Soldier on journey of healing
SAN DIEGO — “It was just another day in Mosul,” the soldier began, his voice shaking. Sgt. 1st Class Marshall Powell took a deep breath. He couldn’t look at the other three servicemen in the group therapy session.
He’d rarely spoken about his secret, the story of the little girl who wound up in his hospital during the war in Iraq, where he served as an Army nurse. Her chest had been blown apart, and her brown eyes implored him for help. Whenever he’d thought of her since, “I killed the girl,” echoed in his head.
He recalled the chaos after a bombing that August day in 2007, the vehicles roaring up with Iraqi civilians covered in blood. Around midnight, Powell took charge of the area housing those with little chance of survival. There, amid the mangled bodies, he saw her.
She was tiny, maybe 6 years old, lying on the floor. Her angelic face reminded him of his niece back home in Oklahoma.
Back in the therapy room, saying it all out loud, Powell’s eyes began to fill just at the memory of her. “I couldn’t let her lay there and suffer,” he said.
A doctor had filled a syringe with painkillers. Powell pushed dose after dose into her IV.
“She smiled at me,” he told the others in the room, “and I smiled back. Then she took her last gasp of air.”
Souls in anguish is how some experts describe this psychological scar of war now being identified as “moral injury.”
Unlike post-traumatic stress disorder, which is based on fear from feeling one’s life threatened, moral injury produces guilt and shame from something done or witnessed that goes against one’s values or may even be a crime.
While the idea of warriors feeling remorse over battlefield horrors is not new, moral injury has gained more attention following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as mental health providers point to it as a reason why veterans aren’t improving with PTSD treatments.
Powell was honorably discharged from the Army last August, and found work as a nurse at a home for the elderly in Crescent, but he realized he no longer had it in him to do the job he once loved. He quit and is pursuing a degree in industrial engineering.
He spends much of his time on his farmland, in his family since his great-greatgrandmother arrived in Oklahoma to start a new life after being freed as a slave. Sometimes, he talks to God as he clears the brush around the walnut trees.
“I feel peace, redemption when I talk to him out there,” he says. “I know he forgives me.”