It turned out there was a firing range right near my house, and I got a job there. And I think, to be honest--and they told me this later--they hired me as a joke because they thought, "this little girl, there’s no way she’s going to last," and they had me cleaning 42 firearms in two hours at the close of every shift. And yeah, that was my job at first; I was not allowed to instruct anybody or anything like that. So, my job was to clean the range, and my job was to clean the firearms, and sell ammo and reloads to customers. So, I did that job from, I think, summer of 2008 to summer of 2009 while I was going to junior college as well, just to see... dip a toe back in education, do I know how to be a real person after everything that I saw over in Iraq.
I mean this wasn’t me directly, but I think we had touched on this slightly that, at the range--we had had two range suicides in the ten months that I was there, and both times the range was full of people, like full. And the most heartbreaking--and this is more like a heart and PTSD injury than anything else, like this didn’t physically injure me, but it has stayed with me for my entire life--was that this guy... just was done with life, and he came in, shot a few bags of ammunition--which is pretty expensive--one bag of ammunition at the time, I think, was 30, $35, so he shot three bags of ammunition before he got up the courage. And there were children on the range, and one of them asked this simple innocent question of, "Did the bullet hit the target, and come back and hit that man?" And the child couldn’t have imagined that someone would turn the firearm on themselves willingly, and so they thought, "Oh, it must have been a safety thing, it must have been the bullet hitting the target and coming back." And, of course, it wasn’t that, and the dad said, "We’ll talk about it when we get home."
But I still think of those people who were on the range that day; and then the next time it happened, it was actually his sister-in-law who got the idea from him and came and killed herself in the same spot. Really, really wild. If I hadn’t seen it all with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that had such a lasting impact; and I think of the other people who were there at the range that day, wondering, “do they still struggle with it, do they still have nightmares about it; do they still...?" It’s one of those things where I didn’t even know the guy and I still wrestle with grief and guilt over that situation--and his sister-in-law, who I did train how to shoot.
And so, coming into that environment, it was distressing, but it was familiar to see that same kind of behavior by the civilian range officers and the military veteran range officers alike; and there were more civilian range officers than military range officers. There were about ten of us and I think three of us were Veterans; I was the only combat Veteran and I don’t know if there was some jealousy there from that, but there was certainly the refrain repeated, "You’ve been to combat, you should be tougher than this." And yes. Yes. So, I was definitely compelled to take it; and the more that I took it, the more respect I earned and the more, like they would go a little easy on me for a while, and then there would be something else.
And then the first of the two ranged suicides happened, and then the hazing elevated again because I had the misfortune of giving him his last bag of ammunition, so they said I killed him. It’s unreal. They would lock me on the gun range and turn out all the lights, and they would start making ghost noises from the microphone; just, in retrospect, the most ridiculous stuff, but they would do anything they could to say that it was my fault for that--which I was a 22-year-old girl who had just gotten home from Iraq and was very traumatized.
