Tomas Young's War by Mark Wilkerson

Author:Mark Wilkerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-651-1
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, Nathan Young was nearing the end of his twelve-month rotation in Iraq, based in Taji, about twenty miles from Sadr City, north of Baghdad. Although he was an artilleryman by trade, Tomas’s younger brother spent the entire year working more in the role of infantryman, providing convoy security on treks all across the country.

It was a stressful, chaotic deployment. Nathan recalled one particularly harrowing moment when his convoy rolled out of the gate and immediately struck an IED. He watched in horror as the convoy’s lead vehicle—normally the position his truck occupied—was rocked by an explosion and quickly became engulfed in flames, exacerbated by a five-gallon can of diesel fuel in the truck’s bed. “We thought the crew was still inside the truck; we thought they were done,” he said.

Somehow, the crew escaped the fire and survived. Memories of the explosion and other similarly chaotic events wore heavily on Nathan. When it was time to come home, he chose to decompress at his brother’s house. Tomas had plenty of room and enjoyed the company. “I went on thirty days’ leave and actually I spent pretty much the whole thirty days at his house,” Nathan said. He was impressed with how his brother was faring—“I thought he was doing pretty good; he was getting around on his own,” he recalled. Tomas had moved his bed out to the living room and the pair hung out there together, talking and playing video games. “About the whole thirty days I did that,” Nathan said.

In late 2006, not long after Nathan had returned to Fort Campbell, Tomas once again found himself with a roommate. Riley Soden had been a regular visitor since being discharged from the Army in early 2005 and was looking for somewhere to live in north Kansas City. Tomas had a spare room and enjoyed the company of his good friend. “We wanted to hang out more together,” said Soden, “and he kind of needed me to help him with some things. A lot of things he took care of himself, but with a little extra help and somebody that had been through the military with him, I just think it was a good fit.”

Soden wanted to help his friend remain engaged in as active and full a life as possible. Admitting that “it definitely was a difficult moment when I first saw him” after the injury, Soden said that “pretty quickly I kind of realized that this is reality, and this is what we’re going to deal with, and so I’ve done my best over the years to try to make him feel as adjusted to how he used to be, you know, when he could walk, as I could. . . . I kind of said, we’re still going to live our lives and do the best we can with what we’ve got. And when Tomas and I lived together and hung out together a lot, we did a lot of traveling and seeing music and trying to go out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.