I said I wanted to share some of the past along the way, but figuring out where to begin is harder than I thought. Nearly 14 years have passed, and so much life has happened since then. We’re very much focused on where we are now and where we’re going, but so much of what’s happening now leads back to one day in December 2012.
So, as strange as it feels to go all the way back to the beginning, I think that’s where I need to start.
In some ways, the beginning is also the end.
December 2012 wasn’t the end of the world like some predicted from the Mayan calendar, but it did mark the end of a young, carefree chapter of my life. Looking back, I know some of that was probably naivety, but something changed after that. I don’t think I fully understood it at the time, and I can’t really explain it now without telling the story of how we got here.
This is the version of the story I’ve told myself, and others, all these years, but this is my first time trying to put it in writing. There are so many bits and pieces I’ve learned over time, but I think I should save those for later because this is the version I carried with me for so long.
The G-rated version.
I’ve always thought of it as a war story, but at the time, I don’t think I really saw it that way. This was Jeff’s job, and deployments had become such a normal part of our lives that even things most people would consider out of the ordinary didn’t always feel that way to us.
There was also a lot I didn’t know—and wasn’t supposed to know. Operational security was simply part of that life. It wasn’t like Jeff could call home and tell me exactly what they were doing or where they were going. I knew the general rhythm of his deployments, but there were plenty of details we couldn’t talk about until he was home, if we ever talked about them at all.
Jeff was part of 3rd Ranger Battalion, an elite special operations unit. Jeff and I were married in 2010, and at that time Rangers were constantly deploying. He left for his ninth deployment on our oldest daughter’s first birthday in October 2012.
As far as I knew, there was nothing about this deployment that felt particularly different from the others.
I knew Rangers typically carried out missions during the evening hours and slept during the day. It was early morning, just before the sun came up, on December 2nd. Jeff’s day was winding down when they felt their FOB get rocked by an explosion. We later learned it was the first of three VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices).
Jeff was a sniper at the time, so he threw his kit and helmet on, grabbed his sniper rifle, and went to where he could be of use. After assessing the situation from a nearby rooftop, Jeff and his sniper partner determined the best place for them was a guard tower on the perimeter.
Once they arrived, they positioned themselves on the exterior portion of the tower and got a rundown from the people already there, who I understood to be a group of National Guardsmen from a separate unit.
There were gunmen actively on the ground at this point, so I assume the snipers were doing whatever snipers do. (G-rated, remember?)
They noticed a truck parked directly in front of where they were in the guard tower and asked the Guardsmen about it. Jeff was told they had fired a few rounds into it and nothing happened, so they didn’t believe it was a VBIED. It was almost immediately after receiving that information, before they had time to think about it, that the truck directly in front of them exploded.
Jeff has always said he remembers seeing the orange blast coming toward him before he was thrown backward into what we always believed was a wall.
This is where the events get a little fuzzy.
Jeff doesn’t know whether he lost consciousness or, if he did, for how long. He does remember getting up before eventually being put onto a Skedco stretcher and dragged to the medics.
Until recently—and I mean less than a week ago recently—I really didn’t know what took place between that moment and the phone call I received from Jeff. For nearly 14 years, that little gap in the story was just that—a gap. I knew Jeff had been injured, I knew he made it to the medics, and that was where the story stopped for me.
There are really two sides to what happened that night. There’s what was happening to Jeff in Afghanistan, where it was already December 2nd, and there’s what was happening back home, where it was still December 1st and I had absolutely no idea any of this was happening.
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