Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:34 | When combat medic Justin Donnelly got to Iraq, it was hot and it smelled like oil and sewage. He was based at Camp Liberty in Baghdad and his first assignment was a macabre visit to a morgue.
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His chosen career path led to being a doctor but after 9/11, Justin Donnelly was inspired to enlist in the Army as a medic. Medical school could wait. There were lives to save right now.
After basic training, Justin Donnelly went to Advanced Infantry Training which for him was EMT school. The prospective combat medic was at Fort Sam Houston, a place he would always remember because of a special person he met there.
He was six four and strong when he joined the outfit. That alone would deter most of the hazing but Justin Donnelly was also a medic. That made him special at 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment. Infantry love their medics, who took care of them on the battlefield and at the party in the barracks.
They had no medics so Justin Donnelly was sent to the National Guard unit that was attached to his battalion. They were Georgia boys but he got along fine with them despite being a Yankee. On an operation, after they searched a compound, an Iraqi woman brought him a child with a serious birth defect. Could he help?
Combat medic Justin Donnelly's first casualty was a soldier hit in the shoulder by a sniper. The training kicked in and he went to work. The whole episode was no more than an hour but it seemed like a lifetime.
His battalion lost five KIA on that first Iraq deployment. Combat medic Justin Donnelly recalls how one of the Humvees was completely destroyed by an IED. He was lucky. He managed to get all of his casualties safely evacuated, unlike some other medics he knew who were devastated by losing patients.
Justin Donnelly was standing at the gate when a car began accelerating toward him. That's a car bomb, he thought, and he turned around and ran. Then came the explosion. (Caution: strong language)
Justin Donnelly had a friend back home who sent soccer balls and children's shoes to him for the kids in Iraq. It meant a lot to them and that was just one example of his friend's life of helping others.
He was on a roll. Justin Donnelly had just been promoted to company medic and, back home, his wife had just given birth to his first child. But then he was injured in a car bomb explosion and sent back to the States. He began to recover from his wounds and adjust to a new life.
Was it justified? In Justin Donnelly's mind, Operation Iraqi Freedom was totally justified. We were there to get rid of a dictator and help the people of Iraq. The politics and troubles afterward would not alter his opinion.
What kind of music did he listen to over there? All kinds of music. Combat medic Justin Donnelly had a playlist like no other and he kept it going on his laptop when he was at the base. When he got home, he was amazed at the divisiveness that had taken hold while he was gone.
If Uncle Sam wanted you to have a wife, he would have issued you one. Justin Donnelly found one in the Army, anyway. They were both in training as combat medics and then deployed to Iraq with different units. Then he went back for another tour while she waited at home with a newborn.
