BONUS EPISODE: The Key

Find out how host Courtney answered the question, who is God to me? This bonus episode covers the time she was deployed to Afghanistan as a Corpsman. This episode does contain depictions of violence especially related to war time casualty and may not be suitable for all listeners. Please use discretion.

Transcript

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welcome to the Unrevealed podcast on your host, Courtney Haggard. And as you can see by the title, this is a special bonus episode. As I was praying over this podcast, I felt like the Lord was calling me to create a series of additional episodes outside of our usual release schedule during this time of social distancing. As soon as I ask God what those episodes would be about, I immediately heard him ask me to share my story. So today, and in future bonus episodes, I will be the host and the guest. I'll be sharing bits of my story with you from various seasons of my life. It was spoken over me at a Presbyterian last year that God is calling me to tell more of my testimony. I've never been really good at sharing my story or giving out details about my life. So what better time than now to start doing that? So buckle up, get ready and let's jump right in. Today's episode does contain depictions of violence, especially related toe wartime casualty, and may not be suitable for all listeners. Please use discretion a part of my story that many people do not know about me is that I was active duty for five years. From 2006 to 2011 I was in the Navy as a Corpsman. Corpsman is very similar to a medic, although we would never call ourselves medics. That's the best way to describe our role to those of you who are not familiar with military terminology. No, I didn't have your typical Navy experience because I was never on a ship. Instead, I was stationed on Marine Corps bases, and while I spent most of my time in military hospitals and emergency rooms in 2009 I was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan. This part of my story is extremely hard to share and, to be honest with you, very few people in my life and know this about me. And while I can't share every memory or peek into each start corner, I am going to be sharing some really hard details more than I've ever shared before. I'm going to do this because I need you to understand just how hard that season of my life really Was to fully understand the goodness of God in my life. When we arrived in Kandahar. It was late June, and by early July I remember the one thing that they kept telling us was this time, while we were there, it was becoming one of the deadliest times in Afghanistan. We would hear this over and over again as we were being processed and assigned positions. Our facility was called the Role three. So unlike civilian hospitals, where a tier one is the nicest and most advanced you can get, military hospitals downrange are ranked backwards. A roll one would be like your basic care that you can get immediately. For example, if you broke your leg, the Corman on the ground with you could splint it and care for you until you could be transferred to ah, higher level facility. A role, too, is a lot like a first aid station or an urgent care, and the roll three had a trauma center. This had emergency surgery capabilities, along with a place where we could keep patients in what would be considered kind of like an ICU,  it really wasn't up to civilian standards is in ICU. But we did keep patient there while they were waiting to be transferred to Germany, so the role three is the highest level of care that you can get in Afghanistan. This meant that any time someone was injured beyond what the unit could handle, they were sent to us all day. Every day we received requests for help on something called a nine line. Basically, this provides nine bits of vital information when injury occurs. Our Tactical Operations center, also called the TOK, would work with the Air Force and the Army units to dispatch helicopters to go retrieve the patients and bring them back to us. One of my jobs was to lead the crew that went to the flight line in a Humvee to get the patient from the hell Oh, and bring them back to the roll three. In some cases, we knew what was coming in, but in most cases the information was pretty slim, and we had to act on what we got in the moment. I remember one thing that we would always look for was how the hell it was flying. If they were coming in fast and erratic, we knew that it wasn't good. Usually those patients were either already CPR in progress or they were crashing really quickly. We would run up to the hero with a stretcher, get the patient and then return back to the Humvee as quickly as possible, assuming whatever care was needed. Then we took them back to the trauma center, and we treated them as best as we could. During my time there I was part of an experienced things that are unimaginable some of the most intimate moments of solidarity to the most disgusting and horrific acts humans can inflict on one another. I remember so much more than what I can share here, some of it good, but most of it not course I don't really have time to go into every single detail, although I will share some of the most vivid memories that I have to help you get a look into what my life look like during that time. Occasionally, I re read my journal from that time, and I am in all of how often and how normally I wrote about people losing two, three or all four of their limbs. I think back to the patients that I performed CPR on knowing full well that they were already gone, but I wasn't allowed to stop until a doctor could call the time of death. I think of the base being attacked so regularly that life just went on as if it was normal. I think back to days like the 16th of September, when we treated an 18 year old soldier who ultimately died of his wounds in one day. And as his last rites were being read to him in the next bay over, the 16 year old Taliban soldier that killed him was laughing. I remember how angry I was that we even had to treat the Taliban soldier at all, let alone as we prepared the U. S. Soldier that he killed to be sent home for burial. I think of the next day on the 17th when we got the call telling anyone who had type a positive blood to come in and give blood immediately. It needed to be given to Eric, a 26 year old soldier who came to us during a mass casualty. He had lost three of his limbs, including his entire lower half of his body. I remember watching the blood flow from the bag with my name on it and go into his body. And then I watched as the blood left his body through the wounds that were too big to stop the hemorrhage. I watched as his soul left this earth. I think about the time that six helicopters landed without any notice, bringing the remains of countless US service personnel, some of them recognizable as human and some of them non. And I remember going into a debriefing meeting