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Myles Hunt, now a national service officer for the Disabled American Veterans’ St. Louis office, was a staff sergeant with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, U.S. Army.Myles Hunt enlisted in 1996, long before Iraq. “Hard times,” he explains. “It got me out of a bind.” He was 22, married, working as a welder in Carthage, Mo., but not making enough money to keep a roof over their heads. “What I expected? What I’d seen on TV: Full Metal Jacket,” he says. “But I joined the Army because the Marine Corps, I’d heard, were crazy. I didn’t want to be on a boat for six months at a time, the Air Force was too soft and the Coast Guard was closed.”
He spent the next six years training in tanks, gunning and reconnaissance. What amazed him was that he loved it. “I planned on being in the Army forever,” he says, his voice tight. “I was a career soldier.”
It was March 29, 2003, and Hunt and his fellow scouts were doing nighttime gunnery exercises in the field, outside Fort Polk, La., when the call came over the radio: Everybody go to the commander’s truck, now.
“He had a light stick, and he pulled out our orders and read them,” Hunt recalls. “‘In support of Operation Enduring Freedom …’” They were to ship out in three days. “I was a little scared, a little excited,” Hunt says. “It was the chance to finally do our jobs. And we were going into combat; that’s just a rush in itself.” He pauses. “Besides, I had 14 guys under me I had to take care of; I had to be excited for their sake.”
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Nobody slept much that night or the next, he says. “We had to have everything ready to put on a bird and go to Iraq. We were a rapid deployment unit: boots on the ground in 72 hours. We landed in Kuwait and convoyed over to the berm that separates Kuwait and Iraq. The chaplain pulled everybody in, we all prayed. Then we went into Iraq—came in behind the Marines and flanked off towards Sadr City.
“My driver was playing ‘Highway to Hell’ through portable speakers, and I had seven years of training cycling through my mind. I kept running scenarios: If you are coming up to a building and somebody jumps out with a rocket-propelled grenade … if someone jumps from a rooftop and starts shouting … if my gunner is hit … I was taking everything in, absorbing my surroundings. Complacency kills.”
Promoted on Iraq soil to staff sergeant, Hunt served as a section sergeant and truck commander. That meant he was in charge in June 2003, when he led a convoy down what they called IED Alley. “A National Guard girl’s truck hit a mine, and it blew her up pretty bad,” he says. “I jumped on the radio, relayed a med evac, told my regiment to set up security, waved on the other big trucks. They just put the hammer down and got out of there, scared to death.
“We got her out of the truck, and I had to cut her britches and belt off, just picked up my bayonet and did it. There was a big hunk of metal sticking out of her backside, probably shrapnel from the mine. I put an IV on her immediately, had my driver holding the bag up. The medic came, saw the blood and froze.” Hunt snapped at him to pull himself together, reached into the medic’s frag vest for scissors and a bandage, and cut a slot around the shrapnel, because tugging it out would have done more damage.
“Last I heard, she was paralyzed but alive, and they weren’t sure if the paralysis was temporary or permanent.”
Hunt received a commendation for valor and returned to his charge: “winning hearts and minds, and all that crap.” What worked, he says, never made the news: He and his squad cleared schools where Saddam had stockpiled ammunition and made them safe for the children to return. Meanwhile, the unit interpreter was going into the city to listen to the prayers: “Half the time it’d be ‘We kill Americans on Wednesday,’” Hunt says. “But we got Sadr City under control.”
In September, they were sent out into the desert, to what they dubbed Camp Bohica (“Bend over, here it comes again”). “No shade, unexploded ordnance all around us. We slept in or on our trucks, and we had to eat MREs. They are in little packets with self-contained heaters.” Heaters? In temperatures that reached 146 degrees Fahrenheit, wearing uniforms streaked white with the salt of their sweat? “If you don’t heat it, you just pull the whole meal out in a clump,” he says with a shrug.
One day Hunt saw a truck with “Missouri Boys” painted on the side: The Missouri National Guard had arrived, with cots and air conditioning. Still giddy at the luck, Hunt left one morning to lead 10 trucks of engineers to Baghdad International Airport. The route took him back down IED Alley for probably the hundredth time.
