A Run to Remember
The views expressed are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Note: Parts of this story are not true, but the story as a whole represents deep truths.
I awoke to the sound of Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, outside my hotel room window. We had traveled to the city of Izmir, Turkey the evening before after getting done with our exploration of Ephesus and the cathedral of Saint Jean.
The Mosque was the next building over. I was drenched in sweat when I woke up. I tried to remember what I had been dreaming about. The nightmares didn’t come often, but when they did, they usually ruined my day. I spent most of the day trying desperately to remember what had happened in the dream.
The only flashes that I was getting were that of laying in an irrigation ditch with a Special Ops Medic next to me. Bullets were whistling, not cracking overhead.
Chief was standing on the berm that made up the edge of the ditch. “The bullets are whistling over us. That means that they are really far away. Get out of the ditch. It would be a really lucky shot if they hit any of us.”
We started to crawl out of the ditch, but a bullet hit the Chief's head and it exploded. The Medic dragged his body down and tried to revive him, but it was far too late.
I shook my head as I came back into reality trying to get the dream out of my consciousness. That isn’t what happened. Chief got on a helicopter hours later when we left that mission. I thought. I tried to think of what my subconscious was trying to tell me.
The night before we had gone to a dinner on the waterfront. There were several amazing seafood restaurants that were strung along Izmir Bay. We had chosen one of the many and had an amazing dinner of midye dolma and chicken tava.
I had noticed that there was a path that traveled for miles along the waterfront. There were many people walking along the path and riding bikes. The city was very western. Most of the women only wore a shawl that covered their head and not their face and many didn’t even wear the hijab at all. There were also several other Americans and Westerners around.
After dinner we walked a section of the path to where the riots of 1919 started that led to the overthrow of the Ottoman Turks. There was a statue there commemorating the event. The statue stood at the north end of the park and a rectangular courtyard stretched out toward the south. The sun had set while we walked to the ferry. The city lights lit up all around the bay. It was quite spectacular. We were at the head of the bay, at the east end of the oval shaped harbor. The city stretched out all around us and the lights played off of the calm water.
I knew some of the history of this spot. Alexander the Great had been here. He had had a vision right near where we were now. A vision of a great city, which led to one of the first planned cities, but I wondered if he could have ever imagined this. Homer had lived here too. But that was in the old city across the bay to the northwest. And of course, the reason that we were there; this was the ancient city of Smyrna that John had written to in Revelation Chapter 2.
As we walked back to our hotel, I noted all the different languages that I heard. There were Turkish bakeries and a Starbucks (I knew where I was getting my coffee in the morning), there were mosques and a Catholic monastery, there was a Victoria Secret and a Turkish store that sold burkas. This is where the east met the west and the culture spoke of it everywhere.
I had noted the path the night before and thought it would be a good place to go for a run. So when the call to prayer woke me up from my nightmare, I put on my running shorts and shoes and walked downstairs.
The spring morning was chilly. I could feel the breeze blowing in off of the bay. People were starting to move about the city. I didn’t notice it at first; I just thought people were being friendly and looking my way, but then I noticed that young ladies were staring, and men gave me loathsome looks. I made it to the waterfront path and turned south.
I had planned on running for an hour or so. I wanted to get at least six miles done. Runs always helped me clear my mind after a bad dream.
Slowly as my feet pounded the pavement, I started to phase out my surroundings and think about what I had dreamed. It was definitely the Marsha invasion there in Helmand province Afghanistan, but what part, what had disturbed me so much that I woke up sweating.
I snapped back to reality. Izmir bay was to my right and the path led toward a ferry dock. A city street was just on the other side of a row of trees. The crowds were getting thick. I didn’t do well with crowds, especially after my third deployment. I weaved in and out of the people walking.
More and more I was getting looks from the locals. What was it? I was in my mid-thirties balding and no longer an attractive 20 something, but the thought crossed my mind that maybe I still had “it” whatever it was that caused women to be attracted to men. I continued running deeper into the crowded path.
