by RICK DANLEY // September 29, 2018
The plan was to interview a young man who’d recently been run over by a bale of hay.
He’d been standing near the hay trailer, helping unload the cylinders, when one of the giant, 2,000-pound bales slipped from the tractor’s front spikes and began rolling his way. The tractor operator honked his horn in warning. The young man heard it and turned around, his feet sliding in the loose gravel — but it was too late. The bale knocked him down and rolled completely over his upper half. He remained on the ground for a couple of minutes, trying to catch his breath. The accident had knocked the wind out of him. The tractor operator, who happened to be the man’s younger brother, came to check on the man. “Hey,” the younger brother said, “you’re not supposed to be sleeping on the job.” The man got up, dusted himself off, said a few bad words, and went back to work. The next day it hurt to breathe.
It took the man a week to go see a doctor. “Eventually, I thought maybe I had pneumonia,” said the man. “I had a collapsed lung before, when I was in the service, when I got shot, and that’s what it felt like. So that was my initial reasoning for going in.” The doctor examined the man, did some X-rays. The result: fractured ribs, a bruised lung lining, some damage to his neck and to the tendons and ligaments in his left shoulder. He was given a breathing machine to take home — a small device that gauges the strength of his lungs — and warned never to let something the size of a small car roll over him ever again.
And that is the story of Brandon Griffith, the man who was flattened by a hay bale.
“FARMING: A NOBLE BUT HAZARDOUS JOB” — this was to be the thrust of the story. I would call around, check in with area farmers, record their tales of ag-related injuries. A sleeve caught in the header of a combine. A tumble into the grain bin. I would combine their stories with Griffith’s, stir in some statistics — alternating human detail with hard data; the usual newspaper shtick — and then conclude that farming is, well, a noble but, yes, also hazardous job. A competent piece of service journalism.
But then sitting with the man in his girlfriend’s Burlington trailer as a nine-week-old kitten pawed at Griffith’s tattooed arm, I remembered something he’d said 30 minutes earlier. “Wait,” I asked, dependably slow on the uptake, “you were shot?”
And so this is the other story of Brandon Griffith.
TWO YEARS AGO — which was about five years after most Americans had stopped paying attention to the war its sons and daughters were fighting in Afghanistan — Brandon Griffith and his unit were called out to investigate an explosive device on a road north of Kabul. Griffith, a bomb technician, was one of two officers in the convoy that day. A convoy always travels with two officers: in the event that one is killed or injured, the other is on hand to give orders. The 37-year-old Burlington native had at that point been in the Navy for 18 years. He was old guard. He’d worked his way up from E1, the lowest rank in the military, to E9, and then, finally, to chief warrant officer.
The mission road that September day was long. The convoy was driving directly into a blinding sun, which stared down on the Americans from above a nearby hill. Griffith held on to Phoenix, his bomb dog, a Rottweiler-Lab mix he’d nursed from the time the dog was a pup. All was still in the Humvee. It was the silence of the just-before.
Suddenly, as all these moments must feel when a loud tear rips through the fabric around you, the lead vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The Americans shifted into gear. Orders were given for the soldiers to dismount and return fire.
Griffith, with Phoenix by his side, readied his weapon and exited the vehicle. But just as he rounded the hood of the Humvee, he was hit in the back by sniper fire. His vest stopped the bullet from entering his body but the force was enough to spin him around, at which point whoever had Griffith in his crosshairs fired again and the officer was shot through his front. This time the bullet, which grazed the bottom of his vest, entered his right side, just above the waist, slicing through his intestines and lodging deep in his guts. Clipping the vest had the effect of shattering the copper around the bullet, turning one deadly projectile into nine or 10, and scattering shrapnel into his liver, his bladder, his pancreas, and the surrounding tissue.
Griffith lay in the dirt. Blood coursed from the hole in his side. Gunfire continued to pelt the area, coming from somewhere in the hills. Phoenix ran to Griffith and, gripping one side of the soldier’s vest in his jaws — just as he’d been trained to do — he pulled the officer behind a wall and out of the rain of gunfire. The dog remained at Griffith’s side until the corpsman arrived.
“I’m laying there thinking, ‘This is how I’m going to die,’ and my dog is looking at me like ‘What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?’” Griffith recalled. “And that’s the thing I was more worried about; not that I was going to die, but that my dog looked scared. ‘Oh, my dog is scared, I can’t die right now, I can’t go. I can’t go.’ I was like, ‘Man, please don’t let my dog see me die like this. That’s my buddy.’”
WHEN THE corpsman made it to Griffith, the unit was still catching Taliban fire. The lead Humvee was in flames, the three U.S. soldiers inside were dead, either killed in the explosion or burnt in the minutes after. The corpsman pumped the injured CWO full of morphine. At the time, no one knew Griffith was allergic to the drug. The morphine sent Griffith into anaphylactic shock and the medic had to insert a tube down his throat to keep his windpipe from closing.
Once the gunfire had subsided, Griffith was rushed back to the forward operating base, where he was loaded onto an airplane and flown to Germany for emergency surgery. Because Griffith had a collapsed lung, which is vulnerable to the excessive pressure of high altitudes, the plane, which was not combat-equipped, had to fly below 10,000 feet. Although it received an armed escort out of Afghanistan, the aircraft remained in plain view of the enemy and within reach of its weapons the entire time.
The flight to Germany took nine hours. Griffith was awake for the first eight. He fell asleep just after the plane breached German airspace, and woke up from a medically-induced coma three weeks later.
The surgeries were a success. Griffith remained in Germany for three months before returning, first, to Burlington, to visit friends and family, and then to the Naval Medical Center, in Portsmouth, Va., for further medical evaluations.