“We were in first-generation Humvees, and they were pieces of crap. If you were getting shot at, and we got shot at all the time, you couldn’t get out. So we had our doors off,” he says. “It was me, my driver and my gunner. I’m scanning, and then I look over my shoulder and see my driver trying to light a cigarette. Oh hell no. I mean, I’ve got no problem with them smoking—sure, we had three cases of C-4 plastic explosives and 13 cans of grenades, but you’re in Baghdad, smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. Still, we were on IED Alley; he should have been concentrating on driving. I smack him in the back of his head and take his cigarette: ‘You watch the road; I’ll light your cigarette.’ I leaned over and lit it, and both of our hands were on the cigarette when the explosion ripped my left thumb off and a piece of shrapnel sheared his face. The force blew me out of the truck. I woke up 30, 45 seconds later hanging over a guard rail, covered in my driver’s blood.”
Training kicked in: He froze, listening for a follow-up attack. Then he realized the explosion had come from an IED. (It was a 122-millimeter artillery round about 18 inches long.)
“I took my helmet off, thinking, ‘Man, it kinda hurts.’ I let it fall, and it started filling up with blood. I thought, ‘I gotta stand up.’ I put my helmet back on, went to button my strap and realized my thumb was gone.
“I look up, and my driver’s laid out in the road. Between the adrenaline and the need to get to him, I was feeling no pain. I knew I was bleeding, but I didn’t know half my face was missing. The engineers were there by then, working on me. I was trying to get them off so I could get to my driver, so they tackled me.
“They had a bird on the ground in 15 minutes. That saved my driver and probably me, too; there was cerebral fluid leaking from my head into my eye socket. If you lose enough of it, you go brain-dead.” Hunt had 17 fractures in his skull and another 12 in his face. “When the helicopter arrived, I still had no clue where my gunner was. They put me on the helicopter—I’m looking around still, trying to find my guys—and then they put my driver beside me and my gunner above him. They don’t put the dead on with the wounded, so I knew they were alive. Then I went into shock.
“I woke up in the Baghdad field hospital. There were pieces of my eye left, they had to go in and finish digging those out. A day later they gave me my Purple Heart—my entire chain of command drove an hour to present it—and that’s when it sank in. My biggest fear was, ‘Am I going to be put out of the Army for this?’ And it came true. I appealed their decision, qualified my weapon left-handed, took the fitness test, did everything a soldier’s supposed to do. But it’s all about my job position: Could I perform the duties of a scout? You have regulations if you are missing so much of a finger or an eye.”
Hunt had nine surgeries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He points to the corner of his eye: “This bone’s out of my hip. This piece right here that holds my eye in is out of the roof of my mouth. This square graft is from behind my ears. I’ve got six titanium plates in my head.
“Nowadays they are keeping us in, guys in my shoes, but I was wounded in ’03. If I were doing anything but what I’m doing right now [helping veterans with disabilities], I probably would have tried to reenlist. I went from Walter Reed to Fort Polk, back in uniform for seven or eight months until I got put out. I was going to wear that uniform as long as I could.”
Hunt has a surprisingly mild case of traumatic brain injury—or TBI—which is considered the “signature injury” of this war. (See “The Brain & the Battlefield” story in this issue.) His theory is that the skull fractures and leaking cerebral fluid saved him from a more severe case by relieving the pressure on the brain. He has some memory loss; nothing he can’t cope with. He has PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder: “My wife kind of opened my eye to it,” he says, looking away. “I still scan rooftops. Things in the road—debris, tires—that makes me nervous. Driving—you have to obey the traffic laws, and we didn’t. I’ve got anger issues, but they’re controllable. Nightmares, yeah, but it’s nothing I really want on paper.
“The one big thing that helps me is just talking about it. But I don’t tell the details of the brain matter all over the car, just that I had to shoot this guy or that guy. Some things were just so horrifying that guys can only relive them involuntarily, by themselves. Nobody wants to remember that crap.”
Yet he’s wearing a metal bracelet so he won’t forget a buddy from another unit.
“Staff Sgt. Christopher Swisher, bullet to the brain,” he recites. “Hasn’t been off my wrist in three years.”
