Wounds of a Navy SEAL: A Farm Story

When I moved back to the farm more than a decade ago, I resolved to find where I fit among a farmscape of industrial agriculture. I was observing more frequent gully washers, an expression for hard rain, and the beginning of a new normal for severe weather. The following experience unfolds during that process of trying to figure out how I fit onto the farm.

Following a June hailstorm that whipped and tattered the leaves of the corn, my father and I went out to the field to meet the crop insurance adjuster. Crop insurance works like this: If the severity of the bullet-sized holes in the corn result in yield loss, the insurance adjuster writes up a report and the farmer gets a check in the mail for the profits that he would’ve received. As the insurance adjuster pulled up in his car that day, he got out. What I noticed was that he was about my age, average-size build, nothing particular – until he came walking across the road towards us. At that time, I saw he had a limp in his walk.

During introductions, I recalled two things. One, he had children about the same age as my children, and two, he was a veteran. We started out into the field. We came to the headland rows, and first we had to cross the perpendicular headland rows. He struggled to lift his leg up over that first row. He grimaced in discomfort. I thought to my myself, “Oh boy, this is going to be uncomfortable for him.” By the time we got to row 24 and there was nothing but the long, straight rows ahead of us, it would be much easier for him now. I sensed he was relieved. I was thinking to myself, “Is being a crop insurance adjuster really the right job for this person?” It’s then that I got up the nerve to ask, “Is your injury related to your military service?” He told me a remarkable story that would help shift and shape the way I think of my place on the farm.

He said: “I was working for the state patrol doing a routine traffic stop, writing a ticket. Speeding ticket, of all things, when I was struck by a passing automobile. I was hurt badly, landing about 20 feet from the scene. A semitruck driver passing by saw this as an opportunity to steal a state patrolman’s handgun. He came over and was trying to pull the gun from my holster. I was fading in and out of consciousness and I was in a struggle with him. Meanwhile, another passerby in his semitruck saw what was happening and he understood that a state patrolman’s 40-millimeter is worth a lot of money on the black market. He came down from his big rig. He was 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds. He came over and picked up that no-good, fill-in-your-expletive. Up, up into the sky he went like a bird. I was relieved. I shattered my leg, but I would be okay. And the best part was this angel of a man, my hero, came to see me in hospital and I got to thank him.”

By now we were only a little ways out into the cornfield because we were walking slowly due to his disabled leg. I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t matter, though, because he rolled right onto his next story. “During basic training, after a three-day sleep deprivation test, the sergeant called me into his office. He wanted me to apply to SEAL school. I turned to him: ‘Navy SEAL?’ One year later, I was in Colombia doing undercover drug cartel intelligence. My job was to take down the bad guys or die trying. I was shot multiple times.” We were a little farther out into the cornfield now and I was thinking this man has suffered trauma. I had been a school guidance counselor previously, so I understood sometimes the best thing you can do is just to listen.

Here we were at the most beautiful place in the world, the middle of an Iowa cornfield in mid-June. The tranquility of the open space, the breeze whispering through the ears of corn. I knew it was my job at that moment to listen. If there wouldn’t have been any people out there in the field to hear his story, I’m sure he would’ve been telling his story to the ears of corn. He continued: “I was wired. I got found out and things went very badly for me. I was shot in the neck, the hip, the shoulder. One in my belly just missed my spine. Navy SEALs carry plugs made of cotton. You push them into the wound and they expand. They are amazing because they get you back into the fight.”

By now we were nearing a low area of the cornfield. I could hear water trickling from a nearby tile into the creek. This is where gullies notoriously fester in this field. Heaps of woven wire fences are in those gullies, reclaimed by the earth. I had spent my childhood tearing out those woven wire fences so we could farm fencerow to fencerow. Now, in a tangle of sagebrush and birch that wound their way up through those rusty woven wire fences, up into the sky into a canopy, songbirds were singing. These rolls of rusty woven wire fence plug wounds. And being an insurance adjuster was the perfect job for this person. I understand now where I fit on the farm. I see the farmland as the ancestral Mother Earth, Gaia: the importance of the lunar cycles, the changing of the seasons, protecting the land from those gully washers during the steady growth of corn all through the summer, like the unremitting care of a mother.