Losing An Arm in Iraq: SPC Danielle Green

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Specialist Danielle Green. Green served in Iraq in the Military Police Corps as a gunner until she was hit by a homemade RPG. She lost her left hand and forearm in the blast.

Danielle Green:

Well, I enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 25. I went enlisted instead of the natural progression of maybe becoming an officer since I already had a degree in everything, decided to go military police officer, so I enlisted in what? 2000... The time is flying by. 2003.

People who know me, they know that I always wanted to join the military, since I was at the age of seven when I watched those commercials, those military commercials, The Few, The Proud, The Marines, be all you can be. And as a kid, I wanted to be all I could be, but I also had a talent. I became very talented at the game of basketball, so I received a scholarship to go off and play at the University of Notre Dame, so I did that first, but the military just never left my system. In high school, I was a part of Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Prior to leaving the University of Notre Dame, I did talk to some Air Force recruiters, I believe that was in 1999, and sat down and talked to them about possible opportunities. And at the time, I had seriously considered becoming an officer in the Air Force, but I wanted to experience a little bit of what it would be like just to fly on my own. My career was over with, so I became a school teacher for a couple of years and taught high school basketball, but then 9/11 hit, and I thought about joining then, but I was just starting my teaching career,, I had just enrolled in graduate school, so I just wasn't ready to leave the education field.

But then a year later, I just felt that strong impulse, I call it an existential crisis where you're going through this identity crisis, now you're not part of a team and your biological clock is ticking a little bit. Now I'm 25 going on 26, so I said, "If you don't do this now, if you don't enlist in the military now, when are you going to do it?" And I knew war was looming, but that was the chance I was willing to take to reach one of my dreams of serving my country.

And I went the enlisted route because I knew we were going to war. And just because you have a degree doesn't make you equipped to automatically be a leader and lead human beings into war. And so I felt like I wasn't starting at the bottom as a private but enlisted I was still getting a feel for what it might be like to become a non-commissioned officer. So the goal was to enlist, become a non-commissioned officer, and then eventually go to officer candidate school where I eventually could become an officer. So when I became an officer, the whole goal was to be able to empathize and work with those soldiers below me instead of vice versa.

I enlisted as an E-4, so that's what I came in as an E-4. That's just one step before you become a non-commissioned officer. So we deployed to Iraq in January of 2004. So I was attached or I was with the 571st Military Police Corps out of Fort Lewis, Washington. And I deployed as a gunner for my company commander, so I was that individual who had mastery over all the weapons systems, and half my body sat inside the Humvee and the other half set out. But we had armor though, we had good armor, and that's what I deployed as is the company commander's gunner.

So when we received orders, it was October of 2003, it was a sense of dread only because I had witnessed soldiers that were part of the initial invasion and they didn't come back looking right. They had that thousand yard glare in their eyes and they drank a lot and they always got in trouble. And at the time, as I think about it now, they was obviously struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn't know what was wrong with them then, but all they kept saying, these other soldiers that came back, "You don't want to go over there. You don't want to go over there." They were stuck in their gas mask, they was just always on call, just always edgy. So seeing these people come back from the initial invasion, it's like, "I don't want to come back like that."

And so I was scared and, oh my goodness, man, I just remember a ton of people was always getting sick trying to get out the military, because they didn't want to go, but I realized that unlike our Vietnam veterans I was not drafted. I volunteered to sign up and serve my country. So I had to rest assured that with the proper training, which we had plenty of training, and my faith, that I could do a good job and come back whole, because those soldiers didn't come back whole. So there was fear initially, but once you had boots on ground in Kuwait, because you went from the US to Kuwait, it was like all my fear just dissipated and I just had to rely on my brothers and sisters to my left and right.

I remember when we landed, it was cold there, and so you don't think about that part of the world as being cold, but it was chilly there. And I read an article how I got off the plane with my weapon upside down, and one of my fellow comrades said, "Hey, you got to turn your weapon the other way," so just nerves and jitters first getting off the plane, not knowing what to expect.

