“They Shall Not Grow Old…”

As I write this, tomorrow is Memorial Day 2025, but it is today, May 25th, when I feel our fallen gathered most closely.

Nineteen years ago, I was the Fire Support Officer for Charlie Company, 2nd of the 6th Infantry.  I was a twenty-three year old Field Artillery second lieutenant, not quite a year out of West Point, and three months into my first Iraq tour.

LtoR: Specialist Robert Blair, Captain Douglas DiCenzo, and Specialist Matthew Owens, Baghdad, 2006. Early enough in the war that C/2-6 Infantry still had to use woodland camo IBA.

On May 25th, 2006, I was riding behind the driver in my company commander’s Humvee.  We had just endured several brutally tedious hours at a District Council Meeting in southern Baghdad. The reason I was sitting behind the driver and not the TC (what we call shotgun in the normal world) is that the air conditioning vent on the driver’s side worked and the one behind the TC’s didn’t.  The trickle of slightly chilled air on the back of my neck wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

As we rode through Baghdad, we talked to stay awake and alert in the incendiary heat.  Captain DiCenzo was giving the driver, Specialist Owens, some good-natured shit for having one of the Harry Potter books in his assault bag.  Being a devoted nerd myself, I was rallying to Owens’ verbal defense when an EFP detonated on us. 

An EFP, or explosive-forced-projectile, was a type of IED the Iranian Revolutionary Guard helped Jaysh-al-Mahdi employ in Iraq.  It was, simply put, a copper mass in a can with explosives around it to turn the copper into a penetrator.  It was devastatingly effective against our Humvee.

I don’t think I lost consciousness.  My entire vision blanked white for a long time and I couldn’t hear or feel anything.  For a moment, I really thought I was looking at the game-over screen and about to have to answer to Jesus for all my iniquities. 

Feeling returned slowly.  While the pain was thankfully dulled by a massive adrenaline spike, I knew not all was right with me.  My right wrist was flopping at an unnatural angle and when I tried to stand my right leg screamed in protest and I collapsed back into the ditch (I thought it was a ditch, the guys would later inform me it was the crater left by the blast).

Examining my surroundings, I saw someone else in an American uniform lying nearby.  I called out to him, I tried to reach over and grab him, but I was too far.  Whoever it was, he wasn’t moving.  For all I knew, he could be bleeding out.  For all I knew, I was bleeding out.  I’d never been hit by a bomb before, I didn’t have anything to which I could calibrate the experience.

I couldn’t hear anything but the wind and my own moaning and breathing, no gunfire, no one shouting, nothing.  I screamed for a medic, but that didn't seem to elicit a response.  Given how absolutely wrecked my mind was, I have no idea how long I was actually in that crater, but I decided that waiting any longer was the bigger risk. I needed to get the patrol's attention, but I wasn’t just going to walk up the side of the ditch with my leg the way it was (broken femur, I was to find out).  I needed a crutch of some kind.

The upper received of my rifle was at hand—the buttstock had been broken off somehow in the blast.  I grabbed it by the front sight post with my mostly functional left hand, and dug the other end into the dirt.  I used that and my left leg to hobble up to get my head and shoulders up and out of the hole.

I’m told one of our guys nearly shot me at that point, thinking I was the IED trigger man, but a local interpreter stopped him.  In short order one of the medics, Doc Taylor, sprinted up to me, laid me back down and hit me with some morphine. Apparently, the Humvee’s burning chassis had continued rolling some distance, and that’s where they’d been looking for us, bear the burning hulk.

The rest of the process, from on-site treatment by the medics, aided by the infantrymen, into the MEDEVAC bird they called is a bit hazy… I do seem to recall praying, and requiring Doc to verify that all my junk was still attached and him laughingly obliging. Doc Swift, the company’s other medic verified that detail for me when I ran into him years later in Afghanistan.  In fact, I can’t run into a Charlie 2-6 vet without getting some shit for that… understandably.

