I Remember The First Time I Stepped on a Dead Body
If you don't want to read a pretty vivid account of September 11th, just go to the strip at auntminnie.com and don't read any more. If you want to read A Healer At Heart - Ryan's story of his time in Iraq, the link is here. The full story of my time after the terrorist attacks of September 11th is below.
One week after the terrorist attacks my National Guard unit was sent to a old land fill on Staten Island to help sort debris from the World Trade Center. Part of that search involved finding human remains.
I remember walking one day and hearing a "crunch." I looked down and my foot had gone through a human torso that I hadn't noticed in the debris. I called a policeman over to gather the remains and I continued about my business. That encounter had already become perfectly normal to me. So had the sound of bones falling from the sky - seagulls were diving into the debris and eating human remains -but they couldn't swallow the bones, so on occasion a finger or knee would fall out of the sky.
I deployed four times with my National Guard unit and one of my deployments was to Iraq where I spent some time running convoys up and down Route Irish into Baghdad.
It was war that spurred me to write my first story - Debriding Iraq. One day I'm going to write about my convoy experiences, but I'm not quite ready for that yet. Right now I'm just a cartoonist and I consider myself lucky that I can make your day better by giving you a few laughs.
So this Veteran's Day I give you A Healer At Heart, which gives you a little background on the cartoon Ryan and his experiences as an infantryman in Iraq during the initial invasion.
This particular comic is not necessarily affiliated with or supported by auntminnie.com . It's my own sort of fan fiction and my way of dealing with my experiences while deployed in the military.
