense. After it burns down, it looks like those vehicles have been there for 30 years. You see bodies fused to vehicles because the heat is that intense.

 

We walked by a truck, and the two guys in the truck, their bodies fused to the steering wheel, and the window rail where the guy was holding on to.

 

And just outside of that truck was a billfold. I could see that it was open. And right there where normally we would keep our driver’s license was a picture of him and his family. I don’t know if that was him – could have been his brother or his father or his uncle – but it was a family.

 

A year after I’d been home from the military, I really started thinking about that. It’s one of the demons that haunts me. That billfold.

 

Because that family will never know what happened to their son or their father or whoever that was. They’ll never know. All they’ll know is that he was in the Army and he never came home. And how many families are like that? Those are the demons that I fight.”

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