A War Remembered

DG: 46 year old Tim Ferrell sits at the kitchen table in the condo he shares with his parents in Hooksett, New Hampshire.

When you first meet him you think, ‘well put together middle aged guy’ in a plaid shirt and khakis kind of way.

But there’s also something that’s not quite right.

Tim’s remembering his first day home from Afghanistan; the moment he came through the door.

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TF: :13 and I thought to myself, things haven’t changed at all.

But somehow everything was different.

He grabbed a beer, and another and another....

(2)
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Tim Ferrell (TF): 2:32 and was a little bit tipsy. And then I went up to bed.

(3)
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TF: 3:26...and I got up the next morning, and I didn’t do a thing all day. I pretty much stayed in the room. b/c what I was most afraid of was that someone would ask me, ‘what was it like in A.?’

DG: For the next year Tim burrowed in.

When he did leave, it was just to bring his new best friend- a six pack- back up to his bedroom.

His mother Sarah didn’t like what was going on.

(9)
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SF: 2:41 it was very upsetting to see him get so heavy, and really fat. In such a short time. but I ddin’t want to tell him that I thought he looked kind of dumpy.

(8)
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SF: 1:58...he just didn’t care about how his body was going to pieces.

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SF: 8:29 I said, ‘T, I just love you, I want to help you, but I don’t know how to help you...And he ‘oh, there is nothing you can do. I don’t have any problems.’

(10)
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TF: 8:11the aggression. If it turns outward, we call that anger, when it turns inward, we call that depression. I let it all turn inward.

(11a)
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SF: 8:37... I thought he might hurt himself...kill himself really.

DG: After a year of this, Sarah finally decided to take charge.

She shoved him out the door to the Vet Center for counseling.

There, they got him to stop drinking.

They got him on Zoloft for depression.

They even got him to go to group therapy.

Tim slowly rejoined the rest of the world.

He now works for the Vet Center, trying to help other struggling veterans.

That would be a nice end to the story.

DG: But, Tim says, he still can’t shake Afghanistan.

And part of the reason is that a part of him loved being over there: a soldier in the middle of the action.

Go back 15 years, at 33 Tim didn’t know what he wanted to do.

Office jobs, computer jobs, in and out of school, none of it clicked.

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TF: 3:54...I was, as my mother would say, a late bloomer.

DG: Then Tim enlisted in the New Hampshire National Guard.

Even he was surprised at how almost from the start he had found an aspiration; really, an identity.

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TF: 5:43...I wanted to see if I had those qualities that make a good soldier and a good person, the loyalty, the duty, the honor.

DG: He volunteered for Afghanistan.

Excited, he started fantasizing about the new, the improved Tim Ferrell.

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TF: 1:50 John Wayne movies, that whole persona, the whole myth subconsciously is a very powerful thing. I wanted to be John Wayne. I knew it was silly, but I wanted that tickertape parade down 5th Avenue b/c Sgt. Ferrell had saved America yet again.

DG: And it all seemed like it was coming true.

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TF: 1:00...it had that sense of superiority. it’s hard not to with all the toys the Army gives you. The night vision and the optical scopes and the M-4 carbine...and you go to a Third World country, you are almost, almost a Superman.

DG: He saw some action, firefights, riots, he was ok.

But then mid-way into his tour, Tim stopped emailing.

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SF: 12:55 ...It was the only time he was gone I got nervous. I just had an awful feeling that something had happened.

DG: In early February 2005, a civilian airliner had accidentally crashed in the mountains about 20 miles southeast of Kabul.

Tim’s unit had been ordered to retrieve the bodies.

(27)
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SF: 14:23 there just couldn’t have been one thing good about that trip up there.

(28)
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TF: :09 ...We were airlifted to the bottom of the mountain and had to climb up b/c the aircraft couldn’t reach that elevation.

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TF: 1:33 you can see the top of the mountain. It’s a place that we came to call the boomerang. And that’s where the plane had crashed.

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TF: 5:54 my job is to take pictures of the deceased for future identification.

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TF: 2:24...as we get to the top we see some of the A. national soldiers.

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TF: 3:28 ...they put the bodies in the bag, and it’s so steep they can’t take them down one at a time so they throw them down the side of the mountain. And they fall like an avalanche.

(35)
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TF: 16:53 I am looking up, I am walking up and I am out of breath b/c of the elevation. And the path that winds up goes to a cleft of two big rocks, and in those two rocks is the upper torso of a woman.

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TF: 13:41 I am coming to the woman now...

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TF: 7:45 she’s older. Probably middle aged. Black hair, strong nose, wide lips. And inches away her body is just torn apart, just pieces left. We can’t find all the pieces to put into the bag.

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TF: 23:19...and I get up close to take that picture.

(41)
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TF: 24:57 I look down the length of the body bag... I try to name the vertebrae, the different parts of the body...b/c it’s easier to think of it that way.

DG: Coming off the mountain Tim just felt glad to be alive.

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TF: :10.... It finally made real for me just how fragile life really is. It’s not a thing we can take granted.

DG: And that thought punctured the whole John Wayne myth.

But he had invested so much into being a soldier he desperately wanted to prove to himself that he could do the job.

Over the final six months of his tour, he felt a growing distance between the soldier he wanted to be and the person he was.

It left him empty.

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TF: 28:00...on that plane ride home from A. things were different Everyone was so happy and jubuliant, practically dancing down the aisle of the plane. And I didn’t feel happy at all.

DG: Tim’s mother Sarah grabs a photograph of Tim taken from the top of the mountain.

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SF: 13:32.... He is just standing looking into the camera. I can’t tell if he is smiling or grimacing really to tell you the truth.

Stuck between smiling and grimacing is a pretty good way to describe Tim Ferrell for the two years since he’s been back from Afghanistan.

On the surface life is going pretty well.

(52)
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TF: 2:51...when I want to be, I can dress really nice. hold a good job, go to school.

At the same time he’s always thinking about Afghanistan.

He thinks he probably killed people over there.

And he wonders if he’s going to go to heaven.

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TF: 8:27 ...They are funny thoughts, but I think about them constantly. Can I still be a good person?

DG: But maybe what gnaws at Tim the most is the sense that he did his duty but didn’t become who he wanted to be.

His dreams of being back on that mountain top the ambiguity of war, the constant dread he felt for 12 months.

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TF: 20:00...not being able to put this aside, diminishes me....as a good soldier I should be able to drive on, to do what I need to do and to get it done, and yet I am held back by these memories. And it makes me question just what kind of hero I am...this is not the way John Wayne always ended his movies.

DG: Tim is getting his Masters in social work.

He says today is better than yesterday.

And tomorrow he’ll be back at work trying to help other veterans.

For NPR News, I’m DG in Concord, NH.