Just after the Boston bombings, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced he was looking for an Army veteran named Tyler. Tyler had carried a woman to an aid station immediately after the Boston bombing. The woman, an MIT student named Victoria, was injured by shrapnel, and in a near panic. He calmed her down. He held her hand. He showed her his own healed shrapnel wounds. He stayed with her until medics took her away. And then he left. Victoria wanted to thank him.
So much for the stereotype of the disturbed combat vet with a thousand-yard stare, holed up in the woods. All over the country, servicemen and women from recent wars are making a delicate, hopeful, and concerted effort to readjust to civilian life. Yet as all soldiers know, the best laid plans often go awry. One of the many horrors of the Boston bombing was that it reawakened terrible memories among soldiers returned from Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. And one of the unexpected blessings was the number of veterans who came to help.
Some of the first rescuers photographed rushing to the scene in Boston were soldiers in combat uniforms. Roupen Bastajian, a Rhode Island state trooper and former Marine, finishing the race, jogged to an aid station. Like all modern military vets, he knows how to use a tourniquet, and he tied half a dozen on severed legs, likely saving half a dozen lives. Army veteran Bruce Mendelsohn was blocks away from the explosion and was knocked out of his seat by the blast. He ran to the scene. That's an odd instinct if you think about it: running to a bombing.
There was such a notable veteran presence at the bombings that USA Today devoted a cover story to the topic and other papers made note. But it's not surprising. The very people who have experienced this type of horror before, even to a point that it became routine, may be the best ones to help, ready to snap back into action. I experienced this myself when I worked on an ambulance with a Vietnam combat veteran. He was always a calm and reasoned presence in the middle of chaos. "All the stuff these guys will see in 20 years," he told me late one night, "I saw in a day."
On 9/11, another veteran defined the day. Rick Rescorla was a legendary soldier in Vietnam, a hero of one of the first and most vicious battles of the war in the Ia Drang valley in 1965. He died in the South Tower, exhorting evacuees in the stairwell with Cornish ballads, later credited with saving hundreds. The word for Rescorla's instinct, and that of the responders in Boston, is probably duty, not heroism, though the two words may mean the same thing.
There are 21.5 million veterans in the U.S. today, one for every fifteen of us, many with combat experience. The writer Sebastian Junger has said that war almost always humanizes, not hardens, people. Our soldiers were humanized in brutal crucibles in lands far away, and they brought that humanity home.
The Boston bombing reminds us that these gentle, grieving citizens haunt America like guardian angles, uniquely equipped and willing to help.