Griffith never was declared medically fit for combat after that. The Navy offered him a desk job or early retirement. “As a chief warrant officer, I was hands-on,” said Griffith. “I didn’t need a desk. Me and computers didn’t get along. I chose early retirement.”
BUT sometimes even retirement isn’t enough to get you out of the service. Not really. Griffith, like hundreds of thousands of other U.S. vets, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He once spent 56 days in the PTSD ward at Topeka’s VA hospital while doctors worked to adjust his medication.
And yet he’s one who never complains. If you suggest to Griffith — who, on a night not long after returning home from being shot and seeing three of his men killed in front of him, had the job of trying to revive his dead mother after she’d succumbed to a fatal heart attack — if you suggest to him that he’s had a hard life, he looks visibly uncomfortable and tries to writhe free of the suggestion. He doesn’t see himself as a victim of any kind.
Of the attack that ended his military career: “That’s what I signed up for. I knew it wasn’t going to be fun and games.” Of the nightmares that intrude on his sleep: “Lots of people have nightmares.”
But he doesn’t say that the view from the front-lines was easy. It wasn’t. It’s a terrible ask of anybody. And the things that haunt Griffith are not the things that were done to him but the things he was asked to do to others. He tells this story.
“We were in a convoy and we came up to a group of young adults. Our translator got all but one to go. I was the lead officer. I was the officer on the front of the convoy, and I’d told everybody if they had to take a shot, I’d take a shot first, since I was up front. I had a lot of 18- and 19-year-old kids behind me and I knew that that was a young adult, and I didn’t want them to pop their cherry — which is their first kill — so I took that on. And, see, the guy, he just turned the gun and aimed it toward us. Three rounds hit him. Well, come to find out, he was a 14-year-old kid. And so, you know, with me having children… that just played hell on me. It still plays hell on me.” Griffith pointed to his girlfriend, Amanda, who sat in a recliner on the other side of the room. “She’ll wake me up in the middle of the night sometimes because she knows I’m having a bad dream.”
GRIFFITH isn’t on any medication for his PTSD at the moment, and that’s how he prefers it. “Usually I just stay busy and don’t worry about it,” said Griffith. “My PTSD is going to be an ongoing thing my entire life, so I just have to learn to deal with it.”
“I’ll help you,” said Amanda, who has a degree in counseling.
“Yep,” said Griffith, “she helps me. She thinks I’m with her for her good looks but I think it’s the free psychology. … Now, granted, I’m going to have nightmares. It’s OK. It’s just how you deal with them. When I wake up from one, I just look next to me and say, ‘It’s OK, she’s here, I’ve got her.’ And I’ve got my kids. Those things keep you grounded.”
But Griffith, during his nearly two decades as a bomb technician, perfected another, unorthodox, technique for calming his nerves.
It was 1997. Griffith had only recently joined the Navy. He was in his first year of explosive ordnance disposal school at the Naval base outside San Diego, and it was his first weekend off the base in five months. He and a group of Seals went to a little karaoke bar in town, and the group ended up singing what at that point was the hottest dance song in the country, the synth-pop hit, “Barbie Girl.” I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world / Life in plastic, it’s fantastic / Come on Barbie, let’s go party!
Griffith has done tours in Kosovo and multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has more than 700 “defusals” under his belt. And for nearly 20 years, up until the day he was shot, every time he felt his heart rate lift as he tottered up to an explosive device in his 130-pound bomb suit, Griffith would resurrect the “Barbie Girls” song, singing it softly to himself inside his helmet.
I’m a Barbie girl, in a barbie world / Life in plastic, it’s fantastic.
“That song took me back to a happy place,” Griffith said. “Every time I feel stressed or something, I sing that and it calms me down. It still does.”
EVERY PERSON has at least one book in them, at least that’s the sentimental cliché. The truth is, for most of us, a pamphlet will do. But the bromide is actually true in Griffith’s case! “My dad says I should write a novel,” said the vet.
Until that day, Griffith will continue working as a farmhand, and the wider world — acquaintances who see him at the gas station, farmers he crosses paths with at the co-op — will know nothing of the feats he’s performed in the service of his country.
And he doesn’t need the attention. Griffith is a polite, modest man. He has Amanda. He has his kids. Oh, and I almost forgot: he has Phoenix, who returned to Kansas with Griffith after the surgeries — still, as ever, the devoted friend.
Meanwhile, off-stage — buried in the deepest sections of the newspaper — the US war in Afghanistan continues.
Griffith’s friend, the second officer in the convoy on that September day in 2016? He was killed in action only three months ago. “A headshot,” said Griffith. “Dead before he hit the ground.”
Griffith and I talk more about the crudities of war. He says it’s not pretty. But, he says, it’s the name of the game. Then he told me about the time he gave the eldest son of an Afghan family his entire supply of MREs, and how the son was able to sell those meal packets for a sum that allowed the 19-year-old to purchase a truck license and feed his family. Griffith remains in touch with the young man, who now drives a truck for the UN. Then he told me about the time he tried to order ball joints for his men but was one number off on the order form, and ended up ordering the delivery of a million-dollar CIWS missile, a ship-based, anti-air missile, which Griffith had to babysit in the desert for two days, until the Air Force arrived to clean up his mistake.
“CAN WE GO back to farming?” I ask. “This is really an article about farming and the dangers of farming.”
“Sure,” Griffith says.
And so I take him back to that day six months ago when the hay bale chased him down the hill. Given everything you’ve been through, I say, wouldn’t it have been kind of embarrassing, in the end, to be killed by hay?
Griffith laughs. “Can you imagine? Been through all sorts of hell. And then, yeah, here we go, the end — a hay bale.”
This article originally appeared in The Iola Register on September 29, 2018. [ed: There is, at this point, sufficient evidence to doubt the veracity of most of Griffith’s military claims — a subject explored at length in Part II.]
RG danley 