That's what I get for playing into the stereotype, but I'm not the only man who thinks the potential of losing that part of my anatomy a much more disturbing prospect than being shy a leg or arm.

And then I was up and away on a dust-off UH-60, back to the 86th Combat Support Hospital, Baghdad’s ER.  My battalion commander was waiting as they wheeled me into the hospital. While they were prepping for me, he informed me that Captain DiCenzo, and the Humvee’s gunner, Specialist Blair, had been killed instantly by the blast.  He then, extremely kindly, and after cautioning me to say nothing about our dead, put me on a sat-phone with my wife, Michele, back in Germany to inform her that I was alive and well, so that she would not have to worry when the rumor mill, despite the Army’s best efforts, inevitably started churning.

Relief and joy I can't even describe flooded me—I was going to go home and see my wife.  We’d only been married eight months at that point. Nineteen years and four children later, I’m so grateful to God I made it home, so grateful to her for staying by my side through that and every danger and hardship since that I can’t express it properly. 

And I was ashamed for how relieved I was then, and I still am now.  I believe in God, but this was so random and unfair it strained my faith and trust. If the AC had been working on the other side, of the Humvee, I would've been killed, too. If I'd taken my own Humvee instead of hopping in with my company commander for that patrol, maybe it would've been mine that got hit--or a different vehicle entirely since we would've been in a different march order.

Two good men were dead, two families bereft. The Blairs lost a son and brother.  The DiCenzos a son, brother, husband, and father.  Each of their lives were rich and filled with potential, their people loved them no less than mine loved me.

I don’t suffer from PTSD.  That’s not a brag—there are men a lot braver than me who do wrestle with that condition, but I don’t have flashbacks or nightmares.  My brain doesn’t process unrelated stimuli as a threat. I’ve never worried that something on the road was going to detonate randomly.  Frankly, I don't suffer guilt over the casualties we inflicted on the insurgents, either. I am fortunate in that neither I nor any of my men inflicted noncombatant casualties, it does happen, and honestly, in the American army at least, it's usually something unavoidable, but that's not a moral burden I have to bear.

What I struggle with is that I lived when others didn’t. At it's best, it's a weight that drives me to try harder, but I never feel worthy, never at peace with it.

I was able to serve in the Army for nine more years, I returned to Iraq leading a platoon in 2008, deployed to Afghanistan for a dreaded staff tour in 2010, and took command of a self-propelled howitzer battery in 2012 before I parted ways with the Army in 2015. While life after the Army has been good to me and my family, I won't pretend there aren't days I miss the people I served with, miss knowing I was working to maximize their chance of survival day by day. Even operating in wars that our country had no eye toward winning, indeed, for which our leaders had no clear definition of victory, it was the most meaningful work I've done aside from raising my kids.

DiCenzo and Blair weren’t the last people I lost to the war.  In addition to those killed in action, the specter of suicide has claimed far too many.  Gulf War cancer is culling my generation of veterans as well.  In 2022, I lost one of my best friends in the world years and years after we were both done fighting because those burn pits placed carcinogen time bombs in his body. Many of us are still making the ultimate sacrifice, even though we haven't been in direct combat in more than a decade.

I don’t relay my story to elicit guilt or imply that we should be morose on Memorial Day.  I’ll be at the grill tomorrow, too, burning some burgers, beer in hand, grateful that my family is safe and happy and I’m with them. You should enjoy the weekend all the more, but take time to give thanks and remember that it's only possible because of generations of Soldiers like Robert Blair and Douglas DiCenzo.

Whatever our anxieties, and I’m not claiming those anxieties are all baseless, embrace gratitude for what we do have.  It was gained and maintained for us only at the cost of irreplaceable lives.

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them."

-"For the Fallen," Laurence Binyon.

Captain Doug DiCenzo was a passionate outdoorsman and athlete. To honor his memory, his family set up a fund to help enable children to attend athletic and outdoor camps. In the intervening years, Doug's Camp Fund has helped send over 2,000 kids to summer camps. If you are able, I encourage you to consider donating.

https://www.dougscampfund.org/