So we landed in Kuwait in January of 2003, I want to say almost towards the end of the month, and I think we acclimated there for several days. And we're talking about 20-something years ago, so my memory's a little fuzzy, and I know the camps have changed too, but I know it took a couple of days wherever we went. We went to Baghdad, somewhere in that area, I don't remember the camps or anything like that because the names have changed, but I remember it taking a day or two to drive across the desert to get there. We slept in our Humvees a couple of times, which Humvees are not very comfortable.

But when we got there, I think the insurgency was just starting to ramp up, because I remember we had some training days where at some point we thought we might go to Fallujah or a Mosul, and I don't know if the people know, but that was a hotbed for insurgents. And, yes, IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, all that stuff could be operated by telephone. So you never knew who and where the enemy was. It could have been a kid, it could have been someone who was working on posts, because we did hire the community to work on posts, so you just never knew. But I enjoyed leaving the wire every day.

As the company commander's gunner, he was on the road almost every day, so there wasn't much of a break. But during downtime, maybe I'm doing patrolling, I'm patrolling a guard post, which was high anxiety producing, because you're a target for mortars and that type of stuff, but day-to-day is just training, going to the range, keeping up on your skills, keeping your fitness together, just being alert, because you don't know when and where the enemy was going to strike. So I would say as we got there it was just starting to ramp up a little bit, the insurgency.

Until that point, I hadn't really experienced anything. There were a ton of roundabouts, so every now and then something would go off, but you just keep on going. If you're not a hit, we just kept going, from what I can remember. But once I left my company commander as the gunner, I went to a line platoon, and that particular line platoon manned a police station, the Al-Sa'adoon police station, so we always had ground patrol. We had people inside sergeants, enlisted NCOs, working with the Iraqi police officers, just training them, teaching them the basic protocol of how to be a police officer. And then we had rooftop security.

So we're talking May 25th, 2004 when I was injured, so it was 115 degrees, and it was my turn to go up to the rooftop. And like I said, this area, nothing had gone on in the area, it was pretty quiet for the most part, but on this particular day, from what I was told, somebody built a homemade rocket launcher and the police station sat in the middle where this homemade rocket launcher was built in the International Baghdad Hotel, so what I was told was that the International Baghdad Hotel was the target, but as these rockets started to fire off this homemade rocket launcher, the trajectory of it started to move, so it's moving back and so now you have the police station right there. So when I went to the rooftop, surveyed the area moments later, I never heard or saw the rocket propelled grenade, but when I looked down two stories I could see that there was a blast, and so our barricades had been hit and just landed a few meters from the Humvee. And so what I remember was one of the sergeants yelling up saying, "Green, did you see where that came from?" And I said, "No." And so that's when I picked up my M4 and I got into the kneeling position, and as I was about to turn my lever from safety to fire, something hit me. So at the time, Ken, I didn't know what that something was, but today I can tell our listeners that it was a rocket propelled grenade blast. And so instantly, I didn't notice at the time, it took my left arm off, so your viewers, so I rock this nice little prosthetic arm, and so the rocket just took the arm and launched in under several inches of sand. And so at that point in time, I'm laying there waiting to die, and after some minutes passed, I realized that I might live.

And so that's when I remember looking up into heavens and I said, "God, I don't know what I've done in this lifetime, but give me the strength to live, give me the strength to be able to tell my story," and I wanted a child. I prayed for those three things. And I felt a sense of a surge of energy hit my body where I could get up and run, but I was too weak. I could move my head, because I'm laying on my right side, but I could see my uniform is shredded, the entire uniform is shredded, there's blood coming, and then that's when my comrades come, about three or four of them, and they perform on first aid. And then I was medevac to the Green Zone where the hospital was. But up to that point, there was no violence in that area. And from that point on I think it really, really started to ramp up in that region.

I was conscious the whole time. So when I tell my story, it's a first account story. So on the rooftop, they had to figure out how to pick me up, because if you can imagine, here I am laying busted open, and I'm sure they saw the bone, so they're trying to process, oh my God, what happened? So eventually they picked me up, somebody launched me over their shoulder, and we went down the stairs, and the Humvee was there waiting for us, and they put me on top of the Humvee, and then we drove through a alley and somebody had called for a medevac, it was a helicopter, so the helicopter came. And luckily for me, I'd lost a lot of blood, but the Green Zone where the hospital was located was across the, I want to say, Tigris River. And right then and there was a team there waiting for me, and they started cutting my uniform off, and then I woke up a few hours later to a new reality.