Again, I took myself back to Marsha. I was standing on the roof of a two-story house talking with my EOD team member Nick. The roof was flat, and the edge of the roof rose up to about three and a half feet and it was made of concrete. There were spent 5.56 and 7.62 shell casing all over under our feet. I had been separated from Nick for the last 24 hours. Nick had gone across a canal to clear the tallest building in Marsha while I had stayed on the other side and cleared the second tallest. This was not standard procedure for EOD techs to separate from each other, but neither was working with Green Berets and Navy Seal Snipers. We were excited to tell each other our stories after the battle had waned and we were back together.
Nick was asking, “So did you ki…?”
All of a sudden, the interpreter yelled at us, “Get down!”
We dropped to the roof of the house. Shell casings shifting under us.
“What was that all about?” Asked Nick.
“There was a sniper asking his commander on iCom if he could shoot at the two Americans standing on the roof. That was you two,” explained the terp.
“Holy…”
I was back in Izmir. Again, in crowds. I had just passed the ferry dock and the bay was wrapping around to the west. Two young ladies looked me up and down and giggled. I smiled back. Wow I must still got “it,” I thought again. Then I looked around. I looked up and down the path that wound around the bay. There was no one else running. In the states this would have been the ideal place to go for a run, but no one else was doing that here in Turkey.
The night before I had noticed all the western influences, but the outdoor fitness craze had not hit Turkey yet. Then I looked myself up and down and to my horror I realized why so many people were staring at me. I was wearing short running shorts and a form fitting shirt. Again, I looked around. Most everyone was in western garb, jeans or slacks, suits, or dresses, but all of them were wearing clothes that covered the full length of their legs and arms. I realized that to them I looked like I was going for a run in my underwear.
I stopped completely, embarrassed. I turned around and started to run back to my hotel room significantly faster than I had been running before. I finally started to see things through the eyes of those around me. I cringed when the girls looked at me and snickered. I was frightened by what the men might do to me. I now saw the hatred in their eyes. I was in a living nightmare. It was the horror of any middle schooler to be dropped into an assembly in only your underwear. Here I was running through the streets of a major city doing just that.
I felt crushed under the weight of the crowd staring at me. I pushed my way mentally past the most crowded part of the path and made it to the area where there were less pedestrians. I got to the street that my hotel was on and turned right, east, back into the downtown part of the city. I just had to make it back to my room.
I got stopped at a crosswalk. Vehicles were flying through the streets of the city, making their way to their destinations. I started to laugh, what a crazy situation to be in. The hand lit orange at the crosswalk, telling me to stop, turned to a white hand. And I started to jog across the street. I was no longer in such a hurry. What could I do?
A block from my hotel I again noticed a group of girls giggling at me. I looked down at my feet. I just wanted to make it the 100 feet back to my hotel.
An Imam stepped out of a mosque to my left. We collided. The Imam, the leader of the mosque, looked at me with wide eyes, scandalized at what he saw. I was back in Marsha, it happened so quickly that I left all of Izmir behind. This wasn’t just a memory.
I was on a different roof. The Spec Ops Medic was standing next to me. We were three stories in the air. The roof was flat, and the concrete edge rose three and a half feet. It was perfect for taking cover from gunfire and to prop up our weapons to fire back at anyone that dared show themselves. There were 45 Afghan Commandos that surrounded the rooftop; each of them had an itchy trigger finger. The night before we had taken over the building under the cover of darkness. The city had fallen with very little resistance. But I knew that there were thousands of IEDs that the enemy had left behind and they would take the lives of hundreds of Americans over the coming months. Now we were just waiting for the Marines to push in from all sides with their vehicles and take over where we were now.
There was a small Mosque right below us. It was early morning. It caught us off guard when an Imam opened the door to the Mosque. He stepped out and looked around. Then he looked up. I locked eyes with the Imam. Instead of ducking back into the Mosque, he darted for an opening in a wall that made up the compound. Chief fired two rounds at the fleeing man. They impacted on either side of the opening.
The opening led into an alleyway. The Commandos unleashed a torrent of bullets, but they were shooting at nothing. The man was in the alleyway between two parallel mud brick walls.
The alleyway was parallel to the edge of the building that we were on. He turned left into the alley, but he could have run back to the right. We were watching both ends. The Imam darted out from the left end of the alley. Again, there was a volley of gunfire. He hooked around a mechanic shop.
