The Moment That Broke His Memory | The Long Road Home 360
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I don't think I've been just Carl since that day. PTSD to me is not a disorder; that is a reasonable reaction to something traumatic that you have been through.
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Looking back, we were also green; we had no idea what we were doing. SolarCity was one of the loudest places I've ever been; everything was trying to sell your eardrums. And then you blinked, they all disappeared. I just knew as soon as all those people scattered that we were in trouble. In that moment, my heart sank.
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Then, the first crack at the bullet that goes well; everything changed in that one instant. My brain couldn't process everything that was going on. I just lifted up that machine gun and squeezed that trigger. That's the first time I took a human life.
The super vivid details of everything kind of fade out, and then like somebody just turned the lights out. I'll just have a blank spot; like there's nothing there, and my brain is saying, "No, that didn't happen. You weren't even there." But every now and again, my brain gives me pieces of stuff, and it always starts out the same way.
Oh, I'll have a dream one night; I get like a fuzzy image of something in it. It may only be something as quick as, you know, me walking down out of that alleyway, and one, I'll wake up. I have to think, was that a memory or a dream? Most people would just want to forget what happened, but these are the moments that defined my life. Until I can remember all this stuff, it's like a piece of me is missing, and I need that piece back.
One in particular, from my vantage point on the first roof that I was on, I can remember hearing people talking. The voices were so close they could throw a grenade onto the rooftop; they were wrong.
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And I was about to fire that 40 mic. It was six civilians—four women and just a couple little kids. There was a man who was probably in his 30s. We locked eyes; there was emotion—there's fear, hate, there's love. He knew that I was about to destroy everything that he cared about, and he was just trying to protect them.
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We never talked; I never saw him again, that I know of. But me and him had more of a bond than people who I've known my whole life. There's one thing I can look back on that day and be happy about—it's that moment. And if it had gone just a little bit differently, I don't know if I ever would have been able to, you know, to live with the things that happened that day. It lets me know that I wasn't just killing people aimlessly.
I might not be Carl anymore, but I know that I'm not a monster.
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