What happened was when I woke up I saw my master sergeant there, and then she waved over to the chain of command to come over. And I saw my leadership crying, and I didn't understand why they were crying because in my mind, I'm alive, but then when I looked down, that's when I noticed for the first time that that rocket, or whatever it was, took my arm off. So I didn't find out my arm was missing until the hospital when I looked down and I saw that one arm was shorter than the other, and that's where I was rewarded, they pinned me with the Purple Heart Award, and they call me their shero.

And so I stayed there overnight, part of the morning. And then I want to say I was probably driven to a field hospital in the middle of the desert somewhere. I didn't even know where it was, but it was still in that region. And then I stayed there for a while for stabilization and then they put me on another plane to go to Germany. And so that was maybe two, three days later, and so Germany was another stabilizing factor where my trauma surgeon actually happened to be a University of Notre Dame graduate.

So this is the coolest story ever. He's class of 1987, I'm class of 1999, but his parents were there visiting him. So the cool thing about this story is his parents started the Fast Break Club at the University of Notre Dame. So they were there waiting for me when I came, and their neighbors with Coach McGraw, who's a hall of fame coach right now. And so when I came in, I was greeted by two familiar faces, Mr. And Mrs. Woods, just the coolest story. So they pulled off their phone, they allowed me to call my late husband, they allowed me to call Coach McGraw, and then we took a picture together. So I was probably there for a day. They cleaned me up, some more surgeries and stuff, and then I boarded the C-130. And then I went to, I want to say, Andrews Air Force Base in Washington or that area.

For your viewers, it was my left hand that was blown off. So the new reality was, gee, I was going to have to learn how to use my right hand. And there's some pride in that because I remember laying on that plane saying, "Oh my God, somebody's going to have to wipe my butt." And that was a for me was a nurse having to wipe my butt. So I did everything I could to just maneuver, scoot up so I could wipe my own butt, because that's how prideful I was. So that was a low point for me saying, "Oh my God..." So anyway, but then you get to the hospital and, like you said, it's those low moments. It's those quiet moments.

So when I got to the hospital, it was a good chaotic from the beginning. You get off the C-130, you go right to the operating room, a week later, probably early June, that's when I met Wounded Warrior Project. They came, welcomed me home, provided me with a backpack full of essentials, comfort items, CD player, toiletries. Then my husband came with a smile. So it still hadn't hit me. I was in a lot of pain, but I was just happy to be surrounded by people. But then at nighttime you're just like, "What just happened?" You're still in shock. Over here you're portraying to be one thing, but over here you're suffering in silence. And I just would have these thoughts like what good am I to society now, what can I do? I knew my military career was over. I'd been in the military for 15 months, and I said, "Just like that in 15 months." So there was some anger, because it's like I was a model soldier. How could this happen to me? I was supposed to go to the board three days before I got hurt to test to become an NCO, so it was like all these things were happening for me, and just like that, it crashed. And so I remember watching the news. I don't know if it was the news, but I remember watching TV and I was in a lot of pain. And I remember watching President Ronald Reagan's funeral, and I've always been a Ronald Reagan movie goer with my grandmother, we loved his movies, and so I watched his beautiful service, and all I kept thinking was, Danielle, if you end your life now, you will not have the opportunity to first have that child that you prayed for or live a long life like this former president over here. And so that was a spark plug for me.

And then as I got stronger, I read about another story with Pat Tillman in USA TODAY and how he gave up his career, volunteered to serve, and then he was killed in action. And I just kept thinking like, “Gee, I'm still here, my arm is missing, but he's not here anymore, he's not here to be with us and be with his family.” And so those two events just really started changing the way I was thinking and just being more grateful of celebrating the life that I still had, but I didn't know how that looked.

But all I could do was follow the guidance of the multi-disciplinary team, which is the doctors, the nurses, the occupational therapies, physical therapists, whoever was there at Walter Reed Army Medical Center I just had to pour myself into their guidance on how they could lead me to recovery along with Wounded Warrior Project and a few other non-for-profits that were out there back then.