I knew where the Imam was going. We had to come in that way the night before. I squatted down and steadied my rifle on the edge of the roof. And placed the chevron of my ACOG three feet off the right edge of the mechanics building. I figured that was where the man would run out if he didn’t just run down the highway that led into the city. It would be suicide for him to do that though. The man did dart out from behind the mechanic building right where I knew he would go, and I just squeezed my trigger. There was no emotion, there was no fear or hatred or racing heart rate; it was surprisingly mechanical. The Imam dropped and fell down behind a wall that we couldn’t see behind.
“Wow! You got ‘em,” the medic said.
“I guess I did,” I replied with no feeling. The emotions and feelings and doubts and fears would come later. “I got ‘em.”
I turned around and slouched against the wall. What just happened? I thought the whole process through. An Imam just came out from his Mosque. We shot at him. I might have shot and killed him. Why were we shooting at him? I undid my helmet. I held my head in my hands. They said all military age males in the city were targets. That was the ROE. So, he was a legitimate target. But still why would we shoot at him? He was running away. He had no weapon. I could see the Imam’s eyes. His eyes that were filled with fear as he first looked up at us and realized that he was about to die.
I raised my head and looked around. I was in my hotel room in Izmir. Somehow, I had made it back to my room. I had no idea how. I tried to find it, but the time was just lost. I looked at my hands; they were visibly shaking. My body was covered in sweat from running over a mile as fast as I could.
I found my phone and called Wilde. He and I had done one tour together in Afghanistan and trained together before I went to Iraq. He went to Afghanistan. We had been through some extremely hard times together, some great experiences. We had opened up to each other about struggles, deployment experiences and the aftermath that we struggled with. I needed someone to talk to, to help carry this crushing burden. I held my breath as the phone rang three times.
A groggy voice answered, “Hello.”
“Hey, Wilde, it's Mark. Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, man but that's fine. What's going on?” Wilde replied.
“What time is it there?”
“I think it's midnight, but it doesn’t matter. I'm here for you. You still in Turkey?” He asked.
“Yeah, I’m about halfway done.”
“Fifteen months huh? That is rough. I don’t think that I could spend that much time away from my family.”
“It has been hard, but there have been some really good things too. I think the hardest part is that I had to miss my daughter’s birth.”
“Yeah, I saw on FaceBook that you guys had another one. You didn’t get to make it back?”
“No, I probably could have, but Sarah gave birth two months after I got here, and I didn't want to use my mid-tour so early. I think I’m going to go home in July. That way I can be there for my boys’ birthdays,” I paused for a moment.
“So, why did you call? You don’t just usually call out of the blue. Honestly, I haven’t heard from you for over a year,” Wilde asked.
“I had a dream last night and then this morning I did something stupid.”
“What did you do?”
“I went for a run in my short shorts in a Muslim nation.”
“That is pretty stupid. And you aren’t dead?”
“Yeah, I guess that is the silver lining.”
“What was the dream about?”
“Marsha.”
That is all Wilde needed to know. That one-word Marsha. Wilde had been on that mission too, but he wasn’t with me. He was two miles north with a different ODA team clearing a cluster of 37 houses.
“Yeah, I dream about that one too,” Wilde confirmed. “Was it the old man again?”
I deflected, “I bet you do. I remember when you guys set off that one IED. We had no idea if you had tripped it or someone on your team or if you had set it off trying to disarm it. I just remember hearing the explosion and then looking west. The cloud from the detonation was already hanging in the air. It hung there for so long, just taunting me that it could be the aftermath of a friend's death. I was so glad to see you guys two days later when we got back.”
“We were glad to see you too. There was so much that happened on that mission. It's amazing that any of us made it out alive. Was the dream about the old man?” Wilde prodded again.
“Yes, when I woke up this morning I was sweating. I knew I had been dreaming about something, but I couldn’t remember what. So, I went for a run and the dream started coming back to me. Chief died in the dream.”
“But he didn’t in real life, right?”
“No, I don’t know where that came from. But then I realized all these people were staring at me while I was running in my ‘underwear.’ (I just used air quotes.)”
“I heard them.”
“So, I turned around and rushed back to my hotel room.”
“Wait, you are in a hotel. Where are you at?”
“Oh yeah, I didn't tell you. I am on a trip with the chapel. We are doing a tour of the Seven Churches of Revelation.”
