The boom of a cannon fired by Civil War enactors on the far side of a local craft fair last month sent retired Ohio National Guard Staff Sgt. Aaron Futrell back four years to Iraq, where an Iranian ballistic missile landed 100 yards from his bunker.
“It’s directly [related] to the missile strike because your body is just instantly transported back there,” he told the Daily Beast on Monday. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m not safe anymore. We’re gonna die. Get ready to fight for your life or get ready to hide.’”
The 42-year-old father of three was overpowered by a rush of adrenaline.
“Cognitively, I know I’m safe,” he said. “I’m here in Ohio. There’s no ballistic missiles falling on us. There’s nobody trying to kill me. But my body doesn’t know that. And it is like the weirdest feeling you’ve ever had when your brain and your body are disconnected.”
The Fateh-110 missile was one of 15 that Iran fired at Al-Asad Airbase on January 8, 2020. Its warhead had 1,000 pounds of explosives.
“The loudest thing you’ve ever heard in your life,” Futrell recalled of the missile that landed closest to the bunker where he sought shelter after hearing an alert on the base public address system. “It’s like fireworks multiplied by a thousand and when they hit the ground, it feels like God just punched the earth. The whole ground vibrates.The air around you vibrates. The blast wave, like, feels like you got smacked in the face.”
Along with suffering PTSD, Futrell was one of more than 100 Americans diagnosed with traumatic brain injury [TBI] in the attack. His TBI was accompanied by intense migraines and more memory problems than someone his age should experience.
To make it worse, soldiers with TBI have no visible wounds and often do not receive the sympathy and respect accorded to those who do.
“They call it the hidden injury, the silent injury,” he said. “Nobody takes it seriously.”
Futrell might be expected to hold a grudge against Trump for having minimized the injuries inflicted by the Iranian missiles.
“I heard that they had headaches, and a couple of other things, but I would say, and I can report, it’s not very serious,” Trump said during a news conference a month after the attack.
He said much the same thing at a campaign event last week.
“What does ‘injured’ mean?” Trump asked. “You mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort…”
Trump added, “None of those very accurate missiles hit our fort. They all hit outside. There was nobody hurt, other than the sound was loud. Some people said that hurt, and I accept that.”
In fact, the base was hit numerous times.
But Futrell possesses an uncommon equanimity.
“Not many people understand traumatic brain injury,” Futrell told the Daily Beast. “It’s not just him, right? It’s been everybody from the VA [Veterans Administration]. It’s been everybody in the army. So far, everybody I’ve run into in this entire process has downplayed TBI.”
Such an even-tempered view in an earlier divisive time might have gone toward preventing the Civil War that was reenacted with cannon fire at the craft fair in his hometown of Canal Fulton.
He continued, “So why are we going to look at Trump and be like, ‘Oh, he should know better,’ and hold him to such a higher standard when we hold nobody else to that same standard? He should know better, yeah. But nobody else knows better.”
Futrell had not allowed his very real injury to keep him from completing his deployment, which had begun just three weeks before the attack. It was supposed to end after nine months, but it was extended a month. He stuck it out to the end.
“I was a soldier, [I] wanted to do my mission, do my job,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
“He should know better, yeah. But nobody else knows better.”
The migraines only got worse after he returned home and receiving medical care from the Veterans Administration for this unseen injury was an ordeal in itself, compounded by the pandemic.
“Trying to get into the VA to see anybody was almost impossible,” he said.
He was not able to actually see a doctor for two months.
“Then another month to see a neurologist so that I could actually get medication to fight these migraines,” he recalled. “And my neurologist said, ‘You probably shouldn’t shoot a rifle, because that’s going to trigger migraines.’”
He decided that if he could not fire a weapon he should seek a medical discharge.
“That whole process took about a year, fighting with the army and fighting with VA disability,” he said.
He retired with a 90 percent disability. He drew some comfort from the army’s decision to award him a Purple Heart more than a year after the attack.
“I still get a little choked up,” he said on Monday, “You earn it because you were injured. It’s like, ‘Yeah, this happened to me.’ And I think the worst thing about having a TBI is it’s like, it doesn’t look like I’m injured.”
He added, “Nobody sees brain damage. No one sees migraines, unless my wife sees it when I have to go to bed early because I have a headache. My kids see it, but nobody sees it in the outside world. Because when I’m fine, I’m fine. And when I’m not fine, I’m not fine. But nobody sees you when you’re not fine.”
He said that only people who knew him before the TBI would see its effect. That he remains a really smart guy who did well in school and has a college degree. He has also self-published four books on hunting and on religion.
“So it’s not like, like it made me stupid, like somebody’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’ve got a bunch of brain damage,’” he said. “But sometimes it feels like it knocked me down a grade level. I can’t remember the capital of Bulgaria, or some obscure knowledge that I feel like I used to know, but I just can’t recall.”
But even amidst so many people who should know better, Futrell remains equitable, living up to a higher standard to which we should all be held in the most divisive time since the Civil War.