I saw the work of Wounded Warrior Project, I saw the work of Disabled Sports USA, Achilles Track Club. I just saw so many good people, great organizations, and I thought in the back of my head, gee, if I'm ever given the opportunity, I want to serve in some capacity, and so that's what motivated me to become a storyteller. I know I'm a paid storyteller with Wounded Warrior Project, but I never sought one-on-one therapy or group therapy. I thought I had enough tools from my experiences at Notre Dame to navigate. I knew I just had to keep moving forward, don't look in the rear-view mirror, and whoever wanted to hear my story, share my story with them, because if I was sharing it then I wasn't suffering along.

So anyway, long story short, I returned to Chicago and my intentions were to work for the Chicago Board of Education. I was fixated on working with kids to share my story of how I got out of the inner city of Chicago, earned a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, got hurt in the military, and I have the story of working through adversity and finding purpose and finding mission.

So went to get my master's degree in school counseling, because the goal was to become a school counselor, then become a dean, coach, all that good stuff, so I focused everything around education, but then the more people invited me to tell my story, including Wounded Warrior Project, I saw the impact that I was having. I was just inspiring people, veterans, civilians. I had this positive impact. And somebody said, "Hey, have you ever thought about trying to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs?" And I was getting my prosthetic care there, going to the women's clinic, that type of stuff, but I had never really thought about working. And so they told me about a position with the Readjustment Counseling Services, which is a part of VHA, Veterans Health Administration. And they was looking for an OIF-OEF veteran to work as a readjustment counselor. And so I applied for the position, interviewed, and they hired me. And I had no clinical experience whatsoever, so I had to go back to school, take four more classes in community counseling, get my license as an LPC, then eventually get a clinical license. And I think in 2010 I was on that path to serving my own community, which was combat veterans.

Just to give the audience a little context. So I grew up in the inner city of Chicago. My mom suffered with addiction. Her drug of choice was crack cocaine. And so I saw that at a very young age, five or six years old. And so right then and there, I'm starting to build resiliency, because I never once thought about going down that route. And that's how I wound up at the University of Notre Dame and just shooting high, aiming high, that type of thing. So I knew that things could be worse, the absolute worst is that ultimate sacrifice. So I had to convince myself that getting hit by this rocket propelled grenade was nothing I could do. There was no way that I could prevent that. I had to tell myself I wasn't on a motorcycle, I wasn't acting foolish, but I lost my arm serving my country, and if I'd known that rocket propelled grenade was coming, then I wouldn't have been up there.

So that's the first thing, rationalizing that it wasn't my fault that this happened, it's part of war. And something else, Ken, I was older too, I was 27 years old with a college education, and I'd gone to Notre Dame, I worked with a sports psychologist, so I knew about certain meditation, relaxation, self-pity doesn't work, playing the victim doesn't work, so I knew all that stuff, because I didn't try it at Notre Dame, but I wanted people to feel sorry for me because of my childhood experience, and it's like, "No, you're here to play basketball and go to school." So just from that context, so I knew coming into this situation that people might empathize, but they're probably saying, "You know what? Better her than me?" That type of mentality.

So just realizing that, yeah, this catastrophic thing happened, but it doesn't have to dominate my life moving forward. That was the main thing. So just being able to control what I can control. About locus of control, you have that internal external locus of control, so the main thing was controlling my actions and my feelings and my behavior, so a lot of stuff going on between my ears. And I knew I could always go to Wounded Warrior Project if I needed some help or I had a friend and my late husband was there for me as well, so I had a support system. And so just knowing that you're not on the island with this and you're not the first person is crucial.

When I was at the hospital there was a time where I did miss being with my troops, being with my team, but that was another life. They're doing what they have to do to survive, I have to do what I have to do to survive, so there really wasn't a time. It's just unfortunate that I went into the service with set of expectations and I wasn't able to meet that, but, for me, I couldn't focus on the missing arm. It was like, "What could I do in spite of?" So for me it was just moving forward.

