War takes boy to manhood

[thedrifter]

April 17, 2003

War takes boy to manhood

By Kristy Gray
Associated Press


GILLETTE, Wyo. ? He signed up for the Marines right out of high school and his journey has since taken him through a war, sterile hospital rooms and countless connecting flights to bring him back home.
Somewhere along the way, he became a man.

?I don?t think anybody could go through what I went through, what my whole unit went through, and not be changed. We all changed that night,? Scott Carey said.

Carey, 20, was shot March 26 in Nasiriyah, Iraq, in a cross fire with Iraqi soldiers. The bullet ricocheted off his gas mask that hung at his side and came out his stomach. Shrapnel ripped through his elbow.

He began a road to recovery almost immediately, both physically as he was shipped from hospital to hospital, and mentally as faced the possibility that he might have died on that field.

But his journey began long before that.

Carey signed up for the Marines right after graduating from Campbell County High School in 2001 because he wasn?t ready for college. He wanted the challenge.

He started his first day of boot camp on Sept. 11, 2001, in San Diego, Calif. At first, he thought the terrorist attacks were a story, a make-believe ploy drill sergeants used to scare the young recruits ? part of the ?tear-?em-down, build-?em-up? routine.

Then they learned it really happened.

Carey still has never seen the television footage of the World Trade Center collapsing, though he?s seen pictures. Recruits were allowed to buy newspapers on Sundays.

Even then, war was intangible. It never occurred to him to be scared as his unit left for Kuwait on Jan. 11.

The desert was hot and dry with sand everywhere. It reminded him of training at Twentynine Palms, Calif., without the water.

?It?s just like being on the beach,? he said.

Temperatures reached the 100-degree mark by the time he would leave.

As long as he stayed hydrated, his sweat could keep him cool.

But when they crossed the line into Iraq, he had to wear his ?heavy and thick? chemical suit.

They worked from 4:30 a.m. to about 9 or 10 p.m. He remembers a couple of periods of ?down time? and he and his buddies talked of families, home and plans after the Marine Corps.

He considers all the men in his platoon his friends.

As he marched through Iraq, he saw civilians but they had been instructed not to talk with them. His platoon didn?t see the enemy. Their worked seemed like just that, jobs they had been trained to execute.

But then war found Carey and his platoon.

The bullet that hit him on March 26 entered through his back and exited through his stomach, miraculously missing all his major organs. He lay in the field for 30 minutes listening to the bullets flying overhead.

When his fellow Marines pulled him out, a medical corpsman stabilized him in the field and prepared him to be shipped to an Army MASH unit.

Carey was supposed to be talking so that doctors knew he was alive and aware. But Carey didn?t want to. He wanted time to regroup, to think, to grasp what had happened. He laid with his eyes shut.

?We have another fatality here,? he heard someone say.

His eyes flew open. He refuted the claim, not so politely.

Carey doesn?t know what happened after that because he was on morphine. He knows he flew to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany with nothing on but his dog tags. His clothes had been cut off in the field so that doctors could check for injuries.

He later flew to San Antonio, Texas, and then to Bethesda, Md., hours later. There, he met President Bush, who gave him the Purple Heart and asked him where he was from.

?Gillette, Wyo.,? Carey answered.

The president said he?d have to tell Dick Cheney that he met a fellow Wyoming boy in the hospital.

Carey watched Bush swear in two Marines in a naturalization ceremony. It officially made the men American citizens.

?Two guys that weren?t citizens when they joined the Marine Corps went to fight. For them to come home and get their citizenship from the president was pretty cool to see,? Carey said.

Carey finally came home Monday.

He feels different: After coming close to dying on that field, he take s the time now to appreciate his life.

?When you have people shooting at you to kill you, it?s like you?re a deer in headlights. That?s basically what it was for me. I?ll know what to expect next time,? he said.

Field doctors are called ?slicers? because they don?t have time to make their incisions look pretty. They sliced a 4-inch line down Carey?s stomach to look for injured organs and moved him to the next stop.

Carey and his family will dress his wounds each day while he?s home.

They?ll heal, but the slice down his stomach will certainly leave a scar. That?s OK, he says. It marks the instance when a boy became a man.

?I wouldn?t give it up for the world. Who can say that at 20 years old, they went to war and got a Purple Heart,? he said.

?God was looking out for me that night. He meant for me to be a survivor.?




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Copyright 2003 The Associated Press.


Sempers,

Roger