“Wow! Really, that must be pretty amazing.”
“We will see. I expect it to be, but we have only been to Ephesus and that was amazing in and of itself. So, to get back to what happened. I was running back to my hotel room, and I was less than a block away when I ran into an Imam. I was back there on that roof in Afghanistan. And you know the story.”
“Was the battle damage assessment (BDA) in your dream?” Wilde asked.
I stood up and walked around my hotel room.
“Yeah, it was,” I said after a moment.
“What did you see?”
“We walked out there where he fell to collect the body, and when we walked around the corner there was a rotting corpse. He was lying face up. There was a large blood stain on his white man dress, but it had turned dark brown. His eyes were missing.”
“Wait, I don't need to know all the gory details. You did do a BDA in real life though, right?” Wilde asked.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t find anything right?”
“Yeah, that's right. Absolutely nothing, no blood trail, nothing.”
“Why do you think that you are obsessing about this operation?”
“I have shot two bullets in combat. One was that day. I watched the man fall.”
“But you didn’t kill him.”
“How do you know that?” I pleaded.
“Because you guys did a BDA and there was no body there and no blood trail,” Wilde explained.
“That doesn’t mean anything. He could have crawled away. Someone could have come and grabbed him.”
“Or he could have just tripped at the same time that you shot at him. You know how it is to get shot at. You hit the deck so quick that sometimes it seems like you are shot.”
“But he was a holy man, why did I shoot at him in the first place? He was unarmed.”
“You know what the ROE was for that mission. Plus, we do stupid things in the heat of battle. I understand why you are upset, but you need to stop beating yourself up over this one.”
“I know. Just when I ran into that guy today it all just came flooding back. I just feel this crushing feeling of regret and doubt and anger at myself for doing such a thing,” I explained.
“Remember what you talked to me about six months after we got home from that deployment, after Sergeant Chatwin was killed?”
Chatwin was a friend of ours and a EOD brother that was killed disarming an IED on our last deployment together. I had been on the call with him and helped put him in the body bag in the middle of a pomegranate orcarch and attached him to a hoist that pulled him up to a hover helicopter and never saw him again.
“Yeah, I do.”
“You said that you were in a bad place. That there was this wall between you and your wife. That there was nothing that could break it down that your heart was hard and hers was getting harder every day. And then you cut open the pomegranate and had your episode and all of this came spilling out all the pain and the hurt and the guilt and it wasn’t just over Chat it was over the mission on which Sergeant McDaniels was killed back in ‘07.”
McDaniels was a member of my security team. He had died when an IED hit his vehicle that was traveling behind us. I had tried to save him, but he was very badly burned and his vehicle was still on fire and grenades and bullets were blowing up inside of it. So, after checking his pulse a couple times and not finding anything I had to leave him there near his burning vehicle overnight until a medevac could come the next morning and remove him and the other four team members still in the vehicle.
Wilde continued, “but the one thing that you said to me was that if it wasn’t for the pain, you would have never turned to God. You were numbing yourself in some stupid ways. Trying to bury that pain and guilt so deep, but you realized that Jesus had already taken that pain and guilt to the cross with him years ago and there was nothing that you could do to earn that love. That is when it turned around for you and that is when it turned around for me too. Seeing how God was working in your life and in your marriage.
“I know you are being crushed again right now, but God is going to use that in those around you more than you could ever understand. Now get up and rest in the fact that you can’t do anything to earn God’s love and you cannot do anything to lose God’s love and you are loved more than you could ever think or imagine.” Wilde explained.
“Thanks man. I’ll try and take that in, but to be honest with you I think that it is going to take me a lifetime to just start comprehending God’s love. I am sharing today at the first church that we are going to, and I realized that there was no way that I was going to be able to share in the state that I was in. So, thanks for taking my call and letting me talk for a bit.”
“No, problem. What else are friends for than sharing burdens?”
“I need to get going. We are meeting in half-an-hour, and I am all sweaty from my run.”
“Alright, well it was good talking to you man. Tell me how fast did you run back to your hotel room. As I remember you were a quick runner under normal circumstances?” Wilde asked.
“Pretty fast. I was so embarrassed once I figured out what I had done. Well, I got to get going. Talk to you later.”
“Until next time my brother.”