You know, when I came home in early January 2005 there was a lot of uncertainty, because now I wasn't at Walter Reed, and Walter Reed was like a bubble, people got you in there, they didn't look at you and stare. So when I came home, it was a little unknown, a little uncertain, I didn't have a job. My transition was a little difficult. So I set my eyes on becoming a Paralympic track and field athlete. I joined the University of Chicago Track Club, and so that got me around. Young people got me out, active again, and somehow the media caught hold of my story. And they came and interviewed me while I was training, and the last thing I remember telling them was, "Hey, I'm available if somebody is looking for someone to hire."

And I remember Mayor Daley was the mayor at the time, he heard my story and he called my husband and I into his chambers and said, "What do you want to do?" And so I told him I wanted to go into the field of education. But I was still starting to build my confidence up, so now I got a job, I'm scheduled to start graduate school, and then I received this phone call, I think it was like in April, from Wounded Warrior Project, so they're this grassroots program, and they call and they say, "Hey, July 2005, we're coming to Chicago, would you like to participate?" And I'm like, "First of all, I don't have an arm so I can clutch into the bike, and then I don't even own a bike and let alone I don't think I can ride a bike." So they said, "No, we got you. Call your local bike shop, have them modify a bike to your specification, and come out and join us."

And so in May of that ride, that's the first time I thought, you know what? You're going to be okay, people care. And so I'm riding, I'm in Chicago, and you have American Patriots, you have first responders out there just cheering you on. And that was my homecoming, because when you are critically injured you don't receive a normal homecoming where there's a parade and your family's running, you're going off to your next surgery. So at that point, with all these things starting to build, I said, "You know what, Danielle?" And I'm riding on this bike. I was like, "Things are going to be okay." And this was in 2005, and I'm just telling you, that event was just a springboard to other events, other activities, and just growing and not looking back since then.

You are not alone. I think sometimes, and even as civilians, we have these moments in our lives where we just get stuck where we think it's only happening to us, but there's hundreds of thousands and millions of people going through something similar, but your story is your story, so you own it. So I tell them, "You're not alone. Hey, are you signed up with some veterans organization?" We got Wounded Warrior Project here,, we have VFW here, American Legion, Purple Heart, all these officers have programs. There's so much support and people want to get involved that I still can't understand why 22 veterans a day are taking their lives, because what for? There's help out here for you. It's not like it was when Vietnam veterans came home or even the first Gulf War. So that's the first thing.

And then just educating them. I'm an employee of Wounded Warrior Project, and just telling them the programs that we have that range from mental health intensive stuff with universities to physical health and wellness where you can be around other veterans, but the main thing is connecting with somebody. If it's not the VA, find your battle buddy, your old battle buddy, or find a friend, but you need to connect with somebody. Like I said, we don't exist on an island, so find somebody and connect with, and you ain't got to share the gory stuff of it, but if you're angry talk about your anger and then get that professional help that you need. Or maybe it's not even professional help. Maybe it's just going out fishing, maybe it's equine therapy, maybe it's music therapy. You can't sing or play, but, heck, it's going to make somebody laugh. So non-traditional stuff.

People say, "I want to live," but there's a difference between living and living, just saying that. So I'm not just existing. I am fully engrossed in life. I get to share my story, Wounded Warrior Project or whoever wants me to speak, and I have this beautiful kid that helps me to really, really live my life. And we travel, we eat, we do our thing. I'm making an impact. And so what I like to tell people is we're all going to experience a life changing event at some point in our life, it could be traumatic like mine, it could be a career crisis, frightening diagnosis, but it's not about that adversity. It's how you respond to it, it's how you bounce back. So you embrace it as best you can, you choose, because we have a choice. It's just like that lonely veteran, he or she has a choice to move forward, but he or she is stuck, and so sometimes they just need a little pushing. But like I say, some people heal in their own time too. Just don't be self-destructive about it. Don't be drinking, don't be abusing your prescribed medication, engaging in whatever's going to cause you harm. Figure out what's going to bring you closer to wellness. But the main thing is move forward and create those new opportunities. And my opportunity is to be able to travel the country and spread awareness about the wonderful work and free programs and services that Wounded Warrior Project provides to veterans and or dependents and caregivers.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Specialist Danielle Green.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David