immediately after that call as we attempted to reconcile the horror of what we had just experienced with the fact that we didn't have the luxury of processing what we had just experienced or how we felt because another helicopter was already on the way. I remember being 20 years old and laughing about the fact that the Humvees that we were driving we're older than all of us, and I remember choosing to become numb. And then suddenly, after six months of nonstop tragedy, our time was up and we were told you were coming home. We finally had a date set that we would be back in the United States. It was January 5th, my second wedding anniversary. I remember coming home and flinching when I was touched and missing the people I was deployed with. I remember not knowing how to express to Justin my husband, that I still loved him. But I was having a hard time accessing and expressing that love. I struggled to cope with the fact that I was suddenly thrust right back into my very normal life, surrounded by people who had no idea what I had just lived through for half of a year. It took me some time to realize that I wasn't really feeling any emotions. Well, except for anger. I was really angry. I was angry that there were people still over there in Afghanistan. I was angry that I wasn't there to help. I was angry that the people around me didn't understand. And I was angry that everything else in my life felt completely meaningless and trivial compared to the life and death emergencies that I had become accustomed to every day. I didn't want to go back because honestly, it was hell on Earth. But I didn't want to be safe in my normal life either. I knew I was not in a healthy mental state, so I went to get help. I went to a counselor and they helped me walk through a lot of what I was experiencing and helped me to better understand what I was going through. And with counseling in some time passing, I was able to eventually adjust to the fact that this was just a part of my life that in all likelihood was something that would remain in my past and that a majority of people in my life would never understand. Years passed, and in late 2011 Justin and I left the military and moved Oklahoma. We got plugged into a church, and in a very short time our lives were transformed. My husband grew up in church, but he never really knew God on a personal level. And I was completely new to the things of God. I was introduced to Jesus and our lives radically changed. We were now these churchgoing Christian civilians in a new state with a future ahead of us, and year by year, the old life fell away and we began to build a new life with Jesus as our foundation. One day about a year ago, our church did a young communicators weekend. This is where three of our really talented young speakers each gave a 10 minute sermon on this question. Who is God to you? He was their healer and their encourager and their new identity. And while all of those things resonate with me deeply, I knew that wasn't the answer for me to that question. I started to ask myself, who is God to me personally? And as I sat there praying and asking, God, who are you? To me, personally, God brought this analogy I had used in the past to my mind, one that I used to explain to people how I survived what we did in Afghanistan. At some point, I had made the choice, whether consciously or not, to compartmentalize everything I was feeling toe lock up all my feelings into a little box somewhere in the back of my mind, and to keep them there with a problem with that is, you don't just get to lock up the hard and scary and dark feelings when you make that choice. It's an all or nothing kind of thing. And like the traumatic events that forced me to put everything in that little box You don't just get to say okay, I'm done with the box. I'd like my happy feelings back. You need something equally powerful to redeem that you need a healing like you've never experienced before. And you need someone to help you appropriately navigate and process all of the hard stuff if you ever want to get the goods back. As I was sitting there praying and God brought that analogy back to me I knew immediately who got was to me. He was the key to that box. I had locked it away and shoved it deep down. And he was the one to help me open it back up and get those parts of myself back If you've ever heard that song by Rita Springer When I thought I lost me you knew where I left me You re introduced me to your love. You picked up all my pieces and put me back together. That is such a perfect description. That revelation He was the key. He was the one that put me back together. He was my maker and he was my re maker. Now I can't stand here and say that every day is perfect and that I never struggle, even though it has been almost a decade, there are still times when that season of my life affects me. My whole life, I've been really self sufficient. It has always been hard for me to trust people to come through when they say they will. It's easier for me to do it all by myself than it is for me to rely on others. But in that season I closed everyone out and I became the only person in the room of my life. I didn't know how to let people in, and I still struggle with that. Sometimes when I'm scared, it's extremely enticing for me to draw back and to internalize 10 dumb and to cope by not coping and to put things in that little box and choose not to feel. But I also know how damaging and costly it is for me to make that choice. For me, letting people in is hard, trusting others is hard. Relying on someone else is hard, but I also know that it's incredibly rewarding. We were never designed to do this life alone. I've learned that when I choose to trust and choose to be vulnerable. It brings the strength of my life that I otherwise would never be able to experience. If you never knew me back then. That season of my life probably looks pretty unrecognizable in my life. Now I have friends who laugh and tease at how easily something moves me and makes me tear up, and I laughed with them. But I also know that it's a gentle reminder of how deeply I can feel and how I can access that part of myself that used to be engulfed in a void. It reminds me that even the little things are worth feeling and experiencing fully, it shows me that when you let got in, he can restore parts of your life that seemed lost forever. If you're listening today and any of this has touched on something familiar to you, I cannot stress to you enough that no matter how alone you feel in that room that you've locked yourself in, I promise you you're not alone. Even if there isn't a single person in your life that you can trust, I promise you God never left you alone. He was right there with you. He wasn't scared off by your doubt where your anger or your pain or you're hurt or anything you've ever done or experienced. He chose you and he keeps choosing you. So the choice is yours. Will you choose him?