First Lieutenant Brie Zeiger tried to stifle her fear as the C-130 transport plane she was riding in began its descent toward Forward Operating Base Salerno in a hostile region of Afghanistan. The base was attacked so often that the soldiers nicknamed it "Rocket City." Just three months earlier, in June 2012, insurgents had detonated a truck bomb and invaded the base, killing two Americans. As the plane approached the runway, Zeiger heard an odd sound, like pellets smacking a metal target at a fairground shooting game. This was normal, the crew told her, just incoming fire from the Taliban.
Zeiger, then 26, was a nurse in a small surgical unit there. At night, the faintest whir of helicopter blades would jolt her from bed; wounded were on the way. She loved the challenge of the work, the rush of making life-or-death decisions. "I felt like I was doing exactly what I was meant to do," she says. But in time, she was numbed by the relentless stream of injured soldiers. One soldier arrived riddled with shrapnel from an improvised explosive device. The medical team tried to keep him alive by pumping air in and out of his lungs. Zeiger remembers looking into his eyes, digging through his bloody clothes to find his dog tags, then watching the 23-year-old pass away. "There is something about seeing a soldier die that changes you," she says.
Her nine-month deployment was so profound and complex that when she returned home, she struggled to talk about it. "How do you explain that your normal day is seeing limbs blown off, the way it looks and smells?" she says. "How do I explain how that changed me for the rest of my life?" The few times she tried to talk with her father about the war, they argued. She grew resentful. Civilians could never understand what she'd experienced, she thought, so she kept quiet.
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